Dear ones,

I said before I was planning to make a trip to SdeC on July 7 and to Medjugorje on August 1, but unfortunately (?) I broke my right foot on July 4!
So I have to 'stay in my cell' quite a while and have had much pain until now, August 9. Not in my foot, but in my chest because of chronic hypventilation. I try to join with Christ in His suffering as good as possible. Elisabeth of the Trinity said: 'L'acceptation, �'est tout'!
I try to practice deep breathing and saying the Jesus prayer. I also read some Psalms every day. That's it. And... I have been reading Jacques Le Goff, world reknowned historian, on the body in the Middle Ages. You would be ashamed being a Christian, reading all this stuff of body rejection in those times (and ours!). Therefore I have asked myself how I can delve more deeply in this disturbing question on biblical anthropology (and all influence by Greek a

Freddy,

I have "chronic" hyperventilation too, but can keep it "under control" by practicing proper breathing exercises.

I don't think you should be "joining Christ in His suffering" with this, unless the purpose of your hyperventilation is to "offer it up". God wants you to breathe naturally and normally, and it can be "healed"

http://www.breathing.com/

www.transformationalbreathing.com/


Katy

I pray for you. I've occasionally wondered about this question of to what extent St. Paul's antipathy between spirit and flesh reflects Stoic thought but never got around to investigating. A quick search on Google suggests the following:

Paul: The Man and the Myth
By Calvin J. Roetzel
Published by Continuum International Publishing Group, 1999
ISBN 0567086984, 9780567086983
320 pages

Paul and the Stoics
By Troels Engberg-Pedersen
Published by Westminster John Knox Press, 2000
ISBN 066422234X, 9780664222345
435 pages

They look like expensive, heavy-duty academic texts. Maybe you can read them and let me know what they say LOL?

Yes, that would be a lot reading; it's an issue I've been troubled about at times as well. But it seems the issue of "flesh" isn't mainly about bodily functions themselves.

Here are a few excerpts from St. John of the Cross, who can certainly be read as Paul in being heavy-handed re: the body. Years ago I read him this way, but find that my own filters were more at work than really understanding him. The same seems to be true of Paul, who is certainly more Jewish than Stoic.

In his book "What Saint Paul Really Said," N.T. Wright cites Colossians 1:15-23 as important for understanding Paul's view of creation, and we see something like that as well in Romans where inspiration has Paul musing over the groanings of creation awaiting the revelation of the sons of God. Wright's book is less than 200 pages, and contains some of the latest criticism of Pauline reductionisms.

I also have an old copy of John A.T. Robinson's "The Body," and see where he writes, in referring to St. Paul's view of "flesh,"

"The natural body must be transformed to become a 'spiritual body (1 Cor. 15:44).' The natural man cannot know God (1 Cor. 2:14), however much he may have been created to do so (Rom. 1:19). The body, indeed, is for the Lord. But Paul is well aware it isn't sufficient simply to repeat that - for the body of human life now belongs securely to the sarx and the powers of sin. And in fact he does not repeat it; he rests none of his ethic of the body upon its original creation for God. He knows that such an ethic is futile unless it is grounded in something further. This other truth is not simply that 'the body is for the Lord,' but the incredible fact of the Christian gospel that 'the Lord is for the body.' . . . "left to myself, says Paul, I am divided and powerless: With the mind I serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin." But now, he writes to his friends, 'you do not belong to yourselves; for you were bought with a price: glorify God therefore in your body."

None of that sounds Stoic to me, but is frustrating for a reason that has become clearer to me more recently:

The soul cannot maintain unity of the faculties as they undergo alchemy (such as through various types of meditation that release polarization of the elemental powers/kundalini within the body/psyche), or the alchemized state, since these faculties, and the soul itself, aren't sourced causally within their own powers. IOW, our faculties participate in powers which aren't theirs causally, and so the attempt to derive from them a state of unity is the working of the flesh which Paul speaks of. I've been doing Vipassan-style meditation for almost twenty years, and my sense is that the senses are just as dependent upon grace for transformation and unity as the mind and will.

Here are those excerpts from St. John of the Cross and his translators in the introduction to "The Ascent":

"Further analysis discloses the the denial of one's consent must be the work of supernatural love. St. John often reminds us that the appetites must be ordered or directed to God through love, employed in loving God. When charity is perfect, all the appetites of the sensory and spiritual part of the soul "move in and through love . . . . We also read of the appetites which are wholly under the dominion of love as being divine. The reason he calls them divine is that they no longer flow from natural motives or ends, for charity has only God as its origin and end (The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, 1979, pp. 49-50)."


The struggle for me, as a beginner, is that John of the Cross deals from the start mostly with those already well passed the active purgation of the senses. And so Teresa of Avila was a better first step until I began to receive infusions of grace, or for me mostly prayer of quiet with moments of infused loving knowledge. Then it became clearer how Paul's notion of the flesh, seen from a human psychological pov, would seem pejorative; whereas from knowing how the effects of grace upon the senses are completely beyond my own doing, the notion became quite helpful (especially for somebody coming from a Buddhist-Hindu background). But here is a passage from the translators commentary that helps (if you look to the text itself you'll see their citations of the saint as well):

"The beginner, unable to be occupied in the obscure, general loving knowledge which is communicated through faith, must employ the remote means to God, which is meditation. He must reflect upon particular ideas and images for the purpose of acquiring some knowledge and love of God. In the initial stages of the spiritual life the soul is still attached to the senses and is unable to advance without their support. God respects this weakness; it is by means of the senses that He draws beginners to Himself. The holy images formed in meditation gradually replace worldly thoughts and assist the beginner in directing his affection to a spiritual object (p. 52)."

Re: the recommendation given to me to read Teresa of Avila (Interior Castle) before John of the Cross, there are some really fine commentaries that clarify her teaching in relation to Jungian psychotherapeutic notions, yet without reducing her understanding of the flesh to a distortion of her cultural setting.

"Towards Mystical Union," by Julienne McLean

"Entering Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle," by Gillian T. W. Ahlgren

And a highly recommended book that can make John of the Cross more pallitable for us beginners:

"The Impact of God" by Iain Matthew
__________________________

But Freddy, no doubt there were horrible abuses of the body as you point out from your reading. I just think it must be something of a "set-up" to evaluate those without the actual perspective of the saints (which we can only have indirectly). Both John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila were critical of those who moritified the flesh out of pride, etc . . . . It seems the body is quite simply a different experience for those more spiritually evolved.

Dear Derek and W.C.,

Please look at the other thread on 'Biblical anthropology and holistic therapies'. There is so much interesting going on in the field of quantum biology, body/mind integration, human body field and so forth...
Thanks also for the titles. I am only beginning now to be really interested in biblical anthropology and holism, because of enduring physical/emotional/spiritual pains I am suffering since 1996.
PAX,
Fred
PS No, Paul has nothing to do with Stoicism!