“….Glorify God in your body.” This surprisingly strong admonition from St. Paul merits our attention and reflection.
In the Christian tradition, there has been the tendency to disparage the body. We have even called the body sinful or evil. The fact is that our bodies are neither sinful nor evil. They are the gift of God to us and nothing that God creates can be sinful or evil! The issue is what we do with our bodies. We always have to remember that as rational beings – persons capable of thought and reflection – we should be able to control the desires of the body rather than allow those desires to control us or our behavior. For example, sexual thoughts and desires are quite powerful in human beings and they do not seem to diminish with age (as evident by the seemingly endless ads for erectile dysfunction medication featuring mature couples. And what is it about clawed-feet bathtubs?). The challenge for us is how we channel those thoughts and desires in ways that are appropriate for us given our specific state in life. We want to avoid allowing those desires to take control of us in a way that leads us to use others simply as objects to satisfy those desires. We also want to avoid resorting to the use of pornography (now readily available on the internet) as pornography objectifies individuals, fosters fantasies that are divorced from the reality of normal human sexual relations and thus harms those relationships, and directs us inward when the sexual act is supposed to be an act that takes one outside of oneself in a total self-gift in love to another person. Human sexuality is a beautiful gift from God but that beauty is diminished when our human sexuality is used in a way that objectifies others or diminishes our own capacity to give of ourselves selflessly and generously in love to another person.
We glorify God in the body when we use the gift of our rational capacity to control the desires of the body in a healthy way, in a way that reflects what God desires for us.