Bodies and souls, parents and children, spouses and monastics

Part 2: Reversal of the pattern and the formation of a chiasm

Last week, I introduced a pattern common to the monastic and married ways of life, describing how the soul is like the parent of the body. Then I teased an opposite interpretation, of how the body is like the parent of the soul. Well, let me describe a couple scenarios here.

Your soul being a good parent of its body teaches it to do prostrations. You do a regular set of them every night in your prayer corner. It is proper and good for your body to participate in prayer since you are soul and body, one person. One night you do the prostrations, but by the end of the set, you realize your mind was distracted the whole time. Your body did its part, but your mind thought of your upcoming schedule for the week, chores you forgot to do, what that nasty Cheryl said at work (Cheryl is so bad, you guys). “Oh well,” you think, once you realize your failing, “at least I got some exercise.” Then you add jokingly, “But I’m not as bad as Cheryl!” You’re not serious; you’re just trying to keep it light. You’ve forgotten the purpose of your prostrations, and that causes you to reflect.

You then imagine this scenario: Poor newlyweds in a country with limited opportunities emigrate to a richer place. They get entry-level jobs with long commutes and arduous hours. They are successful enough at their companies to raise their kids well and send them to college, starting with their eldest son. This son, though, he gets to college and is distracted by the party scene. He goes clubbing, stays out late, abuses various substances… and all of his course work takes a back seat. He doesn’t even attend his classes. The ingratitude towards his parents is staggering. They left their homeland; they did nothing but work; they made of their lives a whole-burnt offering with the one aim that their children will prosper — for the children’s sake, yes, but also so that their children will be able to take care of them when they are old and unable to care for themselves. But their son treats their sacrifices as nothing, seeking pleasure only for himself.

The body doing prostrations on behalf of a distracted mind is like these immigrant parents. It invests all of its energies into forming a prosperous soul that it hopes will take care of it when it withers with age. It needs the soul to mediate between it and God, the source of life and light. The body can sacrifice itself, but it needs the soul to bring meaning to its sacrifice by doing what only the soul can do. The ingratitude we easily attribute to the selfish son then belongs to the languid intellect also, whose lack of care is thus revealed as a type of profligacy. The body groans and travails with the whole of creation (cf. Rom. 8:22–23), while the mind consorts fruitlessly with every wild thought that passes by.

St. Silouan taught, “Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not.” That is a motion of the soul that is extremely difficult to pull off. You know what’s a whole lot easier to do? Prostrations. And prostrations have the same meaning. When you put your forehead down to the ground, you’re “keeping your mind in hell.” When you rise back up, you’re “despairing not.” The Prophet David put into words the divine decree, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 45:10). Again — a motion of the soul you will not easily accomplish. But you know what’s easier than holding the mind still in prayer? Holding the body still in prayer. The immigrant parents had not the means to educate themselves and thereby reach prominent positions in the world. But they could invest their lives in raising children who would. The body like an animal cannot discern the light of truth. But the burgeoning mind to which it is inextricably linked has this potential if properly trained.

We all since Adam come into the world feet first. And so according to the order of generations, the body is the parent of the soul. If this body can be properly oriented, it lives according to the patterns it wants its child the soul to live by. The soul, unaccustomed to holiness, will resist. But after years and years of the body’s parenting, it will be dragged into line with the patterns of virtue such that one day the opportunity will emerge to join willingly to them. This is the lifelong vocation of us all — parenting the soul by means of the body, such that the soul can stand on its own and raise the body up to where it is. So that one day the mind will be still and know the person of the Son of God. And then the meaning from that event suffuses the whole of one’s life. Every bodily moment spent standing still in prayer is redeemed and sanctified.

All virtues work this way in practice.¹ We acquire chastity of body so that we may attain chastity of mind. We abstain from philandering with the senses so that we may learn to abstain from philandering with thoughts. The soul cannot do this on its own. The example of the body is there to help pull it into place, and even more importantly, the grace of the Spirit oversees the project. Those who are faithful with little (virtues of the body) are entrusted with much (virtues of the soul). Thus the process of the body parenting the soul is a necessary component of the spiritual life, but — and I can’t say this loudly enough — the spiritual life cannot be reduced to it.

There are those who would try. Forms of meditation based on the body can content themselves to discipline the soul by means of balance and stillness. The spirituality that results is something self-emergent, vain, and ultimately powerless against the passions that plague us. The body indeed may be the parent of the soul, like immigrants laboring so that their children can have better lives. But who taught the immigrants to sacrifice themselves for their children? Who taught the body to do prostrations?

We come back around to the original formulation. The immigrants themselves were children, back in the old country; someone raised them and instilled values in them. Their children in the new world have grandparents in the old world, and they look a lot like them. The body is the parent of the soul, but only after the soul is firstly the parent of the body. As I described last week, the body is a helpless child, knowing only an attraction to pleasure and an aversion to pain. It knows not how to be attracted to truth and averse to falsehood. The soul knows these things and must instruct it like a parent. The soul, capable of discerning truth, recognizes the typhoon of sin into which the body has loosed it and rights itself firstly by means of rooting the body in virtue. While that happens, the soul at first still flaps uncontrollably in the wind, until with time, with practice — and certainly not without grace from above — the soul stands tall: “And he shall be like the tree which is planted by the streams of the waters, which shall bring forth its fruit in its season; and its leaf shall not fall, and all things whatsoever he may do shall prosper” (Ps. 1:3).

This linear sequence of generations, from soul to body to soul, suggests a further layer circumscribing it by action of the Spirit, for none of this occurs without grace. The soul cannot be self-emergent anymore than the body can. It is the Spirit that gives birth to the soul, and it is to the Spirit that the soul returns in thanksgiving. Hence the chiasm I teased last week makes its appearance: < α. Spirit \ β. soul \ χ. body / ο. soul / ω. Spirit >. I hesitate to arrange it in the chiastic patterns I’m used to printing because I want to emphasize the linearity of generations. But I suspect a parabolic diagram could manage the expression:

This is the spiritual life. This is the correction of sin, the justification of the body and soul, and the glorification of the human being whose creation is willed by the Father, enacted by the Son, and perfected by the Spirit. Monastic men and women experience this in their cells when immersed in lives of obedience and prayer. Married men and women manifest it to the world in their generations of family life. Those immigrant parents, they who were obedient to the virtues instilled in them by their parents, and who thus sacrificed themselves for the lives of their children — they can taste it too. When their children are grown and enter into the world of potential prosperity created for them (maybe it’s spiritual prosperity in the form of monasticism), that husband can look at his wife, and that wife can look at her husband, and they can know that their labors were not in vain, that the Spirit moved in their life together in marriage no different from the monasticism of another generation. The love they feel between them is the same as what uplifts the monastic when the mind descends into the heart. It’s more than a human love. It appears within you like a kingdom not of this world. It is a fire that burns more brightly than the sun, and yet everything belonging to nature is upheld rather than destroyed by its flame. It is the divinizing light of God, to whom is due all glory and worship.

The photographs for this post and the last are by my sister Leah McCormick, who at a previous stage in life was a wedding photographer.

1. See for example St. John Climacus’s The Ladder of Divine Ascent 25.58 (Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2001): “The Master, knowing that the virtue of the soul is modelled on outward behaviour, took a towel [see John 12:5] and showed us how to walk the way of humility. For the soul becomes like its bodily occupations. It conforms itself to its activities and takes its shape from them” (p. 159).