Just in case someone may think I did not write this, I thought I'd post something I wrote today for a Parish Pastoral Council meeting:

Spirituality versus Physicality and Salvation

Going to church every Sunday, and sometimes more frequently, we turn our eyes to the sky, as that is a metaphor for Heaven. After we die, we believe, we will be liberated from our Earthly bodies, Earthly troubles, Earthly pettiness, perturbations, and problems. We will leave the crass urges, desires, yearnings of the flesh behind, and ascend to a Nirvana of pure spirit. We pray for liberation from this body and this earth, to achieve union with our Savior and the Father, through the intercession and ultimate triumph of the Holy Spirit.

We unknowingly and reflexively fall into a quasi-Manichean heresy, assuming that body and spirit are separate, in conflict and incompatible. We assume that the spirit, as is God the Father, is superior to the body, and aspire to cast off the flawed shells we carry with us as mementoes of the sin of Adam and Eve.

And we are wrong. We are wrong because Christ Himself taught us that the body is an essential part of our being. Without the body, there is no humanity. Without the body, there is no Passion. Without the body, there is no salvation. Christ did not give us his spirit: He gave us His body: and that sacrifice saved us for all time.

So every Sunday, we dutifully trudge to the altar, and routinely accept what looks like, smells like, and tastes like an unremarkable wafer of unleavened bread. Swallow it down with a splash of sweet wine, perhaps with a small prayer of “thank you, Jesus, for my life, and my family, and my friends.” Yet what we are casually swallowing is not bread. It is not even blessed bread, or sacred holy water. It is the engine and essence of salvation itself: this is what was hammered to, hung from, and bled on the Cross to give you and me eternal life.

So perhaps we should think a bit more about what we are eating on Sunday morning.

Michael A. Koenecke
September 24, 2009