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Do not believe anyone who maintains that our bodies have nothing to do with God. I might say … that people who regard the body as corrupt most often defile it with impure thoughts. But what can possibly be wrong about this marvelous body of ours? Look at the beauty, the harmony of it. Never say the body is responsible for sin. It is not the body that sins,... The body is only an instrument.... It becomes impure if it is used for fornication, but it becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit if it is united to his sanctity.
--St. Cyril of Jerusalem (d. 386) Catecheses
Oswald T. Chambers asks: “Have we recognized that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?” What a different question regarding the body than questions asked by consumerists of money-grabbing culture.
Contrasting those questions informs us of the difference between a spiritual view of life and a fleshly view of life. The spiritual does not exclude the flesh; it lifts it to its heights of excellence, beauty, and divinity. The fleshly view excludes the spirit, however. The spiritual view seeks to integrate the body and spirit in a wholeness of Love, including deep respect for the flesh of the world and other persons. The fleshly view commercializes flesh as a means to make profit, focusing on reducing wrinkles, promising longer life, getting a tan, removing a blemish, sliming down, …--none of these things are essentially wrong, only generally fully divorced from any relation to spirit. The spiritual view of flesh sees human sexuality as a means of worship, through the selfless giving of self in enjoying oneness with another person. The fleshly view assumes that sex is another healthy recreation, and it calls conjugal intercourse the natural thing to do--meaning the lustful, not natural, thing to do.
Or don’t you know that your body is a temple for the Ruach HaKodesh [Sacred Spirit] who lives inside you, whom you received from God? The fact is, you don’t belong to yourselves; for you were bought with a price. So use your bodies to glorify God. (I Cor 6. 19-20, CJB)
St. Paul, addressing sexual perversity in the church at Corinth, ties together the theology of Indwelling Spirit with the theology of Sanctification, or being set free for and in Christ, including freedom from serving the passions of the body from a fleshly orientation. Note, passions are not in themselves wrong; the passions are expression of godliness meant to be expressed in ways conforming to what is natural, not unnatural: and Christ is the Christian’s image of the truly natural, which is the truly spiritual. Right use of the body pertains, then, to recognition that when you committed yourself to Christ, you renounced the unnatural claim to use the body in any way you might want to use it. You did not lose the passions of nature; rather, you offered them to be set apart and employed, as well as enjoyed, as means of the joy of the Holy Spirit.
So… Do we recognize that flesh is a sanctuary of the Sacred Spirit? Do we live knowing and honoring that Infinite Love lives within us, seeking to share with all persons through the way we honor and use the body to bring love, joy, and peace into the world? Do we acknowledge that some things are forbidden us regarding the body, not because the body is evil, but because certain actions lead us from what the Inner Christ knows will bring meaning and peace into our lives and the lives of those around us? Do you honor that we, in following Christ, have renounced all rights to unnatural use of our bodies? Will you pray, daily, upon rising, recommitting the members of your body to the Christ, and asking that all actions, thoughts, and feelings that pass through the body to others that day will honor Christ and spread love, joy, and peace?
How shall we honor the body and use it honorably? By, as St. Cyril of Jerusalem informs us, uniting the body to the Spirit’s sanctity. The contemplative is becoming one with Sacredness, so that the consciousness of the body is transformed into the Mind of Christ.
The Peace of Christ to All!
*Sources of quotes: Cyril of Jerusalem, T. Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain; Oswald T. Chambers, B. Groeschel, K. Perrotta, The Journey Toward God.
**OneLife writings are offered by Brian K. Wilcox, a United Methodist pastor serving in the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church. He writes in the spirit of John Wesley's focus on the priority of inner experience of the Triune God; scriptural holiness; ongoing sanctification; the goal of Christian perfection (or, wholeness). Brian seeks to integrate the best of the contemplative teachings of Christianity East and West, from the patristic Church to the present. Brian lives a vowed contemplative life with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis, in North Florida. OneLife writings are for anyone seeking to live and share love, joy, and peace in the world and in devotion to God as she or he best understands God.
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