“We are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.”
We, who have been baptized into the death and resurrection of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, owe nothing any longer to the flesh.
The flesh, from the Greek, sarx, is synonymous in the Biblical and Patristic literature with the “world”, not the created cosmos, but the life of the passions – the world opposed to God. Those modes of being which have been established in us through the Fall and a long life of sin, of turning away from God and pursuing the temptations which beset us from without and within.
Though we sometimes seem captivated by them, St. Paul tells us that we are truly no longer under their thrall. Our relation to them now is to put them to death. When St. Paul mentions the “deeds of the body”, this is what he is referring to. It is not the body itself that is our constant battleground; it is the flesh, the inner life which we seek daily through the askesis of the Church to bring into submission to the will of our Father, that we might find joy and freedom instead of slavery and continued pain, anxiety and sorrow.
To mortify these things by the Spirit is to bring our conscience ever more fully into consciousness. The voice of the Spirit resides in our inmost being, planted there by God and brought to full awareness through the Mysteries of Baptism/Chrismation, Communion, & especially of Confession.
In the act of speaking forth our willful separation from God, and all that attends it, in the confession our sins, we find forgiveness, healing and freedom. The conscience is educated particularly through the discipline of regularly meeting with our spiritual father and speaking in his presence to Christ, that he may, by the grace of God, prescribe the medicine necessary to bringing us to the wholeness we seek.
It is a great consolation to remember that all we need, all we seek, has already been planted in us in Holy Baptism and Chrismation. That is the theoria – the theoretical aspect of our spiritual life. But this grace requires the nurturing of the life of the Church to grow in us such that we begin to more effectively live out our inheritance as the sons & daughters of God. That is the praxis, the practical aspect.
The will must be trained. We still have the long, hard, practical work to do; to turn from the ways of the flesh to those of the spirit.
Our bodies and our minds must be changed in all their habits and associations. We must kill, mortify, what is evil and turn and cling to what is good. This is the way to come home to our heavenly Father, home to where we are heirs of God, fellow heirs with Christ, who have died unto this world and its habits, and will also be glorified with him by a new and endless life.
The good is hard to attain. To discern the difference between the apparent and the real good is difficult enough. But having distinguished the two, to cut ourselves away from the hurtful and grow bit by bit toward the true good, to live by its strength and nourishment, to be filled with the good and nothing else, all this is impossible for human nature alone.
Some of us were raised in such a way that our consciences, or moral instincts, and habits of life were formed and shaped by a Christian family and society: a society that knew what marriage is; a society that regarded innocent life as sacred, which saw violence, especially towards women and children as inherently evil. Which viewed cheap, destructive thrills as things to be avoided by all; a society that even stopped work on Sunday to thank God for his goodness.
All this is now past. Marriage is redefined by the state. Abortion is called “reproductive health” and accessible to all – not so healthy for the babies, to be sure. Violence especially towards women is the music on which many modern children are raised. Drugs and cheap sexual thrills are entertainment, and commerce consumes our whole lives. Think how such a society forms the conscience. Especially for our children, who are exposed to it all the time, and particularly for 6 hours a day or so, if they attend the government schools; the kiddie gulags; the drive-in orphanages.
The society in which the post-WWII generation was raised was the moral and ethical remains of two thousand years of Christian civilization. We have now spent that whole capital.
And now our only hope lies in returning to that Christian vine from which we have cut ourselves off. Our hope is to be so firmly grafted into Christ by love, that we will daily grow into His likeness, and be nourished by nothing except his goodness. Our prayer is to be so well fixed in Christ, that the habits of His life will keep us from all things hurtful and make us cling to all that will enable us to go from glory to glory. To stand as faithful witnesses to a world gone mad with evil.
The life of askesis, of training, of discipline, which Christ gives to us through His holy Church are part of the obedience by which we are also glorified with Christ. It is a daily, indeed a moment-by-moment kind of obedience, for the old man, the old Adam, the flesh, does not want to be put to death. It struggles to keep us in bondage to the things we think give us happiness, but which, in reality, only keep us away from the Source of joy.
To walk in the Spirit is to walk each moment with the awareness of our true nature: those in whom Christ dwells by His Spirit and seeks to do through us the same works He did while on earth in His Incarnate Being.
It is to recognize that we are truly His Body, members in particular, who partake of His divine Nature, especially as we receive His Body and Blood in repentance and faith. We become increasingly sensitive to the voice of the Spirit by attuning ourselves to it and shutting out more and more of the noise that surrounds us. A noise that can be deafening, especially to the conscience, if we let it rule our hearts.