What would you be without your body?

Am I simply a collection of flesh and bone, tissue and nerve endings? Or is there more to me than the sum of my material parts? Who am I? Lawrence Cunningham offers 13 meditations on the mysterious union of body and soul.

I

A modern British philosopher, Gilbert Ryle, has called the soul "the ghost in the machine." That oft quoted phrase means, according to the philosopher, that no matter how closely one inspects a person, there is only flesh and blood. In other words, the machine, which is the body, seems to work quite nicely without insisting that there is a ghost that makes it run.

Many contemporary scientists insist that thinking, willing, consciousness, and so on (long attributed to the immaterial part of a human called the soul) can be explained by neurochemistry, molecular biology, or that new interdisciplinary field, neuroscience. This research is important, illuminating, and not to be dismissed out of hand.

Nonetheless, despite such claims, most of us have that uncanny feeling that there is something inside us, deeper than body, that we call the "I" - that voice which tells us to do certain things and avoid others and can reflect upon itself ("It is me that is breathing, thinking, and so on"). Some people even report out-of-body experiences (hence the question, What or who is outside of the body?).

It is all very puzzling.

There is something very deep inside of me that resists the notion that I am just the sum total of all my material parts. Maybe that conviction comes from too many years spent memorizing the catechism, which told me that I am a creature "composed of body and soul."

II

One thing is very clear, and it is this: whatever I am, I am not pure spirit or immaterial. At my age many aches and pains remind me that I am, alas, a too fleshly creature. Indeed, it is one of the great graces of God that, as part of creation, I can enjoy bodily pleasure (although it is me and not a detached body that enjoys it) - the warm embrace of the surf of the Gulf of Mexico; the hug of a daughter; the velvety satisfaction of a glass of red wine.

We may think of these sensations as belonging to the body, but our language betrays us. We say, "I cut myself" or "I really enjoyed that" or "I am sad today."

There is "me," and the "me" does not seem to be either pure soul or pure body. Years ago, French philosopher and diplomat Jacques Maritain warned against the sin of angelism - that pernicious view that somehow we are pure spirit trapped in a corruptible, disobedient, and unlovely body that keeps us from soaring up, untrammeled, to God.

Angelism has always been a persistent temptation to historic Christianity in its brushes with philosophies that favor angelism, such as gnosticism or extreme forms of Platonism.

Angelism has had an unhappy effect on Christian spirituality. Too many books, too many saints, and too many pious practices in the past were infected with angelism - that fear and loathing of the body that encouraged self-punishment. Even ascetics such as Saints Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi had to warn against the temptation to excessive contempt for the body, even though Bernard rolled in brambles and Francis called his body "Brother Ass."

If one wants to see angelism at its pathological worst, consider the beautiful young person struggling with anorexia, who looks into a mirror and wishes that the body would go away.

Angelism loathes the pleasures of the material world.

I like to keep in mind someone's definition of a Puritan: a person who frets that somewhere and somehow others are enjoying themselves.

Good sensual experiences, willingly embraced, are powerful antidotes to he poison of angelism.

III

The opposite of angelism is not bodiliness but bestialism. "We are neither angels nor pigs," cries out one of Walker Percy's fictional heroes, "but sovereign wayfarers!" to satisfy animal urges or instinct; that is what makes us different from the rest of the animal kingdom.

The worst example of bestialism is seen in the hopeless addict (whatever the addiction may be) who is driven by craving, who becomes a servant to the fix or the brief sexual encounter or this or that pleasure that the body demands. It is a curious thing about addiction or other compulsive needs - the body seems to be demanding satisfaction or telling us something that is urgent and compelling. The old issue is, Who is the object of the body's demands? It is, of course, me. And, who am I? Ah, that is the question.

IV

What, then, are we? We are, not to put too fine a point on it, persons - not bodies or spirits., but persons - form out of the clay of the earth into which God breathes his breath/spirit (the Hebrew ruah can mean both).

We are inextricably of the earth but inspired, which is to say "breathed into," by God. God made me as a living person with all of my bodiliness inspired by God's own life.

Genesis says that every day God made a bit of the world, and when God finished a good day's work, God looked at the divine handiwork and made a judgment: "It is good." However, on the sixth day of creation - when humans were made - there was a more emphatic judgment: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31).

V

Every time we see a battered child on television or a homeless person sprawled on an urban sidewalk or a lonely old person peeking out of an apartment window or persons ravaqed old illness, we should say, emphatically as a possible, God mad made these people and they are good. God did not create them to be ravaged but to be mirrors of divine beauty, wholesomeness, and integrity. In that sense, to batter a child is to commit a blasphemy.

Every thing that mars, disfigures, insults, and kills a human person is bad. The opening line of Genesis is, as it were, an ancient spring that nourished every effort that praises the beauty of human beings and cries out against their disfigurement: male and female God made them; in God's image and likeness he made them.

VI

Because every human is inspired by God, because we have God's breath/spirit within us, we have something of the divine about us.

"You are more intimate to us than we are to ourselves," Saint Augustine strikingly writes in the opening page of his Confessions.

