seeking something more

One of my greatest frustrations in life is this concept about loving your neighbor. I mean, I’m kind to most people. I’m tolerant of people. I’m generally an agreeable person.  But being kind or tolerant or agreeable is not what love is. It’s a bit of it, perhaps, but only a very small bit.

My frustration is increased even more by the fact that I’m an introvert and avoid most people. I really don’t know a lot of people. By effect, I don’t really have many people to share this confusing thing called love. I mean, I guess, I can love people I don’t know in person, but that makes my problem even more complicated. How do I love people I have not seen or talked to? Do I end up just loving my conceptions of them, or can I really love them from afar? I know that we as the Church are one body, and distance is only some physical thing that is weak against our spiritual union. That is not my problem. My problem is that it’s hard to for me to separate abstract things from concrete things.

Last semester, just for fun, I read C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, and one of the things that I noticed is Professor Weston’s loyalty to humanity. This does not result in any goodness. As other characters from the book pointed out, Weston would happily sacrifice humans for the sake of this abstract concept of “humanity.” However, as Dr. Peter Kreeft said in one of his lectures. God doesn’t command us to love humanity. He commands us to love our neighbors. He doesn’t command us to love abstractions or concepts. He asks us to love real people with real faults and real value. He asks us to love each man and woman and child, not some vague idea in our mind of society. I was also reminded of this fact, of the need to love humans instead of humanity, when reading Centisimus Annus, or at least reading the first few paragraphs of it. John Paul II here over and over states that a big problem in modern society is that we tend to think of men as simply cogs in a machine, as simply parts of the State. That’s not what humans are according to God. According to God, each human being is someone made in His image, made with profound dignity, made so that one day he may share in the happiness and love of his Creator.

I don’t want to fall in that trap. Nice doesn’t cut it when you’re a Christian, and humanity has little value when you forget to value each human. Only love suffices and even overflows, and that I can only learn from God.

There are a few things which my classmates usually associate with me: one is that I’m Catholic and another is that I love G.K. Chesterton. The odd thing is I don’t really remember how exactly I came to know him. My hypothesis is that I was searching things about C.S. Lewis because I fell in love with Mere Christianity and found Chesterton as one of Lewis’ influence. I am currently trying to read more of his works, and I’ve read The Great Divorce and Till We Have Faces (which is absolutely amazing) and I’m trying to read The Problem of Pain and a recently bought book The Screwtape Letters. Because of these recent readings, I remembered an old quote by C.S. Lewis, “You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.”

A long time ago, when I first heard it, I thought it was really witty, but as I learned more theology, I came to realize that this quote is inaccurate. Now, C.S. Lewis is an amazing theologian and apologist, and I do not know the context of this quote, but as it is, the statement is false.

Humans are not angels. We are not spirits, and our bodies are much more than machines to be controlled. Some Christians, I think, consider the body as only an obstacle and would agree with C.S. Lewis. Christ, in the garden of Gethsemane, told his disciples, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). However, while it could be said that the body (especially our human bodies in this age) are weak, we cannot say that it is evil. Even with Jesus’s comment, we can notice that our material bodies are very connected to our souls. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, humans are “body and soul but truly one.” 

This emphasis of the unity of both material and spiritual in humans is one of the things which separate most Protestants and Catholics. Protestants seem to focus mainly on the soul and spirit of humans, and all faithful Catholics would agree that the soul is very important, “that which is of greatest value in him, that by which is most especially in God’s image” (CCC  363). The Catholic Church, however, also declares that the material body is also part of human nature, that “spirit and matter, in man are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature” (CCC 365).

Two things especially found in the Catholic Church and rare to see in Protestant churches are self-punishment and the sacraments. Self-punishment, especially with the release of The Da Vinci Code seems to be getting negative reactions, and that is understandable. Yet, this practice go to the earliest days of Christianity with the intention of not necessarily punishing the body, though it could be a sign of penance, but to discipline the body, a sort of spiritual work-out. Some might wonder how punishing the body might affect the spirit, but once again it goes back to the belief of the union of body and soul. The sacraments are one of the most positive signs of the belief that God knows the material and spiritual nature of humanity and so offers ways to lead man in its spiritual journey through material things. Man, being both material and spiritual, needs both material and spiritual things in his quest for God, and through the sacraments, both parts of the human nature is satisfied.

While I do not know Mr. Lewis’s intentions in this quote, it is very problematic to think of humans as souls and their bodies as machines. This was not what He intended. “[T]he Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). We are not spirits with bodies, but rather both body and soul.

Note: CCC is the Catechism of the Catholic Church

If heaven was as it is often pictorially presented, that is hanging out in clouds with a yellow circle above your head, playing a harp, and conversing with an old man, then I’d pass. If heaven is merely full of “togas and sandals and armour” as described by C.S. Lewis’s devil Screwtape, then I’d rather be in hell.

However, true Christianity knows that heaven is more than that. It is even more than the happiness we will receive from the beatific vision. Heaven is nothing less than perfect union with God, the discovering and fulfillment of what we all were made to be, pure and holy completeness as we participate in the Trinity. Earth is merely a hint toward the true nature of heaven, but it is a hint, and heaven is the final goal to which it points. 

So, dear artists and illustrators, rest reassured we Christians also believe that whoever wants harps and clouds to be the end of their life is largely misguided.  “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).