This winter has been a disaster. You may have noticed that my posts have become more sporadic here. The reason is really simple: I have spent about two weeks in bed between various colds and the flu.
Lying in bed half-awake, half-asleep unable to do anything, my humanity feels like an unbearable weight. I can only stare at the ceiling and hope the medicine works. I feel like a waste. I have all these gifts, I’m here in Rome studying and yet here I lie, useless.
It is hard to pray, I can barely even think of God. Yet somehow this is his will. My humanity is not something to hide from God; he came to save us here in this wretched state. So often we think the spiritual life is denying the body yet that’s heretical.
John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is often only applied to sexual morality but when I read it, I noticed that he is interested in the body as a sign for our whole life. “The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.” (TOB 19:4, pg. 203 in the Waldstein edition)
Our body is where we are holy. Our body is where we love God. We are our bodies and so too glorify God.
