Body and Soul

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  One of the common errors of people today is a false dichotomy, or a presupposition that there are only two choices.  And this can also affect our faith life.  Because we sometimes act as if we forget that a person is a unity of soul and body, and deal with the one we find more enjoyable or the one that comes more easily to us.  But both soul and body are important, as we see in today's readings.
    The epistle focuses us mainly on the spiritual.  And we have to understand this spiritually, otherwise we would start some pretty strange practices.  St. Paul says that we are baptized into the death of Christ, and that the body has to be destroyed so that sin will no longer have power over us.  St. Paul intends, of course, that we read this spiritually.  We believe that by the pouring of water over our heads and the invocation of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity, we symbolically die.  Now, I say symbolically because our soul is not separated from the body, as happens in natural death.  But the death is real inasmuch as our fallen self dies with Christ on the cross, and then rises to new life with Christ in the resurrection.  So it’s not as if this is all made up or in our minds.  We die to sin when we die with the Lord in the waters of baptism, and that is very real.  But it is not that our physical life is ended, otherwise we would be a cult of mass homicide.
    But then in the Gospel, our Lord focuses on the physical needs of those who were following him.  Christ had been teaching the people about who He was, and backing up what He said by healings and exorcisms.  But then, it is three days later, and the people are getting hungry and running out of food.  At this point, while the Savior had taken care of their souls by His teaching, He also focuses on their bodies by performing a miracle of multiplying bread and fish, so that they could eat and be filled.
    In the Church, people easily separate into those who take care of the soul versus those who take care of the body.  As regards the latter, we can think of those who want to provide for people’s physical needs without consideration of the hunger of their souls for truth and beauty and love.  As regards the former, we can think of those who want to teach people about the Lord and instruct them in the faith, but then when they ask for something to eat, they say some form of, “we don’t do that.” 
    And this tension even exists in Scripture.  In Acts chapter 3, we hear about a crippled man who begs Sts. Peter and John for alms.  He wants money to take care of his physical needs.  But the first pontiff says, “‘I have neither silver nor gold, but what I do have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean, walk.’”  There is a much deeper healing going on here.  Or look back to the Lord, who, when friends lower a paralyzed man down through the roof, immediately tells the man that his sins are forgiven, and only afterwards heals his body, as proof that the Son of Man can forgive sins.  But then in the epistle of James, chapter 2, we read, “If a brother or sister has nothing to wear and has no food for the day, and one of you says to them, ‘God in peace, keep warm, and eat well,’ but you do not give them the necessities of the body, what good is it?”
    So, we invoke the principle of both/and, so often operative in Catholicism.  Jesus is both God and man.  Mary is both virgin and mother.  The Church is composed of both saints and sinners.  We are both soul and body.  We are called to care for both the spiritual and the corporal works of mercy.  We cannot choose one and ignore the other, save at the possible expense of our souls. 

    This doesn’t mean that we can’t focus on one, even while we don’t exclude the other.  St. Theresa of Calcutta is a great example of doing both as she was able.  Her primary mission was to serve the poorest of the poor, and much of her work was caring for the physical needs of those whom society had abandoned.  She didn’t exclude service to people because they weren’t Catholic.  She fed them, cleaned them, and cared for them not because they were Catholic but because she was.  Still, and I know this from my own semester of working with the Missionaries of Charity in Rome, if you were living in their house and eating the food that they prepared, you would pray with the Missionaries of Charity, too.  And St. Theresa would even speak to spiritual poverty when she was given a platform on the national and international stage.
    Probably many of us feel more comfortable serving the spiritual needs of others rather than the physical needs of others.  Part of it may be because we readily have Church teachings accessible in our minds, but we don’t always know how to help someone who says they’re hungry, or thirsty, or need a bus ticket to somewhere.  And, sadly, some people try to scam others out of money, which makes it even more difficult to assist others.  But, I would encourage you to do what I do when someone asks me for help with basic needs of life: pray for guidance from the Holy Spirit to know how best to help that person.  And remember that we don’t have to do it all.  There are many groups in Flint that assist those who are hungry, thirsty, or homeless, like Catholic Charities, the St. Luke New Life Center, St. Francis Prayer Center, and others which are not Catholic but still do great work.  It is not wrong to refer someone to those agencies to do what we cannot do on our own.  But sometimes I know I feel that tug at my heart to give money, or I often carry Applebees gift cards in my car so that, if the Holy Spirit moves me to help someone, I can have a gift card to give them so that they can get food or drink. 
    So often we can try to create false dichotomy between the body and the spirit.  And certainly, one can be fully fed but spiritually starving; or one can be physically hungry but spiritually satisfied.  Christ invites us today through the Scriptures to consider both, and to do whatever we can to address both the spiritual and the physical needs of others, according to the gifts and talents we have received from God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.  

Just a Soul? False!

