Dear Family of Mary

 
Vicka in prayer! Body and soul in communion with God!
(c)Mary TV 2014

J.M.J.  

April 27, 2015

Dear Family of Mary!

"Dear children! I am with you also today to lead you to salvation. Your soul is restless because your spirit is weak and tired from all worldly things. You, little children, pray to the Holy Spirit that He may transform you and fill you with His strength of faith and hope, so that you may be firm in this battle against evil. I am with you and intercede for you before my Son Jesus. Thank you for having responded to my call." (April 25, 2015)

Our Lady continues to be serious about the battle that we are in. She wants us to be equipped for the fight against evil. Maybe the most important preparation for us is a good understanding of who we are. We have been living in a society that seems to want to walk away from God and not recognize that we are creatures made by Him. We are being fed lots of misinformation about who we are and how we are made. Our enemy will use this misinformation to confuse us and tempt us away from God and His plan for us. And so Our Lady is giving us the truth about ourselves.

In this message she brings up something that can be a bit difficult to understand. She says: "Your soul is restless because your spirit is weak and tired from all worldly things." As soon as I read this sentence I realized that it is easy to be confused about soul and spirit. What is the relationship between our soul and our spirit? Are they the same thing?

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church there is a discussion called "Body and Soul but Truly One" (n. 362 to 368) in which we are taught about our being, soul and body:

The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that "then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being" (Gen 2:7). Man whole and entire, is therefore willed by God.

In Sacred Scripture the term "soul" often refers to human life or the entire human person. But "soul " also refers to the inner most aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God's image: "soul" signifies the spiritual principle in man.

The human body shares in the dignity of "the image of God": it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit. (n. 362 - 364)

Our soul is our spiritual principle and makes us capable of communion with God. But the Catechism does talk about soul and spirit, though briefly:

Sometimes the soul is distinguished from the spirit: St. Paul for instance prays that God may sanctify his people "wholly," with "spirit and soul and body" kept sound and blameless at the Lord's coming (1 Thess 5:23). The Church teaches that this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul. "Spirit" signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God. (367)

I had to read this several times before it started making sense. I think the Church is saying that spirit and soul are both aspects of our spiritual being, but that they are not separate entities. Our soul is our spiritual principle, and because it is spiritual, or spirit, it orders us toward God who is supernatural and Spirit. It is because of our spirit that we can communicate with the Lord and receive from Him.

The Church works very hard to make us understand that we are not a conglomerate of different things somehow loosely pasted together. Just as our body and our soul are one being, so in our soul there is spirit but it is not distinct from our soul. It is important. Dualism can result in much abuse of our person. We can't dissect ourselves and examine our parts. The body and soul and spirit are one unit, completely necessary to our person.

Well, I am babbling. But I think it is important to work at understanding this point, because the new age and other philosophies are wreaking havoc with lives by changing the understanding of who we are and how we were made.

That said, Our Lady does talk about our spirit and our soul, and how they interrelate. Tomorrow I want to share a very nice email I received about our tired spirit and our restless soul. Christina from New Jersey makes some very good points from Scripture for us to pray about.

So, for now, let's puzzle this out as best we can, so that we can really follow Our Lady well. As she told us, "I am with you also today to lead you to salvation."

In Jesus, Mary and Joseph!

Cathy Nolan

©Mary TV 2015