Robert Barron - Are Your Soul and Body at War?
Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent. I've said this many times before. It's like going back to spiritual basics during Lent, and the readings the Church proposes for this holy season are always remarkably good and interesting and important. And watch the way the Church juxtaposes the readings. I think with a heightened spiritual attention we look at these scripture passages. So our gospel for this first Sunday of Lent is taken from Mark and it's Mark's very laconic, very understated version of the temptation of Jesus in the desert.
So in Matthew and Luke, you've got these kind of elaborate narratives that go through the various temptations of the devil and how Jesus reacts. Here's all that St. Mark says. "The spirit drove Jesus out into the desert. He remained in the desert for 40 days, tempted by Satan. He was among wild beasts and the angels ministered to him". That's it. That's all we get as a description of what happened. So we do indeed hear about the temptation by Satan, but no details. And I want to focus on this mysterious, fascinating observation he makes after that. He was among the wild beasts and the angels ministered to him. I want you to keep that image in your mind like a kind of icon.
Jesus in the desert, angels above, so to speak, ministering to him and then down below he's with the animals. It's a commonplace of Christian anthropology that we human beings are a bit like a microcosm. That means we're like a little universe in ourselves. Why? Because we combine in ourselves both the spiritual and the material. Let me say that again. It's a very simple but very important point. We combine in our persons the spiritual and the material. the spiritual and the material. Look at the spiritual side. We can listen to Mozart. We hear Mozart with our ears, but we take in the great patterns of Mozart with our minds.
We can study Einstein and we can study the great scientists and the most abstract philosophers. We can read Kant and Hegel and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. We can design computers. We can design spacecraft that will fly to distant planets. We can pray in such a refined way that we almost lose our contact with the earth and we rise up toward heaven. In all those ways, everybody, our spiritual side is on clear display. At the same time, like it or not, we have bodies. We get tired and we get too hot, or too cold, and we have to sleep and we have to eat and drink. And sometimes our passions and our emotions get the better of us. Sometimes we're just dictated to by our bodily passions. We're both spirit and matter, both soul and body. It's our glory, yes, we're a microcosm. It's the unique way that God has made us.
God did make the angels pure spirits to give him glory in their distinctive way. God did make purely material things. They give glory to God in their unique way. And he made us hybrids of body and soul. It's our glory and it's our agony. Much of human life, am I my right fellow sinners, is experienced as a kind of struggle. It's a warfare between the spirit and the body. The spirit warring against the body, the body warring against the spirit. One of the results of sin is that the two of them have become kind of dislocated from one another.
Go back to Paul to the Romans, chapter seven. You find those wonderful but troubling lines, right? The good that I would do, well, that's what I don't do. The evil that I would avoid, that's what I end up doing. And then he says, who will deliver me from this body of death? Well see, he's witnessing to how we experience on the inside the struggle between body and soul. Okay, now look over the history of philosophy and religion and spirituality. What do you find? You find lots of attempts to deal with this problem.
Now, one of them very popular, by the way, from ancient times to the present day, is a kind of imperialism of the soul. An imperialism of the spirit. Think here of Plato and think of Plotinus and think of gnosticism and these ancient dualistic systems that say, I know the body, but the body's bad news and the body is like a prison. That's Plato. And the whole point of the spiritual life and intellectual life for Plato is to have a jailbreak, escape from the prison. Same with Gnostics. They saw the spiritual spark kind of buried deep inside and just we have to get rid of these bodies and move up beyond them. Forms of dualism today, you bet. You bet. It's a very popular option to glorify the spirit and to kind of denigrate the body. That solve the problem? No, because the body and soul were so woven together that all those attempts always kind of founder. They always come up against the rocks because you can't just leap spiritually out of the body. It doesn't work.
Now there's the other way to handle the problem. Forget about the spirit. These are people that live, let's say, in a purely sensual way. They're completely oriented to the body and the needs and the goods and desires of the body. Now, popular option, you bet, from ancient times to the present day. Think of even like today, a playboy of philosophy, or a purely materialistic approach to life. It's just satisfying the desires of the body. Whatever the spirit means, well, that's some kind of abstraction. What really matters is the needs and goods of the body. Is that going to work? Uh-Uh, because like it or not, we're a hybrid of body and soul. And if you try to just bracket the spiritual needs, they're going to rebel against you.
What's interesting, when you go to Rome and you go into the Sistine Chapel and look at those great paintings of Michelangelo and gorgeous, of course, beautiful. But what you notice is the figures. There's something roiled about them and something that's tensive about them. All the musculature that Michelangelo shows, it's not just to show off his skill, it's to show these figures struggling. See, what is that? It's a depiction of what I've been talking about. It's the soul struggling against the body, the body against the soul. And deep down, we want to resolve this tension.
Now, we're entering the season of Lent. Can I suggest to you everybody, the church gives us this interesting peculiar little reading from Mark, that this might be an important work of Lent to bring body and soul properly together. See, what's one point of the fasting and abstinence and discipline of Lent? It's to discipline the body, lest it try to dominate the self too much. How come we fast and abstain? Well, sometimes our desire for food and for drink and for sex and for pleasure becomes too dominant, and the spirit balks at that. The spirit needs to have the body disciplined to some degree.
Now, to be fair, does it work the other way? Yeah. Can sometimes the spirit or the soul be too dominant, that it doesn't respect the integrity of the body, that we start playing dualistic games? Could part of a discipline of Lent be a healthy rediscovery of your bodilyness? I remember when I was at the seminary years ago, and it's a temptation of seminarians, as you get so into the spiritual life and so into these high rarefied things, you can almost forget that you have a body. I remember telling the seminarians, remember to exercise, remember to eat well. In essence, pay attention to your body. Don't treat your body as something that's low level. It's the integration of body and soul that we want.
Well, look at this image again now that we started with. Jesus in the desert. The angels ministering to him and he was with the animals. What do you see now? In his own person we find a reconciliation of heaven and earth. We find the coming together of the spiritual and the material. How important everybody, that we say the word became flesh. See how beautifully that's expressed? The word. That means a purely abstract pattern. That's something entertained by the mind. That's a spiritual reality. But, the word in Jesus becomes flesh and dwells among us.
Do you see Jesus in his own person, as it were, knitting together a universe that had fallen apart because of sin? What does sin lead to? This disintegration of the self. I like that term. I mean, the integration means hanging together. When something disintegrates, the elements fall apart from each other. How come we experience the war of spirit against body, body against spirit? Because of sin. Now, just a quick observation. The link made between that gospel and our first reading for this first Sunday of Lent has to do with Noah.
You say, why in the world would the church link the story of Noah and the ark? What does God accomplish in that story? As sin has affected its destruction, right? So there's the "tohu wabohu", the primal chaos is back. That's the great flood of Noah that's destructive of life. That's what sin does. But what does God do? God rescues his human creatures. Yes, indeed, Noah and his family and all the animals. This remnant of God's good creation also saved on the ark. God is not playing a platonic game in the Bible. I mean, the goal is not, let's get away from matter as much as we can and move up to a purely spiritual heaven. That isn't it.
In fact, don't we say in the creed we look to the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. We don't say we look to the escape of the soul from the body. No, no, we want the resurrection of the body. The whole person saved. Think of Noah's Ark now as a kind of image, or icon of that. Just as Jesus, the angels ministering to him, the animal's attending to him, is an icon of a reconciled world. Everybody, can I suggest this would be a really good way to pray your way through Lent, is to understand more deeply the ways in which the disintegration of soul and body exist in you. And then, with the icon of Christ in the desert in mind, ask the Lord to re-knit these elements of your very self. And God bless you.