Understand the "And"

by Bud Macfarlane

In the movie, "The Passion of the Christ," we are graphically reminded that Jesus took on flesh—that He had a body—and of the suffering he endured in his flesh.

You have a body. That might seem obvious, but follow along with me for a bit. Pinch your belly right now and you will feel it. Understand that you cannot even read this without your physical eyeballs and without your brain noodles to process the images you see on this screen. Your hand is touching the mouse, after all. What I am asking you to do is dwell carefully on the fact that you are not a nebulous "mind" taking in information right now, but a human being with a body and soul.

FLOUR AND WATER
Okay, you have a body. I hope you're a bit more aware of it right now. You may not be as aware that you also are body and soul—that a human being cannot exist as a body without a soul. Imagine a corpse. Have you ever been to a wake with an open casket? You did not see a body, really. You saw a dead body. That is why we have a whole different word for it: corpse. A body without a soul is a corpse that will soon decay and disappear. A corpse cannot read this article on the Net, even if you pin its eyelids open and prop up its limbs before the screen.

So, for you to exist, you must be body and soul. But even to use two different words, "body" and "soul" can lead us to a false understanding of reality. Your body and soul are one entity. That "and" between "body and soul" is more than just a "salt and pepper" connection. That and represents a unity, a oneness. It's much more like the "and" between "flour and water make dough." Dough cannot exist without that "and," and you certainly can't exist on earth without the and between your body and soul.

MESSING WITH THE AND
The great modern heresies—which are just riffs off the old satanic pagan heresies—almost all come down to proposing a false separation between our body and soul. They start messing with the "and."

The bad guys want you to think that you can treat your body like it's not connected to your soul—as if it were an appliance. Isn't that how pro-abortion folks come across—portraying the unborn baby as if he or she were merely a soul-less glob of tissue while trying to convince a desperate mother that her body is nothing more than a storage container? Your living body is not an "it." A living body is a person. You will not become immortal in some far off future. You are immortal right now, in your body, as a body with a soul. At your death, your soul will act as a kind of template for your full self until you are given a new body. As Saint Thomas Aquinas said, "my soul is not I." In heaven or hell, you receive a new body. This is precisely why we say in the Creed: "We believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting." This is why a sinless Mary was assumed into heaven, body and soul. Preserved from Original Sin, Mary's body was not subject to death—one of Original Sin's punishments.

I EAT PIZZA, THEREFORE I AM
In modern times, the philosopher Des cartes got the ball rolling with the silly notion that there is some kind of separation between body and soul (mind). He asserted, "I think, therefore I am." He had it backwards. You are (because you have a body), therefore you think (because your body is ensouled—not a corpse). You can't merely "think" and then be. You have to be before you can think. I'm no philosopher, but even I know that "I am, therefore I think."

That's pretty obvious to us non-philosophers with back-aches and body odor and a love for pizza. (Try enjoying pizza without your body!)

Early heresies attacked Jesus' nature as body and soul. Some wanted to teach that Jesus was not a real human being because they thought, wrongly, that He was just God inhabiting a body, sort of like a flesh-puppet. Or, the early heretics said Jesus could not be God because an infinite God could not exist in a finite body. By rising from the dead, Jesus showed that He was God, not just a man who claimed He was God. Saint Thomas didn't stick his hands into the wounds of a 3-D holograph.

They even objected to calling Mary the Mother of God because of the heresy of Messing with the And. They claimed Our Lady was merely the Mother of Jesus, not the Mother of God. But she didn't give birth to a zombie baby which God was "occupying." Mary gave birth to a little human boy who had the two natures of God and man.

JESUS HAD DNA
Yes, Jesus was a little baby once. Before Christmas, He was a fetus in Mary's womb—literally abiding in her flesh, having taken his DNA structure from her, and until his birth, taking in nourishment from her blood, his tiny heart beating beneath her Immaculate heart.

I'm not trying to be overly-profound here. Just the opposite. Modern heretics, filled with pride, are always trying to "demystify" everything. Catholics need to "re-Mystify." Tell me, exactly what do we really understand completely? We barely understand ourselves. Humility is the great teacher. Much as I love pizza, I can't claim to understand it. People often mistakenly believe that profound things are always "ideas." Yes, it's true: love is an idea, and a profound one at that. But you can't love without your body any more than you can read this without your eyeballs. Jesus loves you in His body. Those were His real lungs sucking in air for the first time in that manger on the day He was born.

Jesus has a body right now, just like you do. If you were in heaven with Him, you could pinch Him or even tickle Him. You could touch your finger to the perspiration on His brow.

AS WE CATHOLICS SAY
Or, if you wish, you can eat his flesh at any Catholic Mass (Jesus used the Aramaic word for "chew" in John 6). Do you see it yet? The beauty of it. The mystery of it? Because you are body and soul, and because Jesus had a body, you can take Him into your body. You can consume Jesus! This is real. This is intimate. This is your flesh and His flesh. This is union. The next time you go to Mass, especially at Christmas Mass, remind yourself of this reality. That you are not merely a "mind," and because you exist in a body, you can have union with Christ—body, blood, soul, and divinity, as we Catholics say and say so well.

It's the kind of union you can chew. The and between "me and Jesus" becomes so close when we receive Holy Communion that our digestive systems can't even tell the difference between where He begins and we end.

Tickling the Mystery
This is the Great Mystery: that God became Man. The heretics were trying and still try to dispatch with the mystery but always end up throwing out the baby with the bath water. The reality is, both existed: the baby Jesus and the bath water in which His tiny little body was cleansed. Mary knows this. On her lap, He weighed no more than a laptop. Jesus was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone—and smile of her smile, as she tickled Him and dried Him and held Him up to her breast to feed him. So eventually He could feed us.

We don't need to understand it completely. And we can't understand it the way we understand lunch boxes or lawn mowers. But we can believe and accept that the Mystery is true without requiring full intellectual understanding. The heretic's big mistake is almost always to attempt to explain away the best parts—the mysterious parts. Accept the Mystery. Accept that you can't understand all of it. Accept that you can understand some of it through Divine Revelation, grace, and reason.

This is what the theologians call assenting to truth by transcending what we can't fully understand through faith. Fair enough, and true enough. But sometimes I'd rather think of it as a Mystery Who we can eat.

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Bud Macfarlane, founder of CatholiCity.com and the Mary Foundation, is the author of three bestselling Catholic novels, available free of charge from Saint Jude Media. You can comment on his articles here.