Main news for 6 June 2021

"Allowed" and "forbidden" are removed by the apostle from the vocabulary and replaced with the word "free." Freedom is not permissiveness, but the ongoing work of our spirit. What Paul says means that, in accepting Christ, we deprive ourselves of the right to live automatically. Each of our actions must be measured against the standard "beneficial." Everything is permitted; we only need to keep giving ourselves an account of whether such a thing is beneficial for me as a temple of the Holy Spirit. There is nothing that can be excluded from the sphere of our choice.

What am I dependent on? What possesses me, blocking out what matters most, clouding the clarity of consciousness? For one person it is smoking, for another health, for another social contact, and who knows what else can become an object of worship and dependence that acts destructively on our life in freedom. And this life is arranged in such a way that every action must become the result of a free and conscious choice for which we are ready to give an answer before God.

These words, written by the apostle Paul for a concrete occasion, in connection with a dispute about food sacrificed to idols, nevertheless prove suitable for guidance in other cases as well. The apostle decisively leads our reflections out of the sphere of legalism ("permitted or forbidden") into the sphere of meaning ("why," "needed or not needed," "appropriate or inappropriate").

This approach corresponds to Christian human freedom, opens paths of creativity for a person, while not denying his responsibility before God. Besides, this approach is fruitful: indeed, it is impossible to spell out all potential situations of human life at the level of "permitted or forbidden." And the apostle Paul's approach can "work" in any situation, because we can always think about whether what I am about to do will bring me closer to the goal God has given me or not, whether it will become something by which I have "come under power," such being the literal meaning of the Greek word translated as "possess" or "have power." After all, a person can give power over himself only to God.

Paul describes quite fully what we would call today the ascetic component of Christian life. However, today many people associate asceticism with "mortification of the flesh," with a struggle against one's own body, and sometimes even against one's own nature in general. The apostle understands asceticism in its original sense, as the ordering of one's spiritual life and life as a whole around that spiritual core which in his time was called the inner Torah. And one of the problems of every ascetic practice in every age has been the problem of ungoverned human intentions.

What is an intention? It is a will whose source is the person's spiritual "I," called the heart in the Bible, joined to the object toward which it is directed. Not one action, not one decision, not even a simple glance cast at something exists without the act of will that accompanies it. It is impossible not only to decide something or choose something, but even simply to see or hear something, or someone, without a particular act of will each time. Yet it often happens that the one who is looking or hearing, for example, identifies himself with what he sees or hears.

In the same way, a person experiencing one or another spiritual or psychological state can identify himself with it, as often happens in cases of intense emotion. And then it is no longer the person's will that directs him, but that with which the person identifies himself. The person himself gives his will, and therefore himself, into captivity to what is only a part of his own nature, and he loses his true self, that genuine "I" which is the source of every act of will and of all life.

Paul understands perfectly: the issue is not what a Christian may or may not see, hear, eat, or drink, but whether he becomes the spiritual prisoner of what he has seen, heard, eaten, or drunk. Whether he identifies himself with all this or remains inwardly free, able at any moment to stop doing what can hinder him on the spiritual path. Sexual immorality, the violation of the seventh commandment, turns out to be especially dangerous spiritually. And the issue here is not some special defectiveness of sexual life as such, but the fact that for a human being, unlike an animal, "pure sex" is impossible.

For a human being, it can only be part of those relationships that connect him with a sexual partner in all fullness and depth, so that even with a prostitute, in a relationship that by definition lasts no longer than one night, a person becomes one whole, and this unity remains forever, for all eternity. Here there is either the fullness of relationship and marriage in the fullness of life, or the fullness of mutual destruction and death. That is why the apostle gives so much attention to this topic: this is not moralizing, but a conversation about the Kingdom, about salvation, about life and death.