"When I Fast, I Fast. And When I Eat Pizza, I EAT PIZZA!"

Last night I woke up a little before 2 a.m., and decided to hit the fridge for a couple of pieces of the kids' left over pizza.  Like millions of others yesterday, I had joined Pope Francis in fasting and praying for peace throughout the world, and especially in Syria.  And I'll tell ya, after a good fast, Little Caesar's pizza had never tasted better!  As I sincerely thanked God for such delicious food, I recalled a story from Christopher West's At the Heart of the Gospel:

Teresa of Avila (one of the saints I most admire) was once caught by her sisters, in the middle of the night, scarfing down partridge.  Seeing the shocked looks on their faces their holy mother responded, "When I fast, I fast; and when I eat partridge, I eat partridge!"  It's a great lesson on why we Christians fast.  It isn't that food or our bodily appetites are "bad," or "sinful."  Rather, for a limited time, we seek the fulfillment of an even deeper hunger.  In yesterday's fast we expressed to God our hunger for peace in the world. 

I don't know how many of us practice fasting, except on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday.  I've hardly ever done it.  When I began researching the prayer life of Jesus a few years back, and His teaching on prayer, I recognized that I was called - that all of us are called - to unite fasting to our prayer for great needs.  It was Jesus' practice; and in God's providence, it is a prerequisite for His release of certain graces.  Kudos to Pope Francis for bringing it into our prayers for peace!

Just don't let anyone get the wrong impression that we Catholics frown upon the feast.  We love to feast!  We've just found that the food tastes that much better after a day of prayer and fasting! 

0.34 Seconds - That's All It Takes

0.34 Seconds - the time it takes to blink your eye; that's as quickly as everything can change for the better.  When I prayed the Rosary this morning, I meditated on Jesus' Resurrection, putting myself in his tomb.  One second He was there, wrapped in His shroud.  And in the next second, with a brilliant flash of light, the shroud lay flat on the stone slab; He was gone.  That's how quickly God can change defeat into victory.  

We have little glimpses of this throughout life.  Think of those times when the phone has rang with a surprise invitation, or you ran into someone you hadn't seen in months; or you got an email out of the blue.  One moment everything was moving along as ho-hum as usual and then boom - you're like a rocket shooting into the stratosphere.  Life is not just one long struggle, carrying the Cross up Calvary; it's also shot through with these experiences of the Resurrection -and we never know when the Lord will surprise us next.

What we know for sure is that each second brings us closer to that instant when "we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.  For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed" (1 Cor. 15:51-52).

Christopher West's "At The Heart of the Gospel"

I remember the discussion I had with my friend Michael in the summer of 2009 when, following a story on ABC's Nightline, criticism of Christopher West was coming fast and furious.  Both of us had really benefited from West's work, so it disturbed us to read comments on the internet like, "West is leading people into dangerous waters . . . He isn't doing justice to John Paul II's Theology of the Body . . . West is not taking into account the incredible strength of concupiscence, and his readers and listeners are going to be caught off-guard."  As I talked with Michael, the most intense lover of the Carmelites I've ever met, the conviction emerged that West's critics were not accounting for the spiritual theology of one of the Church's great Doctors, the Carmelite's St. John of the Cross.  West's critics appeared comfortable teaching that Jesus could empower people to overcome any sin - racism, alcoholism, the hunger for revenge, etc. -and actually live as blazing examples of those sins' opposing virtues . . . except for when it came to living a real, sustained victory over lust.  In that one area we seemed forever doomed to live on a precipice.  West on the other hand seemed to completely embrace St. John's teaching that God can bring us into a transforming union with Him, one that allows us to conquer temptations and take on the image of Christ, albeit with some slight imperfections, even in this life!  Jesus' desire is to brings healing and wholeness to the whole person - and sexuality is an integral part of who we are as human beings."I have come that they may have life and have it to the full" (Jn.10:10). 

Christopher West

So imagine my excitement when I saw the title of Christopher West's new book, At the Heart of the Gospel: Reclaiming the Body for the New Evangelization.  Does West answer his critics?  Yes, and with a tremendous amount of charity.  Hats off to him for taking those criticisms to prayer, reflecting upon them, and emerging with an even stronger presentation of Theology of the Body (TOB hereafter) to show for it.  Throughout this new book he anchors his explanation of TOB with quotations from John Paul II's text as well as Scripture and the Catechism.  He supports his points with TOB commentary from theological heavy weights like Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) and Dr. Michael Waldstein (who in 2006, made the new, critical translation of John Paul's TOB), and offers supporting insights from bedrocks of orthodoxy such as Fulton J. Sheen.  I have absolutely no doubts that what West gives readers is a completely faithful presentation of John Paul's thought, accessible to today's culture.

