Religion for People with Bodies
It has rightly been said that much of contemporary religion, and especially much of evangelical protestantism, is a religion of the mind. Such systems are all about what you believe, and much less about what you do or avoid doing. Many of them, in fact, teach that there is really nothing one can do to lose one’s salvation (“Once saved, always saved” was one of the mantras of my Baptist upbringing).
The Catholic Faith is for the whole person, body and mind. It is a balance of right belief and right action; and even “balance” is not the right term. The two things always go together: they’re inseparable, because we are beings who are properly composed of both minds and bodies.
The Notable Duties of Lent are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. These duties are intensifications of our normal Christian duties: we should always pray, for example, but Lent is a time to really devote ourselves especially to prayer. We should always exercise self-control with regard to food and drink, and we should always be liberal in our help to others, but we pay special attention to these duties during Lent. What we do or fail to do with our bodies affects our spiritual life directly because human persons are a unity of body and soul or mind. The Scriptures are full of reminders of this truth, and Lent is a time to focus on it and to act upon it.
The Proper Preface for Lent reminds us that God uses our “bodily fasting” to “curb our sinfulness, … raise our minds from things of earth, …renew our strength, and reward us with manifold blessings.” That’s a lot of punch from a simple discipline! But there are no efforts, no matter how small, if undertaken in union with Christ and for his glory, that will not improve our lives. We don’t undertake them, of course, to improve our lives; we undertake them as acts of devotion and faithfulness, and as admissions that we are often controlled by appetites and passions and are very far gone from original righteousness.
As we approach Laetare Sunday (Lent IV) and its thematic relaxation of penitential themes, we should catch our breath and evaluate our Lenten discipline in light of the approach of Passiontide and of Holy Week. If we’ve flagged or failed, now is the time to start again. It’s never too late to renew our devotion to Christ, both in body and in soul.
“Most of our conflicts and difficulties come from trying to deal with the spiritual and practical aspects of our life separately instead of realising them as parts of one whole. If our practical life is centered on our own interests, cluttered up by possessions, distracted by ambitions, passions, wants and worries, beset by a sense of our own rights and importance, or anxieties about our own future, or longings for our own success, we need not expect that our spiritual life will be a contrast to all this. The soul’s house is not built on such a convenient plan: there are few sound-proof partitions in it. Only when the conviction -- not merely the idea -- that the demand of the Spirit, however inconvenient, comes first and IS first, rules the whole of it, will those objectionable noises die down which have a way of penetrating into the nicely furnished little oratory, and drowning all the quieter voices by their din.”
- Evelyn Underhill
—JB+
