This body of death

 A recording of today's reading and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel again was the subject of a reflection lastyear, so for today’s blog I turn to the first reading, taken from St Paul’s letter to the Romans (7: 18-25a).

Alongside St Paul’s discourse on love in the first letter to the Corinthians, this passage from Romans is one of the most iconic extracts from his correspondence with the early Church. And in various ways, it is a good counterbalance to it. 1 Corinthians 13 offers us a canticle to the supremacy of divine love, and the fundamental necessity that all other virtues must be filled with its spirit and animated by its power: the greatest of these is charity. The theme is not St Paul’s alone but St John’s also in his letters: we too, he says, have believed in love: et nos credidimus caritati, in the beautiful Latin of St Jerome’s Vulgate translation. The point of today’s passage from the Romans, however, is no longer to draw the reader heavenwards in ecstasy, but rather to show how, despite the miracle of our redemption and the marvels of our growing union with God, certain consequences of sin endure in our very selves.

This is shocking for us; it confuses us. We thought we were better than that! We thought we had left our old ways behind with all the empty promises of Satan; indeed, we say this every Easter Vigil at the renewal of our baptismal promises. But, as all the great spiritual masters observe, we need this knowledge, this reality check. It is, says St Teresa of Avila, the bread with which we should take all our spiritual nourishment.

Not all self-knowledge is painful. The first level of self-knowledge is the awareness of who we are as a creature before Almighty God. Raised to the status of His children by grace, we are, nevertheless, as nothing before His infinity, as grains of sterile sand before an ocean of fertile life.   He is He who is; we are they who are not, or at least not in any absolute sense. Our existence is contingent; we might never have been. We have survived this far, but the lives of most of us will have become a shadowy mystery almost before we are dead and gone, except in the mind of God. Some of us remain a mystery even in this life, ignored, unknown, unremarked, neglected by the surrounding world that is drunk of facetious self-absorption.

And yet God makes so much of us, dressing us in His gifts, blessings us with His gracious kindness, and caring for us in His mercy. Grace not only sanctifies but it elevates the human creature above anything it could have aspired to in nature. In other words, we must hold our littleness together with the knowledge of the dignity that He has given us. We owe it to the truth to acknowledge both the gulf between us and the loving bridges built by His hand.

But then comes the self-knowledge that Paul writes of today:

I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out … When I want to do good, evil lies close at hand.

Ovid, the pagan Roman poet, observed in himself a similar reality. Forgive just a little more Latin but it is so beautiful:

Video proboque meliora,

Deteriora sequor.                                                

I see and approve the better things but the worse things I follow.

It is St Teresa of Avila again who describes the snakes and venomous things that creep around the mansions of the heart, the distractions, attachments, and attraction towards sin that seems to lurk within us, despite our best efforts. St Thomas Aquinas speaks of these tendencies as wounds – and imagine what wounds were like in the pre-antibiotic medieval period – that afflict us even after the initial healing of grace: blindness in the intellect, malice in the will, weak resolution, and unregulated concupiscence in our emotional lives. As a result, we lack not only integrity but also integration; we are a frame filled with fragments that need to be brought to work together, but we are often so poorly coordinated.

There is, however, a divine pedagogy at work in our gradual restoration, an apprenticeship in healing. To become like Christ, we need to go on a journey, initially to the baptismal font. But beyond our passage through that spiritual Jordan, we are called to follow the Master in His peregrinations in life, His encounters with good and evil, His moments of joy, and perhaps also His hour of betrayal at the hands of those who claim to be friends; we must taste something of His sufferings in the spirit, but also of His growth in wisdom of which St Luke speaks tenderly, knowing all the while that the mystery of the Incarnation conceals from us the extraordinary illumination of Jesus’ soul by the beatific vision of the Blessed Trinity.

In other words, just as Jesus could have redeemed the world with a simple prayer, His prayers being of infinite value, it would have been possible for Him simply to transform every one of us by some instant miracle of grace at baptism. But since He chose another path to undo the work of sin-the rocky road to Calvary-so we too are called to undertake that journey with Him. Where the Master is, there must be the servant also. Where are you going, Lord? said St Peter who, during his flight from persecution in Rome, had a vision of His Saviour. I am going to Rome to be crucified again, was the reply. And, hearing these words, St Peter turned tail and ran once more – only this time towards the cross that awaited him. St Augustine sees the battle against our evil tendencies as a punishment and test, but we may go further. Our endurance of weakness reminds us of how low Christ brought Himself to redeem us and it confirms for us our utter dependence on Him.

What a challenge lies before us then, not only to fight the weaknesses we are aware of but, also, let us add, to discern little by little the weaknesses of our shadow selves, the people we are in our unconscious minds, the exiles in us who have fled to the margins, protected only by our noisier, angrier parts who hardly remember their own purpose. Our woundedness is not simple; we are compromised and made complex by experience, the things our heart hides away from our memories out of self-protection. We are a tangle of stories in search of a happy ending, wishing too often the final resolution without the bitter trial that lies between. It is time, my friends, to grow up. It is time to face ourselves.

There is a worse side to our fragile selves, and this is what St Paul confronts in today’s reading. But then there is the hidden side too which only the grace of God, wise counsel, deep work, and careful searching in prayer, can bring back to a state of health and life.

Who, St Paul asks, will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.