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What
does “the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit” mean, and how
does this relate to your ideas about chastity and human sexuality?
 t’s fitting that you should
ask this question on the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, the “Body of
Christ.”
Sexual Morality
and the Body
In his first letter to the
Corinthians, Saint Paul responds to reports of sexual immorality in the church
at Corinth. He specifically uses the example of prostitution, which, in Corinth
at the time, would have been both heterosexual and homosexual. Paul’s
preaching about sexual morality (1 Corinthians 6:12–20) points
to the fact that, whereas most sins are “outside
the body”—that is, they are offenses against charity to other
persons—sexual sins are also sins against one’s own body. Paul
reminds the Corinthians here that they are “members of Christ”
and tells them the following:
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You must know
that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is within—the Spirit
you have received from God. You are not your own. You have been
purchased, and at a price. So glorify God in your
body. |
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— 1 Corinthians
6:19–20 |
Purity of Soul
and Body
This is profound theology. It
tells us that Christianity is not a matter of abstract spiritual knowledge
or esoteric enlightenment; instead, Christian life fully involves purity
of both soul and body. And it explains why genuine Christian
mysticism is not about out-of-the-body experiences.
After all, Christ was born in a body, He died in His body, and He was resurrected
in His body. And He left us His Body and Blood—really, truly, and
physically—to nourish us during the hard work of our
salvation.
The Body as a
Temple
But where, you might wonder,
does the idea that the body is a “temple” come from?
It comes from Christ himself.
All four Gospels recount the same story of The Cleansing of the Temple
(Matthew 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–17; Luke 19:45–46; John
2:13–17) when Christ overturned the tables of the money changers and
merchants, proclaiming, “My house shall be a house of prayer, but you
have made it a den of thieves.” When asked for a “sign” He
could offer for doing this, Jesus replied, “Destroy this temple and
in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19).
The Body’s
Role in Our Salvation
Thus, in demanding both spiritual
and physical cleanliness in the temple, and in promising the resurrection
of the body as justification for demanding that cleanliness, Christ shows
us that our physical bodies play a key role in our salvation. Joined to Christ
in the saving grace of Baptism we become
part of Him, “members of Christ,” the true Temple itself. And at
Confirmation, when we receive the Holy Spirit, who dwells in our bodies
to teach us prayer, we become “temples”
of the Holy Spirit. And in the
Eucharist we receive Christ’s real
Body and Blood to feed our real bodies and strengthen our spirits.
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In the 1960s
the hippie movement seemingly brought a sense of
spirituality into the world. But, grounded in its
protest of social
hypocrisy, it really did no more than incite
us to an adoration of pure physiology cut adrift from all moral guidance.
It began with the naive promise that the
emptiness of life could be filled with psychedelic
drugs, mind-numbing music, and free sex, and it led
to rampant divorce and abortion on demand. In the end, the hippie movement
shows, through its lingering effects in our culture today, that spirituality,
when divorced from religion, is mere psychobabble.
And it leaves the body in a moral wasteland. |
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The Body Serves
Love and Holiness
This all means that we were not
created to serve our own worldly desires—or the “lusts of the
flesh,” as Saint Paul calls them. We were created to share in God’s
love. And so, in Christ, we are all called to serve
God’s will in holiness, and, once accepting that call, we must have
our lives overturned and our temples cleansed in
baptism.
And we must keep ourselves clean
and chaste, morally and physically. And so our hearts, the center of our
body, must be pure.
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Blessed are the
clean of heart, for they will see God. |
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— Matthew 5:8 |
Our bodies are meant to
be chaste and modest temples of the Holy Spirit
so that we can relate to others through our hearts with true love.
Our bodies are not meant to be made into instruments of social acceptance,
expressions of vanity and pride, or provocations
to
lust.[1]
Our bodies are not meant to be covered with the graffiti of tattoos (Leviticus
19:28), or made into works of “art” with piercings, hair dye, gaudy
make up, and hostile punk hair styles. Nor are our bodies meant to be defiled
by making our reproductive organs into the equipment of a recreational
sport.
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Sin must not
reign over your mortal bodies so that you obey their desires. And do not
present the parts of your bodies to sin as weapons for wickedness, but present
yourselves to God as raised from the dead to life and the parts of your bodies
to God as weapons for righteousness. |
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— Romans 6:12–13 |
Therefore, our bodies are meant
for holiness in Christ, and in Christ we are not our own; we belong to Christ,
soul and body, so that, having died with Him in baptism, we can rise
with Him in the resurrection of the body.
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1. Modest clothing should cover the body with
dignity rather than reveal the body. In this context, clothing can be revealing
either because it is tight-fitting (e.g., our culturally ubiquitous jeans)
or because it exposes bare flesh. Just because certain styles of clothing
may be culturally accepted does not prevent them from being an offense to
the holiness we pledged in our baptismal vows. If
you follow what is popular according to the secular culture around you, then
be prepared to end up where all secular culture ends up—eternally separated
from all holiness, lost and without hope in the darkness of
hell.
  
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Read a commentary by Saint
Cyril of Alexandria about
