Catechism of the Catholic Church, 365 The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.
I remember once talking to a friend about a time when I felt suicidal. I was taking a university course on Modern European History,1900-1945. I was being bombarded every single day with the horrors of European history – two world wars, Nazism, Fascism, Communism, new and innovative ways of killing, the horrible deception of bringing innocents onto the battlefield to fight for imaginary valor and values, the senselessness of it all – and it had started to get to me. I remember laying on my bed, staring at the wall, wondering what the point of it all was. If human beings were capable of this sheer amount and concentration of horror, violence, and atrocity – why be here at all? Why even be a part of it?
This wasn’t the first time I had felt suicidal – I have a memory from when I was a teenager, of holding a large number of pills in my hand, considering whether I should take them. In my mid-20s, I forced myself to get online and talk to someone in order to keep from harming myself. These moments were the result of the nihilism and self-hatred instilled in me due to my upbringing, and not related to anything outside of myself, like man’s inhumanity to man. For reasons I can’t explain, I ended up not actually taking action at those times. I just knew it wasn’t something I shouldn’t actually do, no matter how much I felt like it at the moment.
But with this particular incident, which happened in my mid-thirties, I was better able to delineate what I was feeling and why. It wasn’t that I really wanted to die – I just wanted to be oblivious to these awful feelings, these awful realities. And something else, something new, had occurred to me then as well. The awareness quietly flooded into my mind that my body was its own being, that it had a right to live, and that that right had nothing to do with me or what I wanted. I felt very strongly that it would actually be wrong for me to kill it, just because I personally was having trouble coping with life. I was aware of my body as being a unique living organism, whose life was to be respected and cared for apart from myself, and that it was healthy and vibrant and in the midst of untrammeled life, and I essentially had no right to kill it. And that realization cleanly ended all my thoughts of suicide forthwith.
So, during a time when I had dropped out of RCIA because I couldn’t intellectually square Catholicism with what I already knew, and I wasn’t yet willing to allow aspects of myself other than intellect to take their rightful place there, I was recounting this episode to a friend. And when I told this friend about what I had realized about my body, that it had a life of its own which I had no right to take, and so suicide wasn’t an option, he remarked that this was a very Catholic way of thinking. That was one of the moments that made me question my decision to drop out of RCIA, that maybe there was something to being Catholic that wasn’t exclusively to be found in intellectual comprehension and consistency.
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One of the things I have loved about Catholicism is the valuing of the physical body – from the crucifix to the Eucharist, from the statues and relics to the rites and prescriptions for fasting, the physical body is not something to be minimized and forgotten about, but to be enthusiastically included in a spiritual and holy life. As someone who deeply appreciates beauty and sense pleasures, and who also seeks meaning and unity in everyday acts, the fact that the Church uses physically-manifested aspects such as beauty, pleasure, attraction, and desire as tools to bring us closer to God and closer to each other is something that deeply resonates with me. I experience it as extremely life-affirming and holistic. When I am at a non-Catholic church, seeing the empty crosses everywhere, lacking Jesus’ body – it makes me feel sad and empty. The fact that he gave up his BODY is what makes all this possible – why should we discreetly tuck his body away from our sight?
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I have had a complicated relationship with my own body. I was raised by a mother who had severe self-hatred of herself and her body, and, as usually happens that got injected into me, the oldest child. This sense of self-hatred and low self-esteem led me into situations as a teenager and a young woman that further degraded my body and my sense of myself, and this of course led to further twistedness in mind and heart, which I’ve had to wrestle with and heal. Cultural messages, too, that our bodies are insufficient unless they conform to some imaginary standard, and that it is okay and even desirable to objectify people and their bodies for our own pleasure – these also have impacted my ability to have a healthy relationship and appreciation of my body. And for all this, I find solace in the Church. As I stood up in front of the congregation last weekend with my candidate at the Rite of Sending, with my body essentially on display, I was aware that I was in a place where my body was seen as having inherent dignity, not as a tool for the pleasure of others, nor the judgement of others, but as a pure creation of God, with its own inherent value and worth that has nothing to do with its conformity to an ideal or what it can do for anyone else. Sadly, I also thought of the children who were sexually abused by priests, that their bodies should have been given this dignity and safety too, but instead they were harmed in one of the worst possible ways, in a place where they should have been the most safe. I hope those people, and everyone else who has ever been physically or sexually abused, can partake of the kind of healing I experience when the members of the Church are truly acting according to its teachings. I can’t think of anywhere else where such an experience is possible, and for that I am incredibly grateful.
On Becoming Catholic 