Many centuries ago, Plato expressed a philosophical idea that has repercussions even to this day. In Plato’s Phaedo, he tells us that the soul is imprisoned in the body.
For Plato, and many people today, the human person has two separate parts and this concept is known as Plato’s dualism. It states that our souls are noble and spiritual and lead us higher up. Our bodies are material and sinful and drag us down.
It is true that in daily life, we feel bodily temptations to overindulge in pleasures. It certainly feels that our souls are weighed down by our bodies, and if we could just free ourselves from material needs, then at last, we would become a saint.
While this may seem right, it is not.
We do not need to beat our bodies into submission to free ourselves more and more from what it means to be human.
Our soul is not in a bodily prison, rather our bodies are “spiritualized” by our soul. Consider the things that make us human:
o We don’t just talk, we sing.
o We don’t just eat, we share delightful meals.
o We don’t just build shelters, we build homes and decorate them.
o We love one another in sacrificial ways.
o We are romantics and poets, artisans and free-spirited adventurers.
The people of Nazareth could not conceive of a Messiah that was as “human” as they were. Thankfully, in God’s plan of salvation, our bodies are to come along with our souls on the journey of holiness. One does not hinder the other, but both carry each other. This is the miracle of being human and it is a gift from God.
Despite God’s omnipotence, there are a few things God has chosen not to be able to do:
· God can’t force us to love him.
· God can’t force us to trust him.
These are two gifts that only we can give him. And so often we refuse him these gifts! Trust in God is the “Yes” God needs in order to perform his miracles in our modern world.
There are three special virtues that we as Christians can lay claim to. They are called theological virtues because they come from God himself (God = Theos). They are faith, hope, and love.
Hope is often misunderstood. At first glance, it may not seem like something spiritual at all. We hear people say all the time phrases such as: “I hope my team wins” or “I hope I win the lottery”.
One way to understand hope is to recognize that it transforms and heals our past so that we can look towards the future with joy.
We often may say that a person might have “baggage from the past”. If you have baggage from the past, it means that something bad that happened yesterday is negatively conditioning your today and tomorrow. You see the future through the lens of the past hurts.
The people of Nazareth could not let go of the past. They knew Jesus too well and had to let go of what they thought they knew about him. They couldn’t see Jesus as the Messiah because of the false understanding they held onto about what the Messiah would look like and what he would do. As such, this inability to see their present and future through a different lens made them reject the Messiah!
Through baptism and by the sacrament of reconciliation, we receive an inpouring of transformative grace. If we allow Christ to heal these past hurts, we are then freed from the past and able to look to the future now through a different lens: that of God!
Hope is therefore being prophetic. Did not the prophets look to the future through the eyes of God, and then deliver these prophetic visions to their fellow man?
If being a prophet means seeing the future through God’s eyes, then every baptized Christian who allows the theological virtue of hope to be operative in their life can hope to be in their own way and in their own circumstances, a true prophetic witness for Christ.
If, like me, you were raised in the church and have always attended, you have the advantage of understanding and living a life of grace from the “cradle to the grave”. But there could be a few potential issues to deal with.
For example, you have probably never had a moment of choosing on a personal level to make religion and faith a part of their life. You may never have experienced being “far from the Father’s House”, and you might therefore undervalues what it means to “be in the Father’s house”. You might have lots of church traditions that are the backdrop to your life but are not an intentional part of your life. And you might not be “wowed” by learning about the faith because it always just seemed to make sense.
So, what can a “cradle to grave Christian” do to avoid being “bored” or “overly familiar” with Jesus? Here are some practical things all of us should do:
Firstly, we have to meet Jesus anew each day. Go to him in prayer as if you’ve never encountered him before.
Secondly, we must routinely stand before God alone, with our individual uniqueness, and decide for ourselves that Jesus is our Lord and Saviour.
Thirdly, all of us should go on a retreat or pilgrimage so as to experience “something new” and finally, we should make sure to spread our faith, by talking about it, and sharing it.
