Sunday 2 (B-2006): Bodies, souls and eternity

Read: 1 Sam 3:3b-10,19; 1 Cor 6:13c-15a,17-20; Jn 1:35-42

At the beginning of the calendar year, the Word of God today challenges us to apply to ourselves the experience of Samuel and of the two young men who first ran after Jesus.

For they are at the beginning of their relationship with God, and their experience can still teach us how to begin anew our path to holiness.

As with Samuel, so the Lord repeatedly calls out to each of us our name. When we eventually realize that it is he who calls us, he desires to hear us too say, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.”

As with the first apostles, the Gospel reading challenges us to run after Jesus and to hear his disarming and penetrating question, “What are you looking for?”, but also to hear the apostles’ answer, “Rabbi, where do you live?”

Both the call to Samuel and the challenge to the apostles put before us the basic questions of our own lives: Who am I? What is my name, not just as a name, but as my deepest identity? Where am I going? What am I looking for in life, or is my life an aimless wandering? What is my focus? Merely to have accomplished certain things and be remembered for them for, at best, a few generations, at worst a few days? Or is my focus the person of Jesus and learning to “stay with him”?

All these questions come from the soul of man, from the unknown horizon of his mind.

But man is not just soul. He is body too.

From conception until natural death he is inseparably body and soul, the fate of one so often determining the fate of the other. And so there arises another whole series of questions.

How do I as a person relate to my own body? Is it the major concern of my soul? If so, how? As my companion and helper? As my god and lord? And if I ask the question, why do I exist, I must also ask, what is my body for? What is its destiny? Is it a mere shell to be cast aside once I have used it? Does the God who created my body have a future for it that is not the grave? And if it has that future, what does that imply as to how I live in the body now and throughout my life?

These questions, too, receive some challenging answers in today’s second reading from the First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians.

But there is something else that I suggest must be asked before a person tries to answer all of these questions. And that question is: do I even care about all of this?

History, past and present, is filled with people, great and small (if it is fair to make that distinction), whose outlook is very simple, if not simplistic.

“Forget all those questions!” they advise. “Live and let live, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we will die!” It’s an attractive philosophy, because it banishes the pain of angst and conscience, and exalts self-satisfaction.

Many espouse it in some form or another. It makes man his own master and god whose fundamental law is: “do what you like, like what you do, call it freedom to make it sound good, call it human rights to make sure no-one tries to stop you and –here comes the trump card- make sure you tell everyone you are doing it all as a matter of conscience!”

It is not that freedom, human rights and conscience are not supreme values of human life, but their true meaning is often dumped and the terms themselves are hijacked to cover up what is quite simply selfishness.

This philosophy closes man into the very narrow circle of his own wants and likes. If it pays any respect to values or truth it is only to make sure that these “justify” what its follower demands.

Psychologists would say that such people remain effectively stuck in the moral and spiritual capacity of a small child.

For the child, there is no good in itself, but only what it likes, there is no truth except what it wants; there is no love, but only complacent smiles to those who give it what it desires; sacrifice of any kind is protested with deafening screams! And God? Well, thinks the child, “that’s me, of course!”

For a child, all this is natural – to be expected. But not for an adult!

Others say they believe in God, but either treat Him as a distant and abstract concept, with no relation to what they call their “real lives”, or else they relegate his presence to that of the moon: he drops in from time to time, in quarter, half or full measure, but he’s always kept at a very safe distance.

To say I believe in God sounds good, but in terms of daily living, what does it mean? What is my understanding of God? Do I ever even bother to ask myself if I might be rather limited in that understanding? Do I try to know him? Have I even read a book about him since I was 10 years old? Would it not make sense that if I believe in him as God, as my Creator and as my destiny, I should be anxious and zealous in drawing closer to him? And if I don’t make these efforts, what does it tell me about my belief? Is it real at all? For if He is not real to me in my life, what can I possibly mean when I say I believe in him?

Much of the emptiness people feel today is because God is no longer real for them. It is not that they deny his existence theoretically, but they do so practically. They live as if He did not.

And, in some measure, one can understand them. In times past, the material and intellectual poverty of people’s lives made them less dependent on themselves and more willing to depend on God.

But today, paradoxically, the very benefits which come to man as a result of God’s gifts to him of intelligence and creativity, have somehow gone to “man’s head.”

Our senses are saturated with satisfaction, our minds with mere human knowledge and our sense of self with absolute autonomy.

But what has happened to our hearts?

The heart, that most sacred inner sanctum of the human person, has been reduced to mere psychological feelings and emotional self-indulgence.

The heart, which is the fountain and foundation of the greatest and most noble moral and spiritual virtues of man, is told to be quiet in the face of intellectual tyranny.

Science is favored over moral integrity, political craftiness is applauded before sincerity and truthfulness, ideology trumps prayer. Love is reduced to sensuality and its self-serving art, the show of affection is so easily interpreted as an invitation to licentiousness.

All of these beautiful things are wonderful and good - in the correct circumstances. But the problem is that increasingly fewer will listen to the life-giving wisdom of the Word of God which establishes what those circumstances are. Rather, it is cast aside as restrictive and demeaning.

That is why our readings today are so refreshing, so life-giving, so healing.

For man’s basic truth is not that he is closed in on himself, but that in his very essence he is open to God. Self-transcendence towards God is constitutive of what it means to be human.

There will be no self-transcendence if man tries to cast God in a mold that suits his own selfishness. Openness to God means an ever-readiness to let God come to us as He truly is, constantly lifting us up to newer and newer horizons of understanding and love of who he is and, therefore, of who we ourselves truly are.

Man is made for the personal, the very personal, encounter with the Lord, whose closeness is unlike any other.

No-one can call our name with the same tenderness and familiarity of Jesus.

No-one can reveal to us the true, special and unique meaning of our personal identity as does Jesus.

No-one can challenge us to understand what it is our own hearts are searching for as does Jesus.

No invitation to friendship and comity can be more sincere, more promising and more fulfilling than that of Jesus.

And our bodies?

As the psalm says, “he fashioned them” in the secret of the womb. He gave them to us as the first gift we could touch and feel. He fashioned them like the glove which fits perfectly the hand of our souls.

In baptism, his Spirit came to dwell within us, hopefully for ever; again in baptism, he immersed our bodies in some mysterious way into his own risen body; in holy communion, he strengthens that bond even more firmly and sows within us the seed of an eternal body.

He gave us our bodies so that from them we might reach out in sincere and self-giving love to others; that we might see, hear, smell, taste and touch the wonders of his creation.

He made us male and female so that in the sacred union of both we might cooperate with him in the creation of all the children his heart has desired.

Our bodies are not for immorality, but for immortality.

They are destined for the eternal Christ and must thus live so as to prepare for him. For, if it is true that our bodies belong to us, it is even truer that the whole of us belongs to God.

As we head down the path of this new year, let us pray, let us resolve with gratitude and humility to let these readings empower us to take seriously the great dignity of our spiritual and corporal identity. Let us thus live it with passion and without compromise in view of our eternal destiny in the Spirit and in the Body of the Lord.

Msgr. Peter Magee

Sunday, January 15^th, 2006