Pondering the resurrection of the body

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

Pondering grace, temptation, and the will

March 9, 2025
1st Sunday of Lent

“If I am not [in His grace], may it please God to put me in it; If I am, may it please God to keep me there.” 
- St. Joan of Arc, in response to the question of whether she knew she was in God’s grace

  

My friend Kathy and I have this ongoing inside joke, which originated like this: 

 

Carlo: You know, Kathy, since meeting you, I’ve made a lot of positive changes in my life—I’m eating healthier, I’m getting more sleep, and I’m actually going out and meeting new people. It’s like you took me out of Plato’s cave. I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I hadn’t met you.

Kathy: But Carlo, that wasn’t all me. You made the choice to respond to all these possibilities.

Carlo: You know, you always say that when I credit you with something.

Kathy: Yes, because I want to encourage your self-determination.

 

So now, whenever parishioners compliment her on her singing and she tells them, “Carlo picked the song and worked with me on it—this was all him,” I give her a dose of her own words and go, “But Kathy, whatever happened to your self-determination? You also made the choice to step up and respond to my musical instructions.”

 

We observe from experience that different people, when offered the exact same possibilities (or the exact same grace, to speak from a faith-based perspective), may not respond in the same way. Why do some people cooperate with grace more than others? Inversely, why do some people fall to temptation more than others?

 

One of my fond memories about our former parochial vicar, Fr. Joseph Kim, was that he loved superhero movies. One of his favorites was Batman, particularly the Christopher Nolan adaptation. In Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the Joker forces the citizens of Gotham into all kinds of difficult situations that bring out the worst in them—Batman, of course, is the one who holds firm to his moral compass, never succumbing to the Joker’s pressures. By contrast, in the 2019 film Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix, the Joker is depicted as a misunderstood victim of a cruel society that ultimately drove him to madness. Thus, whereas The Dark Night attests to the power of the will, Joker attests to the power of external forces. Why did the Joker succumb while Batman was able to stand firm?

 

Did you know that one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in Catholic theology is the exact relation between Divine grace and human free will? The apparent and immediate answer is of course that God offers everyone His grace, but it belongs to human free will whether to accept or reject it. The complicated part arises when we assert, as St. Augustine taught, that one’s free choice to cooperate with God’s grace is in itself a grace bestowed by God:

 

This question, then, seems to me to be by no means capable of solution, unless we understand that even those good works of ours, which are recompensed with eternal life, belong to the grace of God, because of what is said by the Lord Jesus: “Without me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)
 - St. Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, Ch. 20

 

Accordingly, the Catechism teaches that “The preparation of man for the reception of grace is already a work of grace… God brings to completion in us what he has begun, “since he who completes his work by cooperating with our will began by working so that we might will it.” (CCC 2001) One may then ask, “Ok, so where exactly does the human will end and God’s grace begin?” Well, theologians have been grappling with that since the time of Augustine all the way through the 17th century, culminating in intense theological debates between the Dominicans and the Jesuits, in what became known as the De Auxiliis controversy. In 1607, Pope Paul V “ended” the controversy by affirming both the Dominican and Jesuit views as tenable and banning any further publication of books on the matter unless otherwise approved by the Holy See. The Dominicans and Jesuits were instructed to await a final resolution from the Holy See, and to this day, that resolution has yet to come. Don’t you just love big theological questions?

 

Now, if you ask me where I stand on all this, I’d respond with my favorite answer: “I don’t know.” I’d like to believe that there are many things I have the power to act on and many choices I can make. At the same time, I recognize the limits of own ability. Case in point: one thing I’ve always struggled with is advocating for myself. When people with particularly strong opinions put pressure on me to do what they want, I tend to just give in even when I disagree. One of my friends who’s a therapist would of course invite me to reflect on why that is. The thing is, I know exactly why that is. I can tell you with great self-awareness all the things in my childhood that led to me being this way. But simply knowing the causes doesn’t exactly fill me with the fortitude needed to make the changes that I know I need to make. If everyone could simply do what they knew to be right, against all external pressures, through sheer force of will, the world would probably be sooooooo much better. But I know that at times, my will itself is lacking, and that I need some kind of grace, in whatever form that might take. Perhaps sometimes, that grace might take the form of a special friend who pulls you out of Plato’s cave.

