Have you ever heard a little child
who has been naughty say,
“it wasn't me!
My brain made me do it!”
We have a very strange relationship
with ourselves.
We talk of
“my body,”
“my brain,”
“my soul.”
But where is the “me”
which has body, brain and soul?
[PAUSE]
Sometimes we forget that
we are not just a body.
Sometimes we forget that
we're not just a soul.
If we did not have a body,
or if we did not have so,
we would not be a human being.
Human beings are made of
body and soul together.
Take one away and
we cease to be human.
This is the way that God has made us.
He has made us body and soul
to reflect His being.
We are made in His image
and this means that
we are meant to glow so brightly
with the presence of God
shining in our lives.
We are living beings
- we are rational animals.
God has created us
to enjoy His creation
and to understand His creation.
He has even created us
to seek after Him,
know Him
and love Him.
So how does one who hates God
try to undo His handiwork?
[PAUSE]
The best way
to undo God's handiwork in us
is to tear us to pieces.
The Devil's idea is simply
to make us
unaware of our bodies
or unaware of our souls.
The Devil wants us either
to think that we have no soul
or that our bodies don't matter.
And this is why he uses
the lusts of the flesh against us.
All of the works of the flesh
that Saint Paul tells us and the Galatians
make it seem either
that we are just bodies that need
“to eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die,”
or that our bodies are the playthings of our soul.
This is not what
the Holy Spirit desires.
For the Holy Spirit desires
that we should be truly human,
that we should be body and soul together,
fit for Eternal life in love with God.
This is the war between
the flesh and the Holy Spirit.
We, each one of us,
is a battleground between
the Devil and the Holy Spirit
as we try to live our existence
as God's creature
in the face of powers
that want to tear us from God.
Our bodies are not evil
– they are good.
But if we think our bodies are evil
then what are we saying
to the face of Almighty God
Who declares publicly that
they are good?
If our bodies are just playthings
to be used and abused
for gratifying whatever desires we have,
then where is the dignity that Almighty God
has given our bodies in union with our souls?
[PAUSE]
The way that God wants us
to live our lives
is to recognise that
we are body and soul together
and that we need to keep them together.
This means that the body
needs to be disciplined
so that its desires don't take us away
from the Holy Ghost.
This means that the soul
needs to learn humility
in recognising the need
to look after the body,
to accept and even love its limitations,
and to recognise the needs of other people.
To love means to desire the perfection of others.
This means we need
to desire the unity of body and soul
of other people.
Only in being body and soul united
can we be perfect in
the eyes of Almighty God.
If we look at the fruit of the spirit:
love, joy, peace,
long-suffering, gentleness,
goodness, faith, meekness
and temperance,
we see that these are meant
to unite body and soul.
They keep us together,
not just as individuals,
but as a community of individuals.
They stop us from treating ourselves
with contempt
and show us the dignity of being
a human being.
God has created
each and every human being
with a dignity that
cannot be taken away.
The trouble is that
we can be deluded into
thinking that it can.
In living the Christian life,
we grow in love and
therefore in perfection.
In rejecting activities
that try to deny the body,
or deny the soul,
or to treat the body as a plaything,
we find ourselves closer
to the person God created us to be.
We are still being created,
and we have been given by God
the dignity of taking part
in our own creation.
[PAUSE]
Our lives may well be
the battleground between good and evil.
What we mustn't forget
is that the war has already been won.
We have been given
the opportunity to take part
in that victory.
All the more reason
to love the selves
as God has created us to be
and to love our neighbours likewise.
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