My sixty-five-year-old body increasingly reminds me of my age. For the past several months I limped around because my left side, from hip to ankle, has been hurting and dragging. For the first time in my life, walking and climbing stairs was painful. In retrospect and to my detriment, I probably never gave my body the attention it deserves. A parishioner recommended an eastern massage therapist to help me. While digging in to loosen scar tissue and break up adhesions the Chinese doctor softly said, “I know it hurts, but it must be this way.”
No pain, no gain…no guts, no glory…no cross, no crown…no crucifixion, then no resurrection. This, I understand. Our Christian faith, our health, our gamesmanship, and our very life is based on the notion that suffering brings redemption and that sacrifice can bring satisfaction or even sanctification. Saint John Paul II popularized a “Theology of the Body” by looking critically at the Judeo-Christian creation story and connecting it to our material form, physical development, emotional maturation, social and sexual relationships, marriage, and care for the body as the Temple of the Holy Spirit. Our bodies are a gift to us, even though Saint Paul and other theologians suggest that they are also a curse: the material cross we bear through earthly existence. Hence, it must be this way.
John Paul II claimed that the original scriptural issues of solitude, unity, and nakedness are foundational to our human and divine relationships. When young, we discover our bodies and all the abilities that we possess in them to maneuver through challenges. In adolescence, when hormones go wild and bodies gain form, we discover our sexual desires and develop greater physical prowess. John Mayer’s song, Your Body is a Wonderland, typifies that burgeoning stage when concupiscence and libido flourish. Great mystics suggest that we can transform this ardent longing into a passion that moves us from the physical to the spiritual—though even the most religious among us struggle with modesty, discretion, and abstinence while vacillating between the two. But age changes that. Many married couples that used to get sexually excited in the presence of their naked partner forty years earlier now, after surgical marks, titanium bones, sagging muscles, and balding or greying hair, point at each other’s body and laugh. It’s all part of the aging process and it, too, must be this way.
Though the church wants us to treat our body as the Temple of the Holy Spirit from childhood to old age—and it labels common practices like tattoos and body-piercings as objective moral evils, no less than manipulation of sperm and eggs or tampering with genetics—we are getting better at understanding how such applications can sometimes be honorable, though ethics struggles to keep up with medical and technological advances. Perhaps Robert Kennedy, Jr., who looks very good at seventy, can help as he takes the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services for our nation; he wants citizens to uphold the dignity of the body against many things that have led us to obesity, reliance on drugs, and general poor health. I hope that pragmatic and spiritual aspects of reverencing the body will increase as we give more attention to good practices that might make America healthy again. The societal pushback may hurt, but maybe it must be this way.
So, I accept that my body is diminishing, and that my brain might follow, while I attempt to fight or hold back the aging process as best I can for as long as I can with good nutrition and exercise, though often I feel as weak as Mr. Burns of The Simpsons. Meanwhile, periodically, I will lay on a table where a guy digs into my skin and massages my bones to help me feel a little better as he inflicts redemptive pain. Then I will get up and walk or limp into an uncertain future for me, the church, and society, knowing that it must be this way.
