Channel surfing, I bumped into a program about Oprah Winfrey—about how through dieting, she lost and gained huge amounts of weight recurrently.
As I listened, it struck me how seldom we talk about our bodies when considering our spiritual lives. Generally we Catholics think of the body as something that will die while our soul, the more important part of us, lives on. We have the impression that the body is something we must subdue or struggle against, and that we must not enjoy bodily pleasures too much since we have to leave all that through death.
If we want to integrate our body with spiritual journey instead of neglecting it, here are some body challenges that accompany us throughout life. We need to place them before the Lord in prayer from time to time.
Loving our bodies: We do have a rich tradition in Catholicism that holds up our body as something good, something that glorifies God, something that in the person of Jesus saved us, and something we use to communicate our very self to others. But two things: the best bodies are only given to a few people through evolution and genetics; yet our culture presents us with images of perfect or preferred bodies, images that are persuasive but destructive in all ages of our lives. No wonder we afflict our inner selves with constant comparisons and laments about the bodies we are given. The challenge to love our bodies, with understanding, compassion, and even humor, is more pressing at certain times in life. We think of adolescence, for example, when body image becomes so absorbing. Later, life presents other challenges to love our bodies around illness or incapacity, sexual issues, and aging, to name a few. The challenge to love our own unique bodies is something we need to be speaking about with the Lord throughout life.
Directing our bodies: In our Catholic tradition, the intellect is given a leadership role over bodily impulses in charting our path through life. That’s because from earliest times we bought into Jesus’ teaching about living a purpose driven life. In former eras we said (i.e., the Baltimore Catechism) that our life’s purpose is to know, love, and serve God and be happy with him in heaven. Today we emphasize this world instead of heaven, and we speak of our purpose as disciples: helping the Lord bring about God’s kingdom of justice, truth, peace and love on earth.
But the body doesn’t know about all this! It has its own purposes, its own powerful drives and desires. Our bodies impel us to eat, to procreate, to protect ourselves by territoriality or aggression, and to just rest. Some past catechetical or spiritual writing advocated suppressing these bodily drives and desires, or bodily purpose. Even some saints engaged in inordinate fasting, or afflicted their bodies with physical torture of various kinds. And sin frequently was equated with giving into bodily impulses or desires.
Now there is some truth in this picture! Our bodily drives and desires assert themselves powerfully throughout our lives, threatening to overwhelm our freely chosen spiritual goals. Fortunately through God’s evolutionary creativity, grace, and revelation, we have the mentality and spiritual wisdom to direct and integrate these bodily energies into our purpose driven lives. Some discipline or control of our bodies is needed, of course. But it should flow from good understanding of these good bodily powers. What we teach, preach, say, and publish about our bodies needs to include insights from psychology, medicine, the social sciences, etc. Bottom line: even young Catholics at their level can learn how to befriend, reflect about, pray about and direct these good and powerful bodily purposes toward their developing purpose driven spiritual lives.
Investing our bodies: We humans invest our bodily energy and mentality to shape the world we live in. The spiritual question is: how and in what will we personally invest our precious, finite life’s energy? With all of nature we invest our bodies in procreation, producing descendants to shape the decades after us. And we invest energy to produce what we need to live. But as human civilization has developed, we humans have elaborated relationships way beyond our kin or tribe, and products for living way beyond what is necessary. We’ve been a busy species!
For long periods of Catholic spiritual history, engaging in all this human doing was considered less than good; it distracted us, sidetracked us, from pursuing spiritual things. Today we understand that we work out our salvation by the very way we engage in, or invest in, relationships and work. Vatican II addressed the joys and sorrows of the creative complexity that has flowed from bodily human energy in “modern” times.
Now Jesus, a human of his time, did not know about the complexity we have today. But he did know about that we have the capacity to stand apart from the products of our energy, to consider them, and then to revise, course correct, and improve. He gave us some guidance for this. He pointed us always to the final goal, or teleos, of our activity: the kingdom with its values of justice, truth, peace and love. He recognized evil in his own environment, such as how the poor were treated; He called his followers to oppose evil. He spoke emphatically about prioritizing love and components of love, such as forgiveness and service, in everything. And so our faith asks us to shine those Gospel perspectives on how we relate, work, and in other ways use our bodily energy. It also asks insistently today that we apply these perspectives also to the global world culture we humans together have made. Otherwise we build not only our own houses but the whole human enterprise on sand.
Surrendering our bodies: Dying well is a spiritual task that must begin early in our lives. Dying well means being at peace with the life we’ve lived. Essential to that is trust. We need to trust that our best selves will live on in the many others we have interacted with, known and loved during our lives. We are all “influencers.” We can know this by reflection about how we ourselves have been shaped, changed, “influenced” by the people in our lives. After our death, we remain embodied in many other bodies.
Sometimes however, as we used our bodies to relate, our words and acts negatively impacted or influenced others. Throughout our lives we need to deal spiritually with ruptures needing reconciliation and with regrets about things we cannot fix. That is to say, we deal with our sins. As death approaches, we must trust the larger body of Christ that we are leaving to supplement what we failed to accomplish, to repair any fissures we caused, and to continue the best of the self we have been.
And finally we must trust the Risen Christ. He has been walking with us and taking in (receiving, accepting) the offering of our lives as we have lived them. He does this at every Eucharist. Now it is He who will offer the riches of our completed lives to his Father, and to the body of Christ that lives after us, until the end of time.
Sister Mary Garascia, PhD (Theology), is a member of the Sisters of the Precious Blood of Dayton, Ohio, where she now resides. Until recently she lived and ministered at The Holy Name of Jesus in Redlands. You can follow her weekly Sunday scripture blogs at PreciousBloodSistersDayton.org.