Flannery O’Connor was a devout Catholic Christian who no mercy on those who preached what she once labeled “Pious Crap.” Sometimes, that might even mean poking fun at the ways in which a truth is held or rejected. One truth she clearly held is:
The body is the temple of the Holy Ghost.
She wrote a short story titled, appropriately enough, A Temple of the Holy Ghost. In that story, two girls from a Catholic school, Temple One and Temple Two as they called each other, came to visit, putting on red skirts and loud blouses and lipstick as soon as they unpacked their suitcases. Soon enough, they were being courted by young fellows who sang to them:
I’ve got a friend in Jesus,
He’s everything to me, …
To which the young women responded:
Tantum ergo Sacramentum
Veneremur Cernui: …
Temple One and Temple Two seemed to be doing their best to become sluts to the disgust of the slightly younger girl who seemed to be something like Miss O’Connor. At least as she perceived herself. But the young girl wasn’t disgusted for reasons of some sort of religious purity. She was simply disgusted that the two young women were…so stupid. And the two young men were also so stupid. Everyone was so stupid, some for rejecting the great truths, some for showing no understanding of what the great truths really meant.
In Flannery O’Connor Was a Pretty Good Thomistic Philosopher, I quoted her from a letter found on page 953 of the Library of America collection of her writings:
To see Christ as God and man is probably no more difficult today than it has always been, even if today there seem to be more reasons to doubt. For you it may be a matter of not being able to accept what you call a suspension of the laws of the flesh and the physical, but for my part I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and the physical really are, then I will know what God is. We know them as we see them, not as God sees them. For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of those laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. I have always thought that purity was the most mysterious of the virtues, but it occurs to me that it would never have entered the human consciousness to conceive of purity if we were not to look forward to a resurrection of the body, which will be flesh and spirit united in peace, in the way they were in Christ. The resurrection of Christ seems the high point in the law of nature.
If we “know what the laws of the flesh and the physical really are, then [we] will know what God is.”
We Christians often take on the practices of disciplining the body found in the writings or traditions which come from the early Christian Fathers or from the monks of succeeding centuries, but we misinterpret them, choosing to talk and act as if we discipline the body because it’s something that came from the Devil and must be beaten into submission that it not gain domination over our better, more spiritual part.
Baloney.
I should discipline my body because it is me. Other parts of me form, call them ‘mind’ or ‘soul’ if you will, as I interact with what lies around me and, by doing so, interact with He who lies deep within me as well as deep within all that lies around me.
My body is me as a moral agent. If I wish to try to save a child in danger at risk to myself, I must have a body disciplined (sometimes naturally inclined) to override its own instinctive movements towards safety or at least not into danger. If I — in particular — am to sit quietly in contemplative prayer or trying to put together a difficult scene in a novel or a complex line of philosophical thought, I must discipline my body to sit still. It won’t always work, but I have to work to increase the chances of success.
We discipline our bodies, our very selves, by holding to good routines in our daily schedules. We exercise properly. We don’t baby ourselves — too much — when it comes to cold or other discomforts, though we should take proper care of ourselves. We fast.
Fasting. A complex topic. The Catholic Church in this day has squishy soft standards for fasting — typically, a complete but modest meal and two smaller meals. Some exercise gurus and health experts recommend tougher standards and more often than twice a year — Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are the only fast days on the calendar of the Catholic Church as of 2011. I knew some in California who would go on regular fasts to purge their bodies of various poisons we take in with each breath and with many a bite of food. A typical diet, circa 1978 might have been a day or more of only clear liquids, such as clear vegetable broth, with maybe a day or two before or after of very light eating.
Now some scientist confirm that Routine Periodic Fasting Is Good for Your Health, and Your Heart, Study Suggests. Interesting, but hardly surprising and probably not established beyond reasonable doubt in the way of peer-reviewed science.
Maybe we Christians should think in these terms, that is, of our duty to God to purify the temple of the Holy Ghost. Junk builds up on those walls and floors inside.
Good for your health, and your heart. Good for your moral character, and your soul. I guess that makes fasting a pretty good thing. If only it were easier to do good things which leave us feeling uncomfortable. But that’s the point of it all. To learn how to overcome the reluctance to feel discomfort as I have to at the beginning of running season. At the end of winter, I try to get back to a regular running schedule and find myself in bad shape. Worse than that, I can’t even reach the limits of a badly conditioned body because I have to relearn how to calmly take the next breath into struggling winterized lungs and have to tell those winterized legs to keep going because the discomfort is a sign of good things happening.
If I could fast properly, it might be easier to run or to start running in late winter if only because I’d be a few pounds lighter. But I’d also be better disciplined to endure a small but ongoing amount of discomfort.
I think it is not so much a more important matter as it is a different important matter to fast properly that it might be easier to pray, that I might better help others and might be better prepared to follow the Lord Jesus Christ even when that way leads through suffering or an early death.