Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

Our reading from I Corinthians today should put to rest any suspicion we may have that when the Bible speaks of “the flesh” as something unedifying and in need of restraint, it doesn’t secretly mean “the body.” When Paul asks, “For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh?” he’s telling us that “the flesh” is really a way of referring to patterns of thinking, feeling and relating that negatively impact our lives and the lives of those around us; these patterns have a way of running us. We call these patterns “the passions.”

According to scripture and the teachings of the saints, the flesh our personal complicity with “the world,” a term used to collectively describe the passions: things like love of money, lust for possessions, love of physical pleasure, desire for fame, that sort of thing. To paraphrase Saint Isaac the Syrian writing in the 7th Century: to the extent to which the passions are alive in us, we are alive to the world and our living is according to the flesh.

So, no, “the flesh” isn’t “the body”! Christianity isn’t a dualistic religion that says the body is evil and the spirit is good (that’s gnosticism or Manichaeism). We are fearfully and wonderfully made: old bodies and young bodies; female bodies, male bodies and non-binary bodies; trans bodies and cis bodies; bodies that are disabled and bodies that are not disabled; large bodies and small bodies; and every sort of body! Christianity affirms that God made nature (including our bodies!) good…what’s so often wrong with creation and with/in our bodies is our relationship to them and with them: our exploitation of them, our bad use of them, our selfishness, our dissipation, our love of things and of stuff as ends in themselves and not for the sake of the One who made them, our distorted perspective on them. All those things tend to make of creation the venue of the world’s unfolding; tend to make bodies the agents and instruments of the flesh; tend to seat the tyrannical passions on the thrones of our hearts and enshrine them in the temples of our souls.

To be alive to the world, to live according to the flesh is to live out of harmony with- and away from God, neighbor, creation, self. So it’s important, particularly in Lent, to ask ourselves: what really gives me life? To what, really, am I alive in my day-to-day, moment-to-moment living? Where does my nourishment really come from…and if it’s not from God, how can I be re-oriented, renewed, refreshed, nourished, and become truly alive with the love that is itself the very life of God?

This reorientation is nothing we can do on our own, it’s not a work of ours to accomplish…but God desires to accomplish it in us, by grace, through faith! Perhaps today, dear Friend, we can take time in the practice of our prayer to be still, to make ourselves available to God and God’s grace, so that we can receive the life we desire to live at the hands of the One who is Life; so that all of our being, body, soul spirit, can be quickened by the living grace of God; so that instead of the passions, the Holy Spirit can sit in the throne of our hearts, and we can be alive to God, living according to the Spirit’s will, not in a that’s weirdly aloof, but in a way that’s truly spiritual, which is to say: fully present, fully embodied!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+