It has been the hallmark of Pope John Paul II's theology to concentrate on the first three chapters of Genesis - his theology is a theology of creation. And for a simple reason, the first and most fundamental way in which we are linked to God is through a free gift by which we come into existence as icons of God, for that is what the word image means. No matter what our failings may be (or those of other persons) we must repeat: we are images of God.

In Crossing the Threshold of Faith (Knopf, 1994), John Paul 11 writes, "The Gospel, above all else, is the joy of creation. God, who is creating saw that His creation was good, is the source of joy for all creatures and above all for humankind. God the Creator seems to say of all creation: `It is good that you exist.' And his joy spreads through the `good news' according to which good is greater than all that is evil in the world."

VII

Christ was a person and not, as one of my students brilliantly put it, a spirit in a "Jesus suit." Verbum caro factum est: "The Word was made flesh." It is one of the more pernicious failings of even pious Catholics to think that Jesus lived in a wraithlike state, free from bodiliness. Scripture tells us otherwise, and emphatically tells us so - Jesus was hungry; he experienced disappointment; got tired; became irritated; needed a drink of water when thirsty; burst into tears on occasion; really suffered; really bled; and really died.

Furthermore, I notice, rereading the gospels as I write these reflections, how tactile the ministry of jesus was. Jesus grasps the hand of Peter's mother-in-law (Mark 1:31) and snatches away from death, with a grasp of the hand, both the daughter of Jairus (Mark 5:41) and the epileptic boy (Mark 9:27). jesus communicates healing with the laying on of hands (Luke 13:13). He touches lepers (Mark 1:41) and children (Mark 10:3). Furthermore, people touch him, bathe his feet with tears, anoint his head with oil, kiss him, and, of course, whip him, plant thorns in his skull, and nail his body to a cross. The cross, however, was not the end of the story - it was a prelude, real death leading to real resurrection.

The resurrected Christ rose as an embodied person, not as a spirit without a body. Was he a different kind of person? He most certainly was. The earliest Christian testimony to the Resurrection is in the 15th chapter of Saint Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth. Paul is emphatic: he rose from the dead; he is a person who lives; plenty of people have seen him (some of whom are still alive - Paul writes about 20 years after the event); and, finally, if Christ is not risen, then we are all wasting our time. Preaching is in vain, and faith is mere credulity.

Let's get this straight: at the heart of Christianity is a belief in resurrection, not immortality. Our hope is, that in God's good time, we live as persons and not merely disembodied spirits - like some Casper-the-ghost reality, floating out there in the aether somewhere.

How can this be? It is an old question. Paul had to convince the Corinthians that it was true when they found it hard to even imagine what a resurrected person might be like. However hard it might be to conceptualize ourselves as resurrected, it is still a central datum of our faith.

VIII

What is the deepest meaning of the Resurrection? It means, at its heart, that somehow in Christ we will be changed; we will be new persons. Between our death and our resurrection, we may well live in a kind of immortal state although this is one of the murkier areas of theological speculation. Is the process of death itself our purgatory? After death, from the perspective of the dead person, is there time? The Eastern and Western Churches have different views of these matters, but they should not lead us away from the central point: at some time in our existence, we will live as integral persons.

One of my favorite poets (and a great theologian), Gerard Manley Hopkins, summed up the significance of the Resurrection in a poem with the jawbreaking title, "That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and Of the Comfort of the Resurrection." Hopkins sees simultaneously in the world of nature two things: its teeming life and vitality counterposed to death and decay. Morose at the thought of death and decay, the poet is brought up short by the thought of Christ's resurrection and his own:

In a flash, at a trumpet's crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

This jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond is immortal diamond.

Who could say it better or with greater economy? What will happen is this: out of the carbon of our existence God will fashion purer carbon - a diamond. We will be the same, but we will be transformed. In that sense, our yearning for God and our desire for transcendence becomes fulfilled when we shape life as new persons.

IX

But what of us who live not in the compressed world of poetry or the soaring hope of Paul or within the abstractions of the theologian?

We as Christians must constantly relearn a fundamental truth rooted in both creation and incarnation: God gives us a good world as pure gift, which we need to cherish, love, and see ever again with fresh eyes. One corollary of such an attitude is to resist (indeed, to hate) what mars the beauty of the world around us.

Social reformer Dorothy Day, no sentimentalist she, often quoted Father Zossima's aphorism from The Brothers Karamazov that "beauty will save the world." Neither Zossima nor Day understood that in any effete aesthetic fashion. To hate ugliness is to hate what scars the good creation of God. We should hate a denuded landscape, a polluted cityscape, malnourished children, and rubble-strewn cities. They are all offenses against the design of God.

X

We must also learn that what pleases us as embodied human beings is a fundamental locus for learning about God. Good food at a convivial meal is a way of knowing God - or why did jesus present himself to us in the context of a meal? Human eroticism is a way of loving God, and if that is not true, why does God say to Israel and us "may your breasts be like clusters of the vine and the scent of your breath like apples and your kisses like the best wine that goes down smoothly, gliding over lips and teeth" (Canticles 7:8-9)? Marriage is a vehicle for discovering God, and if not, why did God frame his covenant in the language of marriage covenants? The body is important, and if not, why did Paul tell us that as graced persons, we belong to the Body of Christ?