Third Sunday after Easter

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  People can utilize social media well, and social media can lead to bad things or positions.  For example, someone I know recently posted a video of Rainn Wilson (Dwight from “The Office”) about how spirituality is so important because it is reality.  Ok, not so bad.  But then he goes on to say that we are not human beings have a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings have a human experience.  He goes on to say, “Who I am and what I am is not by body…”.  He continues on to talk about being connected to a higher reality, and the benefits of being connected to the divine.  To be clear, there are many benefits of being connected to God, especially for one’s overall health.  But that part in the middle stuck out like a sore thumb.
    Because it’s a heresy.  It’s just a rehashing of Manichaeism, which taught that the body was bad, or lesser than the spirit.  This was a pernicious heresy, to which St. Augustine of Hippo ascribed before he was baptized, and which swept Europe during the end of the first millennium, which gave rise to the preaching of the Dominicans fighting this old heresy with a new name (Albigensianism). 
    What is the drive that leads to such a push?  Well, probably one of two things.  On the one hand, we see so many natural evils that are no one’s personal choices, and so we might ascribe evil to the material of nature itself as a simplistic way to deal with why these natural evils happen without anyone willing them.
    On the other hand, when we sin, we can either accept responsibility for our actions and repent, or we can blame our actions on something else, and seek to avoid responsibility and punishment.  And we’ve been blaming someone else since the beginning.  “The woman you put here with me…”; “The serpent tricked me…”.  So if we can ascribe most of our evil actions to the body, and say that they don’t have an impact on the soul, then most of us are probably not only getting by when it comes to following God, but doing very well, and probably on the straight road to heaven.  If all you had to worry about was spiritual sins (judging others in your mind, not believing the right things, wishing others harm, but never following through with your actions), most of us are probably saints right now. 
    But, of course, we are not simply spirits.  We are a cohesive unity of spirit and body.  What we do to one, affects the other.  If we choose to sin in the body, it has effects on the soul.  And even when we sin at the level of our souls, there are effects on the body. 

    That unity is part of what we celebrate at Easter, and our belief in the union of body and soul is based upon the fact that Christ rose from the dead, not just in the spirit, as we will do at our death until the general resurrection at the end of time, but also in the body.  As He said in the Gospel today, “A little while, and you shall not see me, and a little while again and you will see me.”  He died, that is to say, His soul left His body, but then they were reunited and He returned to His disciples so that they could see Him again.  In some of the accounts of the Resurrection, the disciples think their Lord is a ghost, but He asks for food so that He could eat, and assured them that He was not a ghost.  Indeed, He asks Thomas to feel the wounds in His hands and side, not only as the proof that He is the same person, but that His body is there. 
    And because we are that union of soul and body, as confirmed to us by the Risen Lord, St. Peter can encourage us to refrain from our carnal desires.  Yes, sometimes what the soul wants and what the body wants are not the same thing.  But they are still in the battle for eternal life together, and what one does affects what happens to the other.  And this is not just with our desires to be fruitful and multiply, but also how we submit to legitimate authority, the example we give to believers and non-believers alike, so that they can see that the life to which Christ calls us is, in fact, possible, and helps us find true joy and freedom.
    Because the soul and body are one, even after we die, and our soul leaves our body, they will be reunited one day.  Hopefully we will receive a body for glory in the resurrection as we go to heaven, or perhaps have to be purified in Purgatory.  But, even the damned will receive back their body, or damnation and suffering, as they remain in Hell for all eternity.  Dante, describing those in the various circles of Hell, talks about the punishment that the bodies receive, from the punishments due to giving in to carnal desires, to the Beast, chomping on Judas and Brutus in the coldest, lowest level of Hell.  This is also why sometimes the martyrs are depicted with the wounds of their suffering, not because they suffer in heaven, but because what they allowed to happen to their bodies, rather than deny Christ, now becomes the sign of their victory, like St. Denis holding his head, St. Lucy holding her eyes, or St. Bartholomew holding his flayed skin.  

    That is also why our salvation is accomplished with physical things.  We don’t simply sit and think to ourselves: “I desire to be a child of God in the Son of God.  Now I am.”  No, we have water poured over our heads as the priest invokes the Blessed Trinity over us.  We do not simply sit in our rooms and think: “I am really sorry, and I’ll never do that again.”  The priest says, “I absolve you” with his audible voice.  We don’t only ask the Lord to fill us with Himself, but He gives Himself to us under the appearance of bread and wine, but that which is truly His Body and Blood, which we receive into us, so that He is closer to us than any other human could ever be.  God uses physical stuff with which our body interacts to create changes in the soul.  What happens to the one, affects the other. 
    So, if anyone ever suggests that we are simply spiritual beings, or souls trapped in a body, or that the material world is evil, which the spiritual world is good, you can counter with a direct quote from Dwight: “False!  Body; Blessing; Beatific Vision.”  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.