Title: Self and Christian Living
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Blog Entry: Following Christ is a way of finding oneself. God always reaches to us (Samuel's calling and Jesus recruiting His first disciples in today's reading). Yet there is always an attitude of listening involved; listening with body and soul. This is the way we are called to make, to connect with God as human beings. It is in this context of our possible connections with God as bodily beings, that Paul in the second reading speaks against the commercialisation and objectification of the body. it is through our bodies that we relate to God spiritually. But our body, as St Paul is suggesting, can also serve as a blockage in all this. Creating boundaries between soul and flesh, (the spiritual and the material; God's calling and the desire to be ourselves) is not strictly speaking the Christian way of seeing things. When paul speaks of the body not being meant for fornication, he is affirming the golden rule that whenever and in whatever we envisage the body to an end in itself, all sorts of distortions follow. Affirming with Paul that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit opens wide open the doors towards authenticity, which brings serenity and equilibrium in our lives and offers safeguards agains all the possible distortions of our humanity. We turn only inward to connect and relate ourselves to God because it is to Him that we belong, and the more we seek to own ourselves the less we find our true self.
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