Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

Questions and Answers

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?

Outline of the Answer
• Sexual Morality and the Body
• Purity of Soul and Body
• The Body as a Temple
• The Body’s Role in Our Salvation
• The Body Serves Love and Holiness

 
It’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:

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.

— 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.

Read a commentary by Saint Cyril of Alexandria about
transformation by the Holy Spirit

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.

 
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. 

Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God.

— 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.

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.

— 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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