allowed that process to provide a fair amount of suffering. Why avoid that? God is giving you the opportunity to tend to the temple. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth doing.
Again, on the flip side, if you’re someone who says, “the gym is my church,” or “hiking is how I’m with God,” or “Sundays are for football or sleeping in,” you’re deceiving yourself. You can certainly offer the suffering of an extra set to God. You can certainly pray and feel close to God surrounded by his magnificent creation. You can certainly use playing a sport to love your neighbor and your enemy (you know, maybe your teammate and your opponent?) all at once. But if that takes you away from offering God the worship he asks of you, you’re missing the point. If you glorify the body to the detriment of your soul, you set up an opposition that shouldn’t exist, and you become less human, less fully alive, and less of who you actually are. At times, attending Mass, praying, or going to confession can be far from easy. But they are always good, maybe especially when they involve a kind of suffering. They give us an opportunity to tend the temple.
It took me most of my life to realize (and it still takes consistent reminders to remember) the truth I’ve mentioned several times here already: our bodies and souls should be one, not two parts, but one united person. Saint Paul points this out in 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 (although I only really understood it this way recently): “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” He’s speaking of a union of body and spirit; that’s what makes the temple. We belong to God; we are not our own. Through his death on the cross, Jesus bought us at a great price. The good news is, he bought us away from death, from the separation of body and soul that God never intended.
We’ll suffer both in body and soul, in small ways and big ways, not only when we do things that are bad for us, but also when we do the things that are good for us. Remember, that’s something Adam and Eve earned for us through original sin — that even the things that are good for us bring suffering. With their disobedience, work (which is good for us) became burdensome, food (which is good for us) took toil to acquire, man’s and woman’s desire for each other (which is good for us) became easily distorted, and even giving new life came only through great pains in childbirth. And because our wills are weakened and our intellects dimmed, doing what’s good in every capacity became more difficult.
Living for God and dying to self is challenging. But in Christ we have an opportunity to offer every single suffering back to him so that he can transform it to help us grow, to change us, to bring us closer to him. So don’t run away from suffering, especially the suffering that comes from doing the things that are good for you. Embrace it. Conquer your fear, laziness, anger, gluttony, lust, all the things that keep you incomplete, and master your body, mind, and soul. Then the suffering you’re bound to experience anyway will serve our mission: a life lived out by our souls through our bodies — one in which we can know, love, and serve God.
Chapter Three
Virtue and the Power of Habit
“He who combines the practice of the virtues with spiritual knowledge is a man of power. For with the first he withers his desire and tames his incensiveness [his tendency to excite or provoke], and with the second he gives wings to his intellect and goes out of himself to God.”
— Saint Maximus the Confessor
There’s a truism that people only change out of “inspiration or desperation,” and I remember a therapist I know once saying: “For someone to change for the better, they don’t have to love the good. They don’t even have to want to love the good. All they have to do is want to want to love the good. God can work with that.” As he pointed out, the bar to start positive change is actually very low. So, if you find yourself in a place of mind, body, heart, or soul that you’re unhappy about… good. Otherwise you have no inspiration (or point of desperation) from which to effect change. G. K. Chesterton puts the question this way: “Can [you] hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing?”
In the fall of Adam and Eve, our nature was corrupted. As a result, all of humanity experiences a weakened will, so that we all totally relate when Saint Paul says: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom 7:15). We struggle to figure out our lives, and even after we do we struggle to live them. The good news is that in Jesus Christ we receive the grace to reorient our actions and our desires toward the right things, toward things that are truly good — and don’t just look good. It’s a fascinating little principle of life that, very frequently, we first have to consistently orient our actions to the good before our desires are oriented toward the good.
So, what does all this have to do with virtue? Well, virtues are the qualities of spirit that enable us to choose the good. More specifically, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “A virtue is an habitual and firm disposition to do the good. It allows the person not only to perform good acts, but to give the best of himself … he pursues the good and chooses it in concrete actions” (1803).
Virtues, both natural and supernatural, come to us most readily as the product of habit. Remember the anecdote of a woman praying to be more patient and loving? Rather than knocking her free will out of the way and transforming her into a caricature of kindness, God provided her plentiful opportunities to practice patience and kindness. Far more challenging (but also better). Practicing virtue (natural and supernatural), and consistently practicing it, and habitually choosing the good, are the only sure ways to stop neglecting what is truly good for our souls and/or our bodies.
What does that look like? Well, to my mind, that means a daily practice of exercising your heart and soul, body and mind, coupled with a daily practice of feeding your heart and soul, body and mind. A daily practice of giving your heart and soul, body and mind the rest they need. In the workout guides at the end of this book, I’ve provided what you’ll need to create a daily practice, one that stays dynamic from one day to the next, and uses each day as preparation for the next. But as I mentioned earlier, the only way even a plan for single day works is if you do it. Then do it again the second day. Then do it again the third day. Take it one day at a time, but let that day always be from today until tomorrow.
Your daily practice stretches from this very minute for the next twenty-four hours, not the past twenty-four. What are you doing right now and in the next twenty-four hours to live in accord with the truth, with your goals, with your greatest good? What action will you take in this moment to do the difficult but necessary thing? That’s the question always before us: Will I choose the slide of easy counterfeits, or the harder climb of authentic virtue? There are a million temptations, excuses, and unhealthy desires that can derail us. The key is to exercise both your mind and your free will to say, “I see that for what it is, and I choose the good instead.”
When I’m busy or sick, or have sinned, I know I’m tempted to say, “If I don’t really pray today, that’s fine, I prayed yesterday,” or “I’ll pray tomorrow, that’s good enough.” The truth is God doesn’t need my prayers, I do. When I’m busy or sick or frustrated, I know I’m tempted to say: “This sin will make me feel better… and it’s so little. It doesn’t really matter. I’m good enough.” The truth is God doesn’t need me to be good, I do. When I’m busy or sick or tired, I know I’m tempted to say: “I can skip my workout. I’m too tired to do it well anyway. It doesn’t matter this one time,” or “I know it’s not good for me to eat another half loaf of bread in fondue, but it’s not a big deal. It’s fine.” The truth is God doesn’t need me to treat the temple of my body with respect… I do.
What we do today with our bodies and our souls is what we do tomorrow with our bodies and souls, unless we make
