Body and soul

WE have just celebrated the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15. Days before that, when I was referring to it in a chat with some high school boys,  I was taken aback to notice that in spite of their religion classes some of them did not know that the feast would fall on that day.

I immediately thought that this must part of their adolescent condition. They can know a lot of things in the sciences and arts, but can suffer some serious gaps in their religious knowledge. Well, all of us actually have some gaps one way or the other. But this situation should just lead us to help one another.

When the day came, we had a school-wide celebration of the Massl, and I took the opportunity to explain the significance of the feast, with special emphasis on how our Lady’s Assumption into heaven is very relevant to the boys.

The feast tells us that our Lady was assumed into heaven body and soul upon her death. She did not have to wait till the end of time to have her body reunited with her soul, as will happen to all of us according to what our Christian faith teaches us.

She enjoys a certain privilege, because being the Mother of Jesus who is both God and man, she was endowed with special graces that exempted her from original sin, and was sinless in her earthly life, and arguably exempted from sin’s effect of death, the separation of body and soul.

Anyway, the point is that we, as human persons, are meant to be both body and soul, and not just body only or soul only, here on earth and in our definitive state in heaven or hell.

The separation of body and soul in death is temporary, and that is precisely due to our sin whose effect on us will be definitively resolved in the Last Judgment.

We have to wait for the end of time at the Last judgment before we can have our definitive state of body and soul, because the final judgment of our earthly life also depends on how our life was affected and at the same time has given effect also on the lives of all the others.

We have been designed to be both body and soul together. Because of this, we are both individuals and social, universal and transcendent beings. We, therefore, just cannot be judged individually without regard to the others. We also have to be judged collectively, as a people, precisely on how we played a part in the lives of all the others.

We have to be more aware of these implications of this basic truth about ourselves being a body-and-soul organism. We have to be more aware of our responsibilities to live by these implications of this truth.

Foremost is the truth that we come from God who with his breath of life brought us to life. We therefore have to realize that we are not just a mass of cells. Yes, we also are that mass of cells, but it is animated by the breath of life, the spiritual soul, that comes from God.

Our spiritual soul therefore has to be linked to God always. Woe to us if we dare to separate ourselves from God! And since that soul is breathed into our body, then our body has to conform itself to the dynamics of the soul.

The dynamics of our individuality that is brought about by our material body should be made to engage with the dynamics of our spirituality that links us with others and ultimately with God. Our body has to be involved in the love of God and others.

Death precisely comes to us when our body dares to separate itself from our soul. The worst death is when our spiritual soul dares to separate itself from God, the ultimate and abiding source of our life.

If this linkage is clear in our minds, and is made a conviction that guides and shapes our thoughts, words and actions, then we can readily see the great need we have to pray, to strengthen our faith, hope and charity, and to discipline the way we think and love, as well as the way our wayward, sin-infected bodies behave.

We can readily understand why we need to have recourse to mortifications, sacrifices and all forms of self-denial—which are precisely what our Lord told us and how the saints lived.

We can then work out on the details of how we ought to live daily, considering our specific conditions.

Love expresses itself in generosity

YES, of course, where there is love, there is generosity. The two cannot be separated.

It’s in the very essence of love to give oneself without measure, without calculation, without expecting any return. It just gives and gives, even if along the way it encounters difficulties, rejection, suffering. It embraces them, not flee from them. By its nature, it is given gratuitously.

Love engenders generosity and its relatives: magnanimity, magnificence, compassion, patience, pity, etc. This is the language of love, the currencies it uses. It thinks big, even if the matter involved is small according to human standards. In fact, it’s love that makes small, ordinary things big and special.

That’s in theory. In practice, though, there can be elements that put limits and conditions to that love. This can be due to a number of reasons.

One, because man grows by stages, and his capacity to love also develops in stages. It goes through a development timeline, much like one’s growth timeline from childhood to adulthood and maturity.

Thus, philosophers have distinguished more or less like 3 kinds or stages of love: “eros,” where one loves another because of what he can get from that other person. This usually happens among children who love others mainly because of what they can get in return from others. That’s very understandable.

Then, there’s “filia,” where one loves another because he shares the same things—interests, likes and dislikes—with that person. This is typical of young boys and girls who happen to like sharing things among themselves.

Then, there’s the final stage of “agape,” where one loves another because they just want to, without expecting any return, and continues to love even if that love is unreciprocated, or worse, rejected. This is the love of the truly mature persons, and definitely of heroes and saints.

Each one of us has to figure out which kind of love he has, does or lives. It can happen that even if one is already of a certain age, he is still stuck with the “eros” type of love. But if everything in the development process goes well, he should reach the ultimate, perfect level of love.

There can be reasons why one gets stunted in his loving. When one, for example, is mainly dominated by an emotion or material-based kind of loving, then he tends to be self-centered, unable to transcend beyond his own interests and preferences.

