Let’s Get Physical (in Prayer!)

A Reflection on the Second Reading for Sunday, January 14th, 2024:
Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

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1 Corinthians
6.13-15, 17-20 

​Brothers and sisters: The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power.

Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself.

Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.

​Pause. Pray. Reflect.

Bodies are handy. I sometimes wonder if angels, if they were capable of committing the sin of envy, would be envious of having bodies.

Sometimes we realize that we take our bodies for granted, but usually that means we forget that not everyone enjoys the same physical health or mobility that we do. But angels and demons remind us that having a body is not an essential element of being a living creature of God.

Now, I don't have time to get into a full Theology of the Body, and I think Saint John Paul II probably has more worthwhile insights on that than I do. But I have been giving some more thought recently about how to bring my prayer out of my head and into my hands, lips, mouth, and ears. We have ’em, we might as well use ’em to better offer Him praise and trust.

Saint Francis de Sales said that the best way to combat temptations to be spiritually depressed is to get hands-on and external with your devotions. “Use external acts of fervour,” he says in Introduction to the Devout Life. “Embrace your crucifix, clasp it to your breast, kiss the Feet and Hands of your Dear Lord, raise hands and eyes to Heaven, and cry out to God in loving, trustful ejaculations.” He recommends these, uh, “ejaculations” to be lines from Scripture, like Psalms or the Song of Songs. Hearing your own voice singing or saying sacred words can be powerful. The immediacy and intimacy of physical touch forces us into an encounter, and out of our sometimes daydreamy distance from Christ.

Likewise, if we're struggling with an immaterial sin, like say pride, it can be helpful to find a material penance. Like a cloud becoming ice, take something that’s impossible to pin down (and therefore, properly confront) and find a penance that is pure body, pure physical immediacy. In Dante's Divine Comedy, the souls experience “contrapasso” or “suffering the opposite.” In Purgatory, the souls atoning for pride carry heavy stones on their backs, forcing them into a constant humble, subservient bow. Voila, the intangible made very tangible. Much easier for our little brains to get the message. 

With Lent already barrelling around the corner, this has given me some food for thought for an appropriate act of penance. I’d say “unleash your inner medieval poet” but that could get a little gruesome. How about, “compose a psalm of penance” instead?

We got these bodies for a reason. Let’s use them the way the Cherubim only wish they could.




Kate Mosher

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