Orienting our body to the spiritual and the supernatural

THAT’S the task and the duty that we are reminded of on the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, celebrated on August 15. Our body, just like our spiritual soul, is expected to also share in the very life and nature of God.

If Christ, the pattern of our humanity and savior of our damaged humanity, resurrected and ascended into heaven both as God and man, both with his human body and soul, we too are expected to attain our ultimate and eternal status with our body perfectly united to our spiritual soul that is elevated to the supernatural life and nature of God.

Precisely, Our Lady who typifies the perfection of humanity, validated this truth of our Christian faith with her Assumption into heaven. We should never fail to realize that we can also go to Our Lady, who is also a mother to us, to teach us how our body can deserve to share the divine life and nature.

Given that dignity of our human body, we have to make sure that our piety and our devotion to God and everything related to him has to involve both the body and soul. It has to involve our whole person. It just cannot be purely spiritual or purely material. It just cannot be only a matter of knowing the doctrine, quite cerebral in approach, without some external manifestations, or of practicing all sorts of devotional exercises, without knowing the doctrine of faith.

If piety has to be authentic and consistent in all circumstances, then it has to be lived both in our spiritual soul whose main faculties are our intellect and will, and in our material body whose link to our soul, the principle of life, are the emotions and passions, the memory and the imagination, our temperament and psychological state, etc.

When piety is limited to one or the other essential element of our being, to either our spiritual soul or the material body, then it cannot be consistent. It cannot hold out against that anomaly for long. It sooner or later will fall into the tricks of hypocrisy and self-deception.

We need to see to it that our body is properly animated by the spirit of Christ, which is a spirit of love, a spirit of self-giving, willing to make sacrifices even up to death for love of God and of everybody else. This spirit of Christ should be felt in the body. And let’s convince ourselves that it is in this way that our body acquires its best condition.

It’s in this way that our body too will always look for Christ and for others out of pure love. We have to be wary of letting our body be animated by other spirits—like the spirit of the flesh, the spirit of world, or even the evil spirit.

In fact, to be realistic, we always need to subject our body to some discipline, sometimes of the severe kind, because our body is always weak no matter how strong it looks physically. It will always tend to indulge itself to madness, often falling into some forms of addiction and bondage. It’s our built-in potential traitor.

We should subject the body to the dynamics of our spiritual soul that in turn is subject also to the dynamics of faith, hope and charity, or in short, the dynamics of the life of God from whom our soul springs as God’s image and likeness.