A healthy body

There is one thing which you do not often forget to have at home, and that is your meals.  And so, when you come in hungry from school or from play, one of the questions you often ask is, “When’s supper?” or “When’s tea?” or “When’s dinner?”  And after you have had your supper or your tea or your dinner, you feel better.  This is because food makes your bodies grow and keeps you healthy – or rather the proper food does, what we call a healthy diet.  If you lived on nothing but sweets, you would get ill; though I remember one boy in Catechism who said that, when he grew up, he would like to work in a toffee factory as a toffee-taster, and when I said that would spoil his appetite for dinner, he replied, “I’d have toffee for dinner too!”

Of course there are other things besides diet that keep us well.  Here is a rhyme that reminds us of them:

Sleep, sunshine and fresh air,
Exercise and diet,
Are the five best doctors in the world,
And no one can deny it.

Now, God provides the sleep and the sunshine; you provide the exercise; and your parents provide the diet.  Or do they?  They see that you have all the bread you need, and they provide you with your meals.  And maybe sometimes your mother or father makes a cake, perhaps a birthday cake.  But bread and cakes are made for flour, and the flour comes from the wheat which grows in the fields.  But your parents do not make the wheat grow, nor does the farmer.  It grows because the seed that is sown has life in it, and it is God who gives it life.  If it were not for him, the seed would be as dead as sawdust, and so there would be no wheat, no flour, no bread and no birthday cakes.  And the same is true of all the food we eat – it is all a gift from God.

So you can see that it is God, just as much as your parents, who keeps your body well.

A healthy soul

But our body is not the most important part of us.  Even more important is our soul, our real self.  The body dies, but the soul goes on living.  Now, just as the body can be healthy or unhealthy, so also can the soul.  A really healthy and well-grown soul is like Our Lord’s, pure and clean and true, generous and good-tempered and kind; a strong and upright soul with nothing weak about it.  And just as our bodies cannot be healthy without certain things, so neither can our souls.

We saw that our bodies need, among other things, sunshine and fresh air and exercise.  We all know how much better we feel if we have been for a good walk in the open air.  As regards sunshine, when one of the first big homes for blind people was built, the architect thought that, as the people who were going to live there could not see, there was no point in putting in ordinary sized windows.  So instead they made the rooms with very small ones, but it was soon found that the blind people were getting ill because they did not have enough light. (Note 1)  As a result all the windows had to be altered and made larger.  (For a research explanation of this, click here)

Prayer

Now what sunshine and fresh air are to the body, God’s Presence is to the soul, for “…God is light and in him there is no darkness at all” (NRSV, 1 John 1:5). And prayer is the soul’s chief exercise, for when we pray we are exercising the greatest power our soul has, the power to know God.  And just as people’s bodies get in a poor way if they take no exercise, so their souls get in a poor way if they do not pray.  For in prayer we walk with God in the sunshine and fresh air of his holy Presence.  So, that means we must be regular in our morning and evening prayers, and in our prayers at the Eucharist.

The Blessed Sacrament

And that reminds us that the Blessed Sacrament is the Food of our souls, that Food which is Our Lord himself, the Living Bread who comes down from Heaven at the Consecration in the Eucharist.  The Blessed Sacrament, Our Lord’s own glorified Body, is the very life of the soul without which the soul cannot be well and strong.  So when you are confirmed, or if you are already confirmed and are making your Communion, always prepare your soul for Jesus with great care and receive him frequently all through your life.  For, as Jesus himself has said, “…the bread that I will give (after my Resurrection and Ascension) for the life of the world is my flesh”.   “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you”.  “...the one who eats this bread will live for ever” (NRSV, John 6:51,53,58).

SUMMARY

1. Among other things, our bodies need sunshine, fresh air, exercise and a good diet.

2. Our soul is our real self and when our body dies, our soul goes on living.  Just as bodies can be healthy or unhealthy, so too can souls.

3. A really healthy and well-grown soul is like Our Lord’s, pure and clean and true, generous and good-tempered and kind; a strong and upright soul with nothing weak about it. 

4. Prayer is the soul’s chief exercise and when we pray we walk with God in the sunshine and fresh air of his holy Presence. 

5. The Blessed Sacrament is the Food of our souls, that Food which is Jesus himself.  So we must always prepare for Communion very carefully and receive Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament frequently throughout our lives.