March 16, 2025
2nd Sunday of Lent
He will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body by the power that enables him also to bring all things into subjection to himself.
- Philippians 3:21
Recently I finished the final episode of a TV show that I had been binging for a long time. The show is called Being Human, and it’s about an unlikely trio of a vampire named Aidan, a werewolf named Josh, and a ghost named Sally, living together in the same house and figuring out how to coexist with the rest of humanity (and each other!). I found the character of Sally to be the most fascinating, perhaps because of all the stuff she goes through in the show that brings up a lot of questions for me about what an unembodied soul might actually experience. Not unlike the character of Patrick Swayze in the 1990 film Ghost, Sally is shown to be able to see and hear what’s going on around her without being able to touch (or taste, or smell) anything. Why is that? Well, supposedly it’s cause she doesn’t actually have a physical body. But anyone who knows me well enough knows that I find a lot of common answers unsatisfactory… If Sally’s inability to touch is due to not having a corporeal body, then it follows that she shouldn’t be able to see or hear either, since she doesn’t have corporeal eyes and ears, yet for some reason she can still see and hear. So then I wondered, if all our sense experience in our earthly life comes to us through our physical body, what then would the “sense experience” of an unembodied soul (e.g. ghosts or angels) be like? What does a spirit actually experience? Could a spirit still experience the beauty of a sunset, the taste of the finest wine, or the sweet sound of the song On Eagle’s Wings being sung by a fully participative congregation at St. Joseph Parish?
Well, did you know that in St. Thomas Aquinas’ magnum opus, the Summa Theologica, there’s an entire section devoted to all things angel-related? Yup—what angels are, how they know things, how they interact with human beings, whether they assume bodies, if they’re able to eat food, etc.—if you think I’m an overthinker, just know that the amount of thinking I exercise doesn’t even rise to a fraction of Aquinas’ thinking! And if you’re wondering how Aquinas would answer my above questions, the short answer is that angels, according to him, would indeed be able to experience all that stuff, not through physical senses, but through knowledge given to them by God. So Sally from our TV show, though not necessarily an angel, would most likely be able to see and hear through Divinely provided knowledge… And if that still leaves you with more questions, I’d say go ask a Thomistic scholar haha!
But here’s the thing. Scripture tells us that we won’t just be unembodied souls—we’ll actually have resurrected bodies! And that opens up a whole rabbit hole of questions about what our resurrected bodies will be like. I was chatting with our Faith Formation Coordinator, Alison Burton, and I asked her if she ever gets questions from the kids at CCD about what our resurrected bodies will be like. She said, “Yes; I just say our resurrected bodies will be perfect, and that’s usually enough for them. I don’t have a ‘baby Carlo’ who’d go ‘but what IS a perfect body?’” Alison is fortunate to not have to deal with the Carlo-type who always just has more questions haha. Well, St. Augustine believed that one’s resurrected body would be as it would at one’s prime:
It remains, therefore, that we conclude that every man shall receive his own size which he had in youth, though he died an old man, or which he would have had, supposing he died before his prime.
- St. Augustine, De civitate Dei contra paganos, Book 22, Ch. 15
But even more than the body’s “age,” the resurrected body would, according to Catholic teaching, be more like a “super body,” i.e. like Christ’s resurrected body. Fr. Vincent Serpa from Catholic Answers responds:
The Church teaches that at the resurrection the bodies of the just will be re-modeled and transfigured to the pattern of the risen Christ. Like his body, our resurrected bodies will be those of a person in his prime. They will be incapable of suffering. They will have a spiritual nature—not that they will be pure spirit, but they will be like that of Jesus, who could penetrate closed doors after he had risen. They will have new agility in that they will be able to obey the soul with great ease and speed—so that when the spirit is willing, the flesh will no longer be weak! Our bodies will be free from all deformity and will reflect God’s beauty to the degree that our souls do.
- Fr. Vincent Serpa, Catholic Answers
Well THAT ought to be something to get excited about! So, Catholic parents, if you wanna have a lively Catholic dinner table discussion with your kids, tell them all about the resurrected body and see where the conversation goes (and hopefully your kids aren’t the Carlo-type…)!
With my peace,
Carlo Serrano, Music Director