The Spirit of the Disciplines

The conflict between flesh and spirit is the experience of all who begin the spiritual life by the influx of God’s life-giving word. Sometimes the conflict is long, sometimes short. This is where the spiritual disciplines come in. The disciplines for the spiritual life, rightly understood, are time-tested activities consciously undertaken by us as new men or women to allow our spirit ever-increasing sway over our embodied selves. They help by assisting the ways of God’s Kingdom to take the place of the habits of sin embedded in our bodies.

Sometimes, as it did for Simon Peter, it often appears as if the body has a life of its own capable of action to some degree independent of, or in conflict with, our conscious thoughts and intentions.

Whatever further qualifications and explanations must be added, you cannot in the final analysis love another person in the normal human sense and not also love his or her body; and you cannot love or really care about that body and not love the person also.

It is clear from all of this that nothing we can recognize as human experience and personality is separable from the meanings and orientations and habits embedded in the flesh of a particular human body.