“I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” These are beautiful if challenging words of St. Paul. He wants us to live our bodily lives from within the new mind we have received from God, especially in baptism and confirmation. We are to think of our bodies in God’s way, not man’s.

And, really, it’s perfectly obvious that we should do so. The human body is God’s design and gift. He is the true author of its “operating instructions.” This is even more the case after we are baptized. In Baptism, the Holy Spirit, and through Him the Holy Trinity, dwells within us, body and soul. We are no longer our own property. We have been bought and paid for by the Blood of Christ. Our bodies belong to Him. In fact, baptism makes us one body with Him in a way which far surpasses the union of husband and wife in marriage. We call that bodily union with Him “the Church”, of which He is the Head. The Head guides the Body.

The graces of Baptism are what Paul refers to when he says, “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God.” Baptism opens the floodgates of divine mercies and inundates us with them, in body and in soul. The human being is not just soul with an appendage called the body. We are each an embodied soul, an incarnate spirit, a spiritual body, male or female. God has fashioned us wonderfully, beautifully, in this way. Our body, too, is included in that image and likeness of God that we are. Paul even says that our bodily surrender to God is our spiritual worship. So, the body is not a separate or even alien thing in relation to our soul, our spirit, our “I.” That’s contrary to the mind of God, to reality itself. Soul and body come into existence together, as one being, at the same moment, the moment of conception. The enemy of the union of body and soul is death. It separates what God has joined together. It is the result of sin. Sin is a spiritual thing, but the division from God which it brings affects our bodies: they die. That’s why Christ’s victory over sin and death on the Cross makes it possible for the divorce of body and soul in death to be overcome in the resurrection of the body and in its reunification with the soul. Sin will always seek to cause division betweenus and within us, including between body and soul. But, after Baptism, the sacrament of healing, of reconciliation, expels sin from body and soul and allows us to experience again something of the peace of the harmonious union of body and soul.

This peaceful is the ordinary condition that God wants for us, for our happiness and fulfilment. The more we accept and engage with God’s instructions on how to live in body and in soul, the more we will experience profound harmony within ourselves. This will then mean a deeper awareness of the oneness between our whole selves and Christ’swhole self, Head and Body, that is, the Church.

St. Paul is well aware that we often experience an inner division and conflict which can show itself in bodily behaviour. He seems to describe it vividly in one place: we find ourselves doing the very thing we hate rather than the thing we know to be good and which we love. This is a lifelong struggle, but one which the mercies of the sacraments are at hand to help us win. Paul appeals to us to draw on these constantly so that we can present our bodies to God as a living sacrifice. A sacrifice means that we set ourselves apart for God, whatever our life’s vocation is. We do what is holy in His sight. It’s an ongoing, living sacrifice until we come to die and surrender ourselves entirely to God. It is a holy sacrifice because God is its origin, its mainstay and its goal. Our daily efforts and struggles to live in our bodies in a way that is acceptable to God can only be done if we are motivated by love and gratitude to Him. For He gave us to ourselves in the first place. Body and soul, we are our own first gift of love. He calls us to share in the final blessing of the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. That is why St. Paul urges us not to be conformed to worldly views of the body, becoming mundane photocopies and losing the originality we have from God, as Carlo Acutis would say. Rather, Paul says that we are to seek to be transformed by God’s will for our bodies, a will we know from the Word of God and is instilled in us through Baptism.

We must recognize that a certain neurotic obsession with the sins of the flesh was prevalent in the Catholic Church for far too long. It was very damaging to so many good people. It alienated many from the Church and it impeded the path of spiritual and psychological growth for many. Since the ‘60’s we seem to be on a better path, although now you could argue that the pendulum has swung too far to the other extreme. What we must recover is a deeper and broader understanding of Christ’s will for both body and soul together in an integrated way. This is the true meaning of chastity, whether in marriage or in celibacy or other life states. It is not something which stunts a hugely important dimension of our humanity! That is misinformation promoted by a mistaken and limited understanding of who we are. On the contrary, chastity favours balance, harmony and integration of all our human faculties and gifts. It enhances our flourishing in both body and soul.

Because of our frailty, trying to live that out is always going to be a work in progress. Hence, we need clarity as to Christ’s vision for a healthy and holy bodily life. Then it will be easier to promote a gradual growth towards that “living sacrifice” which our bodies are called to be. The Church transmits those clear parameters in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a resource which we would be wise to refer to regularly. In the rough and tumble of life, we all need great patience and compassion with ourselves and with others: to encourage and reassure, to support and sustain, to be merciful and kind –  but also to be resolved and focussed, to be ready to renounce and sacrifice as we work towards that deeper integrity and integration of our baptized bodies and souls. In the end, as the Psalm says, our flesh pines for God and our soul thirsts for Him. May we proceed calmly but vigilantly on our path, our soul clinging fast to Christ and His right hand upholding us. As Christ gave up His body for us in the Eucharist, let’s pray to Him today as we receive Communion, “Amen, Jesus. This, too, is my body which I desire to be given up for you ever more completely every single day.”