We must learn, in short, that it is through being flesh-and-blood people that we come into contact with God, and without such contact, there is no path to the divine. (Think of John of the Cross who listened to the love songs sung outside his prison cell in Toledo and turned them into the mystical poetry that is the pride of the church.)

XI

What, it is objected, about asceticism Fasting? Voluntary celibacy? Denial of the self? Lenten penances?

The term asceticism comes from the Greek word askesis for "athletic training." Taken into the Christian vocabulary quite early, it describes the ways in which we are trained to be disciples of Jesus. There are certain things that we train not to do and others that we train to do.

The bottom line, however, is this: we do no honor to God's intentions to "give up" or "deny" what is in the world because we see things as bad or the world as evil. If one is celibate for the Kingdom, the roots of that decision are poisoned if the choice is made because human sexuality or the married state is looked upon as evil. One follows the poor Christ with the conviction that we give up that which is good (possessions) for something that is better - namely, the freedom to commit fully to Jesus Christ. We fast, not to despise the body but to freely abstain temporarily from a good for a greater good: to focus more intently on the presence of God.

Contemporary spiritual writer and theologian Philip Sheldrake argues this conviction in his recent book Befriending Our Desires (Ave Maria, 1994). He notes that the human desire for love, sustenance, and friendship are all markers pointing to the source of the good in these desires that is God. This is a very old idea in the Christian tradition.

The fifth-century mystic Dionysius the Areopagite says this in his influential treatise on the names of God: "The Cause of all things loves all things in the superabundance of His goodness, because of His goodness he makes all things, brings them to perfection, holds all together, returns all things. The divine longing [eros] is Good seeking good for the sake of the Good."

The implications of this are staggering if only we learn to keep things in focus: human love leads to divine love; human warmth is a touchstone of divine care; human enjoyment points to that which fills up all desires.

XII

It is odd (but understandable) that Christians deprecate personal mortificatioh at a time when mortification is fashionable. We resist fasting while people stream off to Weight Watchers; we resist asceticism while the new ascetics, decked out in spandex athletic gear, enrich health clubs and spas. Is the problem that Christians did not understand mortification as anything more than obedience to rules? That is probably part of it. Are we chary of mortification because some persons, seeing mortification and self-denial as ends in themselves, became scrupulous, discouraged, or obsessively compulsive?

There is much evidence that many people, with the best intentions in the world, did get so waylaid. Is it because we heard too many sermons about the dangers - mainly of sex - that we carried about burdens of guilt? That is what many of our novelists from James Joyce to the present have insisted.

Is it not time to look again at asceticism, mortification, and denial of the self in a new, more wholesome light? I think that we should, and perhaps already have. Why not fast on certain days by eating no more than a cup of rice and some water as a sign of community with the destitute of the world?

Why not explicitly deny oneself a pleasure for good of the poor? The price of two movie tickets would feed a hungry person for a week in some parts of the world. In 1 Corinthians (9:24-27), Paul tell us: "Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete but only one wins the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to win a perishable crown but we an imperishable one. Well, I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air; but I pummel my body to subdue it, lest in preaching to others I myself should be disqualified."

Paul, mixing up methaphors from track and pugilistics, makes two important points. First, we as Christians train for a goal that goes beyond the immediate prize from the here and now. We seek an imperishable crown.

Second, and more important, the askesis we undertake is a vehicle for something beyond, "lest after preaching to others I should myself be disqualified."

The crucial point is not to be an ascetic only for the imperishable crown but to train for holistic goals. I can be an ascetic for quites specific reasons - to feel better, to do my tasks in life better, for the sake of my well-being and that of my family, and so on -which is completely compatible with being a better person, and, as a consequence, a better Christian. Why not be an ascetic for the good of others?

XIII

How do we live sensibly as human persons? By trust in who we are. One of the early desert fathers was told that some of the brethren were falling asleep during the night office of prayer. The old desert ascetic responded that when he saw a brother dozing off, he let him sleep a bit resting on his lap. The old monk understood that his brother was tired, and he took pains to relieve his fatigue. Now that is my kind of ascetic.

To be a Christian person is to love the good world that God gives us, love ourselves and others, and breathe out gratitude to the source of these freely given gifts, and conversely, to hate what disfigures that world through ugliness, fear, loathing, and violence.

In one of his essays, Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton wrote that he attempted to make his life, simultaneously, a great No! - to materialism, violence, hatred, and mindless activity - as well as a great Yes! - to all that was beautiful, true, and human. That is why Merton, as great a figure that ever lived in the American church, saw no contradiction between the austerity of his monastic life and his love for poetry, art, a few cold beers at a summer picnic, and a solitary dance as he listened to the music of Bob Dylan in his hermitage.

So, don't think of the body and the soul. Think of the person. Love the earth from which we all come and remember, as Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel writes in I am my Body: New Waves of Embodiment (Continuum, 1995): "The earth into which the dead bodies are lowered reconciles us with mortality because it keeps something of immortality hidden in itself. From such earth by tradition the Redeemer can also come: the grains of rice, the root of Jesus or Christ from earth."