Grace Notes: Body, salvation and self

By SISTER ANNE MARIE WALSH, SOLT
Columnist

 People who have had near-death experiences sometimes report a kind of giddy exhilaration at finding themselves outside their bodies. They frequently describe a “popping sound” as they separate from their bodies, along with a complete cessation of pain or suffering.

That might lead us to think that liberation from the body is something to be desired and that death accomplishes this. But actually, this is not what we believe as Catholics. We yearn for some kind of liberation because our bodies, as they are now, weigh us down. They are burdensome because they have been wounded by original sin, by our own sinfulness and by the sins of others against us.

But the body is not something to be gotten rid of. Deep down we know this. Deep down, we understand that being human means having a particular kind of body that identifies us as human. In fact, the physical death of the body subconsciously disturbs us so much that it makes death hard to even think about. 

God didn’t make us as creatures who continue to morph into other kinds of life forms. Even across developmental stages, we always have a body, a soul, and a spirit. But the attitude toward the body has, from the beginning of time, been susceptible to poisoned distortions. We have come to think of it as too limiting, as the obstacle to the immortality and the transcendence we are seeking. 

And we mistakenly think we can extricate ourselves from the problems of the body, or the body itself in our fallen state. We don’t see the body as a fundamental expression of our being. We don’t think of it as something redeemable in the same way the rest of us (our soul) is. We think the body belongs to us as a possession, as a kind of accessory that we may dispose of any way we see fit. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Truth often has to compete with modern imaginings of reality. When it comes to the body, two great hopes compete for the modern imagination and they sound alike until you notice which direction they point. Both admit that something is deeply wrong with human embodied life — both promise rescue. But one promises the redemption of the body, and the other promises escape from it. Almost every contested question of our moment — bioethics, gender, aging, disability, death — turns quietly on which of these hopes a person actually holds.

Ancient thinking generally saw a dichotomy between the body and soul. The body was considered temporary housing while the soul was the real self. The Christian vision is different. The creed does not conclude with the immortality of the soul. It concludes with "the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting."  

Thomas Aquinas pressed the logic to its end: the separated soul is in an unnatural condition, incomplete and even the blessed dead await the resurrection to be fully themselves. The risen body is glorified, but it still behaves as a body, a healed body now capable of things it lost in the fall. 

It is important to look at how we personally view the body. The secular world tends to see it as a prison. Believers see it differently, especially in light of Jesus’ Incarnation. He comes to save humanity, but he does it in and through the body. This alone says the body is more than just a shell or a casing. It is us!...even in its deformities. Without the body, we are no longer talking about human beings. What the Lord offers us is salvation of the person and therefore salvation of the body is included, with liberation or transformation of its defects en route to glorification.

Transhumanism is one of the newest secular attempts at immortality. If the self is essentially information, then the body is hardware — inefficient, decaying, replaceable. Mind-uploading, radical life extension and the dream of fundamental independence are technological restatements of the old Gnostic wager: the real you is trapped in the flesh, and salvation means freedom from the flesh's constraints.

These are responses to genuine suffering. Bodies do hurt. They betray us, humiliate us, decline and die. And Christianity has to be able to account for this. The secular hope tends to seek transcendence by subtraction — fewer constraints, more control and eventually a body so engineered, or so dispensed with, that it imposes nothing on us at all.

For the believer, the body is not the enemy. Sin and death are the problem. Being a limited, dependent creature is not a defect to be overcome but the shape of the relationship God has made and called good. So, the cure is not subtraction but healing and glorification. The resurrection does not take us out of the body but perfects body, soul and spirit together. Limits are not eliminated but are instead made luminous. Dependence is not shameful, because Jesus himself lives by receiving everything from the father. 

The Incarnation tells you that the self you did not choose — this face, this history, this aching and unreliable body — is precisely what God came for, and precisely what he intends to keep.

 Questions for Reflection
Do you ever treat your own body as an instrument, an obstacle, or an embarrassment rather than as part of who you are?

The risen Christ kept some of his wounds. Not all of them. What might that suggest about how God will handle your own scars, limits, and history?

Think of someone you know whose body has failed them significantly. How does believing that the body is the person — not its container — change what you owe them, and how you would speak to them?

Our culture often equates dignity with control. What really is the source of our dignity, and do you need to reorient yourself? 
 
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