We are back in
the Ordinary Time and just for a little bit because this year the beginning of
Lent is very soon: February 22 is Ash Wednesday [I know! Time is flying and we
are getting old]. Today I would like to focus in on our
second reading, a reading about morality, specifically sexual morality. I know:
hard topic. You know, when people tell me in confession that they struggle with
sexual temptations, I usually mention to them that when we stop struggling we
should take our pulse because we will probably be dead[1].
St. Paul
addresses his letter to people who lived in Corinth. That was the ancient
equivalent of Sin City. Most of the people of the pagan world engaged in
manifest immorality, but some of the worst were those in Corinth. They even had
their own saying to justify their behavior.
No, it wasn’t, “What happens in Corinth stays in Corinth.” It was, food
is for the stomach and the stomach for food. And St. Paul tells them and tells
us that we are so much better than that. Our bodies belong to God; I mean that
we are members of the Body of Christ. We are far more than animals with nothing
but animal instincts. He goes on to use a very important phrase: our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit.
If we are immoral, we are sinning against our own bodies, sinning against our
union with Christ.
That is a
beautiful concept: we are Temples of the
Holy Spirit. This concept could help us to understand why we avoid
immorality. It is not a matter of some sort of Catholic No No, rules, we do our best to fight off our temptations because
we are united to Christ. We are not animals.
We are so much better than that.
Let me give you
a good example. As probably know the most beautiful chapel in the world is the
Sistine chapel[2],
and it is great because of the artwork inside it. Every year, hundred of
thousands of visitors see the paintings of the creation. The frescos are, as
you know, nudes. They emphasize the
beauty of the human body with God himself as the source of this beauty. In those
paintings the creation of man begins with God touching Adam’s hand and concludes
with the creation of Eve. Adam needed Eve and Eve needed Adam to overcome the
loneliness of the human condition. They needed to give themselves totally to
each other. And here is the message behind these paintings: the only way that we can find ourselves is
by giving ourselves away. In other words: we are made in the image of God.
We are created in the image of the love between the Holy Trinity. When Adam and
Eve gave themselves to each other, they felt no shame. They could be naked.
Shame came when they began to use
each other.
Blessed Pope
John Paul II spoke about this in his Theology of the Body[3]. He said that human happiness depends on self-giving,
not self-assertion. That is the
difference between love and lust. Love makes a gift of oneself to another
for the other’s good. Lust is taking from another for personal pleasure. For us
Catholics, sexual morality is more than self-control. It is self-mastery. For
us sexual morality is the mastery of the desire that allows us to give
ourselves to another in a way that affirms the other.
So how should we
teach this to our children, adolescents and Teens? Well, our emphasis should be
on our human dignity as well as the dignity of others. We need to teach our
children to respect their own bodies as well as those of others. We should
extend our “good-touch, bad-touch” lessons to the little ones to include how
they treat themselves and how they treat others. We need to assure our
adolescents that the changes that are rushing through their lives are gifts
from God. We need to assure them that they are not animals. And yes, in high school and college they
probably will be tempted to enter into immoral relationships, but instead of
facilitating these temptations, we need to strengthen our Teens by reaffirming
in them that relations outside of marriage violate the integrity of love as
giving because they lack promise and commitment.
I invite ask
you, to reflect again on Paul’s message to the Corinthians, and us: do you not know that your body is a Temple
of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not
your own? For you have been purchased at
a price, the Body of Christ on the cross.
Therefore, glorify God in your body.
This is not the
way of the world. But we are called to holiness, to be separated from the
world. Sexual morality itself is one of the many ways that we express this
holiness.
So today, as
always, we pray that we may we have the courage to be Catholic and to live a
pure life, a life full of light and courage and purity ■
[1] Sunday 15th
January, 2012, 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time. Readings: 1 Samuel 3:3-10, 19. Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will—Ps
39(40):2, 4, 7-10. 1 Corinthians 6:13-15, 17-20. John 1:35-42.
[2] You can visit
it virtually, here: http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html
[3] Theology of the Body is the topic of a
series of 129 lectures given by Pope John Paul II during his Wednesday
audiences in the Pope Paul VI Hall between September 1979 and November 1984. It
was the first major teaching of his pontificate. The complete addresses were
later compiled and expanded upon in many of John Paul's encyclicals, letters,
and exhortations. The delivery of the Theology of the Body series did have
interruptions. For example, the Wednesday audiences were devoted to other
topics during the Holy Year of Redemption in 1983.
