By Sister Colleen O’Toole
What does the Assumption have to do with me? As I prayed with the readings for today, I was struck by the physicality and embodiment portrayed. So often, we reduce our faith to something intangible, something untouchable, as something set apart from our regular life. Many Catholics have a tendency, intentional or not, to divide the sacred and the secular, the body from the spirit. We internalize lines such as “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” and seek to control and suppress our physical selves in a variety of ways.
In the readings for today, bodies are placed front and center and are involved in sacred acts. We read of a woman who “wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth.” We see Mary travel to her cousin Elizabeth, and watch the infant leap in her womb. We learn of a God who works in a very physical, real way, as God uses the strength of his arm to scatter, to cast down, to lift up, to feed.
What does this tell us? I believe these readings are a powerful example to us that our bodies matter, that when we focus on the spiritual to the neglect of the physical, we are failing to come to God in our full humanity. God wants all of us, for God does not split us into pieces.
I have found this belief most clearly articulated and emulated in Black Catholic spirituality. For the past six years, I have been studying at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University in Louisiana. During my time there, I have been invited into a space where the body and the spirit are one. They are unified in worship, when we clap, sing, dance, and drum at prayer and liturgy. They are unified in theology classes, where we read Dr. M. Shawn Copeland’s work Knowing Christ Crucified, and learn to recognize Christ in the marginalized of today. The body and spirit are one in theological reflection, where we reflect on how we feel when God is close to us. And they are one in the various ministries we will return to as sisters, priests, and laypeople, where we understand that in order to hear the Good News, people’s physical needs must be met. It is not a choice between body and soul. One cannot exist without the other, and as Christians, we are called to take care of both. Jesus tells us, in Matthew 25, that we will be asked not how many prayers we said, but if we fed, clothed, and helped our neighbors. Our personal piety will mean nothing if we do not tend to our neighbors.
In class this summer we read narratives written by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Solomon Northup – all formerly enslaved people who wrote about their quests for freedom. Their stories starkly illustrate the division between body and spirit. In all their narratives, they describe enslavers who read the Bible, attended services, and prayed long prayers one minute, then beat and whipped the enslaved people they controlled the next, making a mockery of their Christianity. It made me stop and reflect on how I was living: is there a place in my life where my actions are out of line with my spiritual practices and beliefs? If someone were to read a story about my life, would they look at my faith with the same repugnance I view the Christianity of the enslavers?
But how, then, as Catholics, do we move from the realm of the spiritual into the realm of the physical? Toni Morrison, a Catholic, shows us how to do this in her work, Beloved. She gives the following words to Baby Suggs, a woman whose son bought her freedom from her enslavement. She tells the Black folks of Cincinnati, gathered in a clearing:
“Here in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs, flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it … You got to love it, you! … This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you … hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.”
A true love of one’s self gives strength and courage to live in a world where people often are treated as commodities. Loving yourself, just exactly as you are on this earth, can give you a greater ability to go out and love others, just as they are on this earth.
Let us not fall into the trap of holding spirit over flesh. Our Catholic tradition gives us significant examples of how interconnected our bodies and spirits are: Mary was assumed into heaven in body and soul, Jesus came to us in an earthly body, God appears to us today in the bodies of all those we meet, and we profess our belief in the resurrection of our bodies.
Can we allow ourselves to live a truly embodied faith, and value the lived realities of those around us?