He cannot truly love. His loving has some strings attached or ulterior motives. He cannot soar far and high from himself.

We have to understand that to be able to love, we need to be with God, for God is love. He is the source, pattern and end of love. All our loves here on earth, to be real, have to be inspired by that love that is in God. Otherwise, they are fake.

It stands to reason then that we need to go to him, to pray and meditate on his love—how he created us and endowed us with the best things in life, making us his image and likeness, and in fact children of his.

We need to realize ever deeply that his love goes to the extent of forgiving us for our sins and stupidities, and not only by decreeing things, but by assuming even our sinfulness and dying to it

We need to feel that love in a very direct and immediate way, which can only be achieved first of all with his grace, but also with our effort. We need to feel that such love is the one that inspires, directs and energizes our loves here on earth.

So, we really need to spend time entering into this reality, first of all, by praying, by meditating, then by studying the doctrine of our faith, since God’s love is not mere sentiments. It involves truth whose substance is passed on to us through the doctrine revealed and lived by Christ, and now authoritatively taught by the Church.

We need to outgrow our tendency to fall for an unrealistic and sugary understanding of love, so common these days, especially among the young, or worse, associating love with the purely carnal and selfish. There are many caught in this kind of predicament.

When we have this kind of love, we will spring into action, always with joy and peace. Sadness, feeling lazy and the like are dregs and signs of self-love. God’s love, on the other hand, makes us very alive even in the midst of so much trials and suffering.

As long as we struggle...

YES, as long as we struggle interiorly, there is spiritual life, the very wellspring that produces the living water for our river of life. As long as we struggle interiorly, we can be assured of our fidelity to whatever commitment we have entered into. Interior struggle is essential and indispensable in our life.

Our life is very dynamic, with all sorts of challenges to face, problems to solve, issues to be clarified. We need to see to it that our interior life, our spiritual life, our thoughts, desires and intentions are firmly rooted on God, their proper foundation.

We need not only to purify our thoughts and intentions from any stain of pride, vanity, lust, envy, sloth, gluttony, anger, etc. We need to also fill them and rev them up with true love and wisdom. These are the reasons why we have to engage in a lifelong interior or spiritual struggle.

The ideal situation should be that we are always in awe at the presence of God in our life, making him the principle and objective of all our thoughts, words and deeds. We have to be spiritually fit before we can be fit anywhere else—family-wise, professionally, socially, politically, etc.

Let’s never be deceived that our life is mainly physical, and its development is just a matter of struggling externally—that we manage to eat, to work, to earn, to stay away from physical danger, etc. The real battle is in our internal selves—in our thoughts and desires, our will and plans.

The struggle in life cannot just be a matter of economics or politics. The battle always starts and ends in our mind and heart, in the spiritual aspect of our life. This is where things start to happen, and where things also get resolved.

Even if there are still things to be fixed externally, we can still manage to fix them internally, because that’s where we get in touch directly with God, and with him, nothing is impossible. Let’s disabuse ourselves from the thought that we get our ultimate peace and joy somewhere else.

That’s why we have to see to it that our thoughts and desires are properly engaged with God who is their true foundation and end, for outside of him, we will just expose ourselves to all sorts of random and usually dangerous possibilities.

And God is not a figment of our imagination, a product of our desire to believe, a mere psychological crutch. He is the most real being—in fact, the fullness of subsistent being whose essence we can somehow know but can never fathom. He is the very author of reality itself.

This task of conforming our thoughts and desires to him is getting to be very exciting, because these days many are the earthly things—attitudes, philosophies, ideologies, cultures, together with their lifestyles—that dare to be alternatives to God.

Today’s world is so immersed in worldly values that any reference to God is at best a mere formalism, a decorative item, a lip service to tradition that is already emptied of its true substance.

And this is because in the first place many people are not praying anymore, are not exercising and living by faith. They prefer to follow by the rule of “following what comes naturally.” And that’s usually just obeying one’s feelings and passions, or the many flipping fads around.

Thus you have ad slogans like, “Obey your thirst,” “I don’t wanna grow up….. I’m a Toys R Us kid,” “It’s fun to tickle your tongue with…” If you’re constantly bombarded with messages like this, chances are you will believe them, and start abdicating the use of your spiritual faculties.

We have to wage an abiding interior struggle if only to keep our sanity, our humanity. We need to do it to avoid becoming mainly conditioned by earthly values that are blind to the spiritual and supernatural realities of our life.

            We need to see to it that our mind and heart are truly engaged with God, with the living God, and not just an idea or theory of God. This is not only possible, but also highly practicable, because in the first place, God himself wants it that way.

            The reason many people find it hard to get in contact with God is because they have lost the art of prayer and contemplation, and have assumed a dominantly worldly outlook that makes them self-centered, complacent, agnostic, if not atheistic.

            This is where interior struggle is most needed.