2022-09-15 A Meditation on the Body-Soul Divide

“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; steadfast love and faithfulness go before you. Blessed are the people who know the festal shout, who walk, O Lord, in the light of your face, who exult in your name all the day and in your righteousness are exalted. For you are the glory of their strength; by your favor our horn is exalted. For our shield belongs to the Lord, our king to the Holy One of Israel.” (Ps 89:14–18 ESV)

Amidst all the mystery about how we live and how we die, amidst the mystery of words spoken and what these do to our eternal soul, we can properly graduate ourselves unto the title of Spiritual Being. We are spiritual, and that is a mystery as it bears on the present but also on the future. Words we speak can fix up a wounded soul; words of faith, words of acceptance or rejection, words of repentance, words of assent unto Holy creed and cause.

This is a mystery, because we are an inner dynamo and spirit that is somehow contained in our bodies, in our mortal frame, yet beckons unto Eternity. Our spirit, properly nurtured by the Holy Spirit, is a step beyond first thoughts: first thoughts say, this spirit is divided apart from this body and the deeds done in the flesh. No, second thoughts start to realize that somehow the spirit is married to the body, and yet that with great forgiveness and second chances. It is married to a body in love with and addicted to passions or outlays of a material and fleshy sort. Amidst the hubbub is Eternity again, soul and body elevated unto that level of discourse wherein our Lord cannot quite look at us, so sinful we are, except that now He can indeed see us squarely in the eye, because His Son was just like us, and was just as ruined by sin, in His case, the Cross He bore for us.

So the spirit is healed by manifest, tangible, outlay. The enlisting for holy service in the camps of the Lord, is scorned by some, denounced by others, poo-pooed by a third, yet just may have given clarity and focus, a task for the day, a weary and joyful rest at each day’s end, a timeless, eternal affinity with so many soldiers who have gone before us, so depicted in art and film, so translated and transferred unto an eternal salute, an eternal kneeling before a Cross, before a King who serves as Leader now, Head of our country and our world, an eternal contribution and tithe of one’s very being and time. So the salute and the certainty that this day’s religion is of equal weight as any religion of time’s past; the good times were not umpteen years ago but are rather right now here and in front of us.

We study with hushed amazement the Puritan faith and the Awakening faith, the so-called church history, the warring times such as the Reformation, which is a history of souls meticulous, waiting, patient, quieted, sojourning, suffering, coupled, announcing a future Time when the merged spirit and body will be lifted up and rejoiced over in eternity, at an eternal feast. So we have put aside regrets and painful memories; we are wholly formed despite any and all wild seeking past after failure and sin; we speak because we love, expressing ourselves, or because not to speak is to do disservice to our own salvation certainty: “I believed, even when I spoke: “I am greatly afflicted”;” (Ps 116:10); “because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.” (Ro 10:9–10).

So to believe is no longer to worry to die, no longer to worry to be useful to loved ones, to celebrate over what the Lord has given us, serenading, singing, praying, and to stare down the enemy life has given us. Would that our enemies would translate unto us, and would cease to be at war; yet we are brave to know that fear of being in the Good Camp, that fear of success as much as of failure, that broken and peculiar frame called Who We Are. Some reason hosts our better outlays and our better contributions, yet it is the Lord who makes rhyme and reason of it all, who makes life so filled with mystery and wonder, yet so constrained and contained in a finite and mortal body. That mortal body has borne the message He wanted us to retain: that there is sin and righteousness, there is sin and mercy, there is hate and there is a Love that stands firm. Somehow, we are eternal.

Wild and wondrous thoughts aside, dwelling in two worlds now integrated, our fine thoughts of just who and with what we are in fellowship, brings us to appreciate and murmur thanksgiving just for the care of a friend, just for those sanity checks that speak to a soul tormented by the retaliating inimical spirit. So we puzzle and question our own deeds, yet also “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.” (Ps 127:2). We are satisfied and cast our burdens onto the Lord; we expect a counter-assault of demons, but our demonology understands, “I believe”; “Be gone, for I have with me God’s Spirit”; “I rely on Jesus”. Thus we allow all manner of mystery to be accomplished with a few expressions, words or prayers, mystery in our body-soul’s strong stand and our reassurance that the Holy Spirit is with us. Indeed, together we can stare down an army.