Sons and Brides

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Today St. Paul reminds us that we are the sons of God and joint heirs with Christ.  While we often speak about the moral life and the requirements of following Christ as His disciples, there is something that comes before morality, and if we miss this, we often see the demands of a relationship with Christ as merely laws imposed on us from without.  What comes before morality is identity.  Or, to put it another way, being precedes doing.  You have to exist before you can act, and any action you take or can take flows from what and who you are.
    Now, we might think that St. Paul should have said that we are sons and daughters of God.  Certainly in the age we live in, we can demonstrate more inclusivity and not simply reference masculine identity.  But the Apostle to the Gentiles carefully chose his words, words that God Himself inspired.  So how can we disciples, both males and females, understand what St. Paul meant when he called us all sons?  

    Our identity, ever since baptism, connects to Christ.  At Holy Baptism, we receive a new identity, and that is of Christ.  In Holy Baptism, the Holy Spirit mystically joins us to the Body of Christ, so that we are members of Him.  And in that sense, all of us are sons.  Or, to put it another way, we can speak of ourselves as sons and daughters in the Son of God.  This identity cannot be overstated.  When God looks at us, He doesn’t ignore who we are.  He created us as males and females, different, and yet complimentary.  Even our bodies tell us something about ourselves that is not accidental (this is where those who promote gender dysphoria get it wrong; having a male body or a female body tells us something about ourselves, even if it doesn’t exhaust our identity).  And yet, as soon as we die with Christ in the waters of baptism, the Holy Spirit configures us to Christ so that, already and yet in potential, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me, as St. Paul also says.  When God sees us He sees us as individuals, but also sees us as members of the Mystical Body of Christ, as His Beloved Son.
    And because God joins us to His Son, we can also call ourselves heirs of God “and joint heirs with Christ.”  All the riches that God has for His Son belong to us to, not by nature, but by adoption.  In human adoption, the child has no claim to anything from a parent not his own until that parent chooses the child, which opens up the claim to support from the parents to the adopted child.  So with us, as adopted sons and daughters in the Son of God, everything that God has for Christ, God offers to us as well.  As God Himself says in the second psalm: “‘You are my son; today I have begotten you.  Ask it of me, and I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and, as your possession, the ends of the earth.’”  God withholds nothings good from us, including eternal life and a seat at His right hand, provided we stay in God’s family and remain connected to Christ.  What good thing could God withhold from Christ?  He will not withhold it from us, either, because we are in His Son and part of Him through Holy Baptism.  Eternal life?  Ours.  Power?  Ours.  Grace to resist all temptations and never commit mortal sin?  Ours.  As St. Paul says in his first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 3: “all belong to you, and you to Christ, and Christ to God.”
    So often we think only of what we have to do, but we ought to first think of to whom we belong and our identity.  When I know I belong to God, Catholicism no longer consists of rules to follow from without, but a means of fully living according to how God has made me and how He has configured me to Christ, so that I can be ready to receive my full inheritance as a son of God, rather than spending it elsewhere like the prodigal son.

My sister and brother-in-law at the their wedding reception

    But, lest you ladies feel like the struggle is only yours in thinking of yourselves as sons, we, all of us, are also brides.  This is where men have to struggle.  Throughout the Old and New Testament, God uses bridal imagery to describe His People.  In the Book of Hosea, Israel is compared to a wife, though an unfaithful one.  The Prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah speak about God as our husband.  And the Song of Songs allegorizes the Chosen People to a bride and God as the husband.  Likewise, in the New Testament, our Lord speaks of Himself as the Bridegroom for whom the virgins must keep watch.  In St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians, marriage is a mystery which refers back to Christ and the Church.  And in the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse of St. John the Apostle, he describes heaven as a wedding feast of the Lamb of God, and the New Jerusalem is a bride adorned for her husband.
    Saints have long described the soul as a bride of Christ.  Not just the souls of women, but the souls of men.  Why?  Because there is meant to be a certain subordination of the wife to the husband, always out of love, and trusting in the husband laying down his life for the wife.  So we, the Church, Christ’s bride, should receive Christ’s law of love and obedience as a wife receives her husband.  That is why the Church has no authority to change the teachings of Christ, as so many of our Protestant brothers and sisters have tried to do, because we are not the masters of revelation, but simply the recipients and stewards of it.  The Church can develop those teachings and understand them more deeply through the centuries, but we cannot reject the ones we don’t like or find uncomfortable or inconvenient.  This is our challenge as men, who like to take charge and be in control: to give control over to the husband of our souls and submit to His rule, rather than to our own.
    Being precedes doing.  Before we do anything, we are sons of God and the Bride of Christ.  Starting with our identity makes actions much more intelligible.  The moral life no longer seems like barriers to our freedom, but ways to fully live out who and whose we are.  God wants to give us every good thing as our inheritance.  But to receive that great gift, we first must recognize that we are sons and daughters in the Son of God and our souls are the Bride of Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  

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.