Christopher West does a masterful job of teaching us the true value of the body within Christian Faith.  As much as the world around us - and even our own poor catechesis - would like to characterize Christianity as souls seeking release from sinful flesh, nothing could be further from the truth.  The great scandal of Christianity - as opposed to the Platonism of the Greeks, or the Cartesian duality of today - is the conviction that God not only descended into human flesh but, through the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, has raised it to literally unimaginable heights.  The goal, the victory, we Christians await is not our souls' liberation from the body and the spiritual experience of heaven, but the glorification of both soul and body on the day Christ brings heaven to earth!

I did find myself taken aback at several points in the book - not from anything irreverent or immodest on West's part, but by the depth of the Holy Father's reflection.  Allow me to site one example: the Holy Father's vision of marriage as the "primordial sacrament" (TOB 97:2).  Prior to humanity's fall, John Paul sees marriage acting as an "efficacious sign," communicating divine life (TOB 19:4).  The union of man and woman, and the new life that flowed from it, was an anticipation of the union to be achieved by Jesus and His redeemed Church, His Bride (Eph.5:31-32), and the supernatural life that would come into the world through it.

And the "transforming union" Michael and I discussed so many moons ago?  Oh, it's here - in spades. West quotes from John Paul II (TOB 43:6), showing the Holy Father's complete agreement with St. John of the Cross that we can experience a "liberation of our hearts from 'concupiscence,'" a true transformation of our desires.  (The Holy Father's agreement with St. John isn't surprising considering that he was the subject of JPII's 1948 doctoral thesis!)  But like John of the Cross, the Holy Father and West insist that the purity of heart Jesus spoke of in the Beatitudes (Mt.5:8) comes only after  many purifications and dark nights.  We should not overestimate our strength or progress in the spiritual life.  For the vast, vast majority of us, periodic "custody of the eyes" will be a necessary safeguard to looking upon someone of the opposite sex with lust for a good, long while.  But we are called to transformation.  We are journeying toward looking at others with the very eyes and mind of Christ - that's the Beatitudes, that's the Sermon on the Mount.  And the Lord wouldn't issue the call unless it were a real possibility!  The question is, how serious are we about achieving it?

Looking back at what I've written so far, I recognize that my words have not, and in my opinion cannot, do justice to the depth of this book.  I already have a list of friends to whom I plan to loan it.  If you are ready to see yourself, marriage, reality, to see the Catholic Faith through a new set of eyes, then click this link:
 

Why am I Getting in Shape? T.A.

That's right, Thomas Aquinas. I've meant to write this post since I started blogging and just never seemed to get to it. I started reading Aquinas just before Easter though, and he inspired me to get up on that exercise horse again - and stay with it for over three months now. What did Thomas remind me of? Hylomorphism.

Aquinas borrowed Aristotle's description of human nature, a composite of body and spirit. It's not that we are souls in bodies; we are souls and bodies. (Why else will Jesus reunite our souls and bodies when He comes again? The souls in Heaven, even though united to God, are still "incomplete" - still not the finished product God has planned!) And hylomorphism is a tremendously biblical idea, running throughout the Hebrew Scripture, or Old Testament.

When we concentrate on our "spiritual lives," deepening our prayer and overcoming sins, it can be really easy to forget that we are our body. God expects us to take care of our whole person, not just half. And Aquinas is right there with modern medicine, speaking of the mind and body's influence on each other; health or illness in one impacts the other. It's one of those things that we realize, but we like to push to the side: it hurts to work out, and I want another plate of pizza. But our bodies show forth our spirits; and my spirit - big on gluttony and laziness and low on the virtues of temperance and fortitude - has been causing a bloated body. And that bloated body doesn't want to be outside playing in the yard with the kids, or doing much of anything really.

So I started walking two miles on my lunch hour, and then a couple of weeks back, cutting out seconds at mealtime, and now weight lifting (high intensity training will get results and only take 20 min. out of my week). Most importantly though, I pray. I've had so many false starts in my life that I'm keenly aware of my need for God's help to make virtue grow in my soul. I feel a little closer to Jesus the carpenter too, to the Jesus who walked back and forth over Palestine.

During this journey, quite by "accident," I came across a book by Dr. Kevin Vost, just written in 2007, which addresses aerobic exercise, weight lifting, and diet, showing the correlation between the thought of Thomas Aquinas and modern sports physiology! Now don't you more conservative folks out there be shocked by the cover - I cannot recommend this book highly enough.