Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. (...) because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary but what cannot be seen is eternal." 2 Corinthians 4:14,16,18
Hebrew anthropology and Greek anthropology
The idea that the soul is immortal and destined for eternity and that the body, which it embodies for a time, is mortal and as such destined to disappear, has everything to do with Greek dualistic anthropology and nothing to do with biblical way of thinking.
In Hebrew and biblical anthropology, neither the soul is immortal nor the body mortal. In our being, the corporeal and the spiritual dimensions form an indivisible whole. If during our earthly life the body has a soul that animates it, then in our afterlife, the soul has a body that gives it form, a body that is not physical but spiritual. It has the same form as the physical, but not of the same nature.
Visible matter is made up of invisible things
We have always assumed that matter is visible and spirit is invisible; in reality, this is not the case. The quantum physics of our times, which has dethroned Newton’s mechanistic and materialistic physics forever, tell us that visible reality is made up of invisible realities.
The atom, considered to be the "building block" of matter, is invisible and is made up of an electron that is always in motion, inside a nebula or cloud, the centre of which is composed of neutrons and protons; these in turn are made up of quarks, which are further made up of the most elementary particle discovered recently and dubbed "the God particle". From this we can conclude that simplistic definitions such as: the matter is visible and spirit is invisible have nothing to do with modern physics.
The water metaphor
Water, without ever ceasing to be what it is, exists in nature in three different states: solid, liquid and gas. In its gaseous state, water, without losing anything that characterizes it in its essence, exists in an intangible and invisible form.
Just like how water can exist, without ceasing to be what it is in its essence, in an invisible and untouchable form, so we as people can also exist in an invisible and intangible form in our spiritual body, which replaces our physical body after death. Our physical body is our way of being and existing in time and space; our spiritual body will be our way of being and existing beyond time and space.
Coming back to our analogy, water in its solid and gaseous state is like being in limbo because it is in a pure state. But it is only the principle of life when it exists in the liquid state, that is, not pure but drinkable. When water vapour condenses, in the form of rain or dew, it penetrates mother earth, and after acquiring a "physical body" formed by the mineral salts that make it up, it is born from the earth, which is why it is called a "water source".
Mineral salts are the physical body of water, as they transform it from pure to drinkable and fix it inside every living organism. Pure water, without the mineral salts, is not the principle of life because, unable to retain it in its pure state, living beings would dehydrate and die.
When water evaporates, it lets go of the mineral salts which were its way of being in this world and returns to its pure state. The evaporation of water is like our death; just like water, which does not need mineral salts to be water, we do not need our physical body to be what we are, children of God: it is not, therefore, our physical body that identifies us before God, but our spiritual body.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
No comments:
Post a Comment