Automatic translation from Italian, under review.
Dearest all,
we are now in the midst of the summer heat, in this time of holidays and, I hope, of rest. I think it is particularly helpful to grasp the Christian meaning of caring for our body, because it is a temple of God. The interior silence that makes us able to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit also requires proper physical relaxation; in agitation it is hard to live a true, trusting abandonment so as to be led by God along his paths.
May Mary guard us and wrap us in her mantle.
Happy holidays to all!
YOUR BODY IS A TEMPLE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT (1 COR 6:19).
There is one petition in the Our Father that draws our attention in a particular way to the reality of our bodiliness: “Give us this day our daily bread” (Mt 6:11). Jesus taught us to ask the Father each day for the material food that nourishes our body, and even more for the “bread of life”: the Eucharist, pledge and cause of our resurrection.
The Son of God did not, so to speak, become angelic, but incarnate; he knew the needs of our humanity, he had a body in all things like ours; he redeemed our whole person, body and soul. All things were created for him (cf. Col 1:16); even the creation of the angels is ordered to the plan of salvation.
The incarnate Word did not become an angel; in taking on human nature he did not know and love God only spiritually, and for this reason he is our Savior, with regard both to our soul and to our body.
In Christianity the dualism of soul and body found in Greek philosophy is overcome. Our flesh too will know future glory, which means that our body, as created by God, is good in all its qualities, in the way it functions, in its needs.
“God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good” (Gen 1:31), says Genesis, speaking of the Creator. We must therefore accept ourselves from God’s hands, just as we are.
Jesus the Redeemer comes to save us not only spiritually but also bodily. The mystery of the Risen One concerns, in a particular way, our body: it is not another body that will rise, but our own. The body of the risen Jesus bears the glorious wounds; it is the very same body that was first tortured and pierced on the cross.
In Heaven, the Risen One has a heart of flesh that beats with human pulsations. Christ Jesus, by taking on our human nature, raised it above the angels; in him we too will one day have a body capable of experiencing the Trinitarian perichoresis, the harmonious beauty of the communion of the risen.
Our body and our passions can support and strengthen our spiritual life; the saints of every age, with their ardor and their great feelings, bear witness to this. Holiness, after all, is nothing other than falling in love with God and loving him with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our strength; being wholly his and, in him and for him, wholly belonging to those whom he gives us as brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, companions on the journey of our ascent toward him.
We are called to express the beauty of the mystery of the incarnation at work in us; Love will suggest to us how to involve our body and our very psychology in the experience of God, until we find the most effective means, just as happens for the spirit through reading, study, meditation…
We know from experience that emotions are inscribed in our body: how many times do we find ourselves tired, without energy, without even the strength to laugh, because of the intensity with which we reacted to certain situations! We are a single whole: respecting a rhythm of life, the right hours of sleep, sport, the right balance between work and rest…, the harmony of the various concrete aspects of daily existence has no small influence on our spiritual life.
It is also thanks to our instinctive life and our passions that responsibility for our acts, even for our faults, is often mitigated, because our determination is not always sufficiently clear-sighted; temptation, for example, can lead us to experience, within, the inner struggle in which the will adheres to the good while our passions and inclinations go in another direction. And yet this bodiliness of ours is also a powerful help to the spirit, if it is well harmonized with the fundamental choices of our life.
The voice of the Spirit cannot be heard in agitation. In this regard, the importance of physical relaxation must not be neglected: each one has to find the means suited to relaxing: a walk, a few breathing exercises, a little gymnastics, anything can help.
Everything that has to do with the body is often the object of study of psychology, medicine, bioethics or other human sciences, and it seems that spirituality walks on one side and the human sciences on the other. What is required is a spirituality that embraces the person in an integral way, including his or her bodiliness. We may forget that one day our body will be clothed in immortality, we will see new heavens and a new earth, and our person too will then sing its liberation together with all creation.
We are God’s temple, so we must take care of our body, seeking also to safeguard our health in order to love God and others better. Yet health is not as important a good as life: true, infinite Life is the goal toward which each of us, taken as a whole, continually tends, walking in the way of Love, in which health and sickness are only stages of the same road.
We must live our experience of Christian life as body and soul; our body too is destined for glory, it too must enter into the experience of God, because it is God’s temple.