 

With my peace,

Carlo Serrano, Music Director

Blindspots, Integrity, and Orthopraxis

March 2, 2025 
8th Sunday in Ordinary Time

A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its own fruit…
 - Luke 6:43-44

 

I must confess that I’ve left the Music Director’s Corner unattended for the past three weeks. If you’re someone who checks this page for regular updates, my apologies for not having updated until now.

 

As it happens, this Sunday’s Gospel reading is one that hits very close to home for me, for two reasons: Firstly, I’m the type of person who has what I like to call “blindspot paranoia.” I always second-guess myself because I worry that there may be some factor I haven’t considered, some cognitive bias I’m unaware of, or, to borrow Jesus’ words, a beam in my eye that I’m just not seeing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked myself, “what if I’m only choosing this song for my own personal gratification and not really for the enhancement of the liturgy, the spiritual experience of the congregation, or the greater glory of God?” Ask my friends Kathy and Danielle, and they’ll tell you all about Carlo’s paralyzing fear of unchecked beams in his eyes!

 

The second reason has to do with the virtue of integrity, which I take to be the opposite of hypocrisy. I’ve heard two popular definitions of integrity: 1) doing the right thing even when no one’s looking, and 2) when your words, actions, and beliefs all match. It’s that second definition that piques my interest. Religious philosophers distinguish between orthodoxy (correct belief) and orthopraxis (correct conduct). For Christians, this distinction raises important questions about the relation between specific credal beliefs and carrying out good works—does one necessarily follow from the other? Is one more important than the other? Should we distinguish between “true Christians,” or “fake Christians,” or implicit Christians at heart (what Karl Rahner calls “anonymous Christians”)? What if someone is really kind but not a Christian? Or what if a Christian is so terribly despicable? These questions may apply in an interreligious sense, i.e. between Christians and non-Christians, or in an ecumenical sense, i.e. between Catholics and non-Catholic Christian denominations. There are of course widely diverging answers from very intelligent Christian thinkers. Consider these contrasting viewpoints:

 

Anonymous Christianity means that a person lives in the grace of God and attains salvation outside of explicitly constituted Christianity… Let us say, a Buddhist monk… who, because he follows his conscience, attains salvation and lives in the grace of God; of him I must say that he is an anonymous Christian; if not, I would have to presuppose that there is a genuine path to salvation that really attains that goal, but that simply has nothing to do with Jesus Christ. But I cannot do that. And so, if I hold if everyone depends upon Jesus Christ for salvation, and if at the same time I hold that many live in the world who have not expressly recognized Jesus Christ, then there remains in my opinion nothing else but to take up this postulate of an anonymous Christianity.

- Karl Rahner, Jesuit theologian

 

Now if once we allow people to start spiritualising and refining, or as they might say ‘deepening’, the sense of the word Christian, it too will speedily become a useless word… In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the language, for we already have the word good. Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served… When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, XII-XIII

 

Gandhi no doubt loved the way that Jesus related to the downtrodden and disadvantaged and assumed that he himself was a leper or Samaritan when he really was a Pharisee… Whatever the case, the Jesus he liked must have been a Jesus who would love and accept him just as he was and not a Jesus who declared that even a man as good as he was an enemy of God.
 - Rev. Tim Challies, Reformed Baptist Pastor

 

But on the question whether we ought to prefer a Catholic of the most abandoned character to a heretic in whose life, except that he is a heretic, men find nothing to blame, I do not venture to give a hasty judgment.

- St. Augustine, De Baptismo Contra Donatistas, Book IV, Ch. 20

 

I should note that term orthopraxis was coined in the 1960s by proponents of liberation theology—a social-justice-oriented theology that I first encountered in Jesuit college back home in the Philippines. And while I try my best to approach contrasting views as impartially as possible, if it appears to the reader that I tend to lean more closely to Jesuit thought, that may be the subconscious influence of my Ignatian upbringing. Did I mention I have a crippling fear of unchecked cognitive biases?

 

Having made that disclaimer, I’d like to share this beautiful analogy from a homily by Fr. Arnel Aquino, SJ, one of the Priests based in my former Jesuit college. Fr. Aquino compares two famous concert pianists, drawing the analogy between technical prowess without expression and orthodoxy without orthopraxis:

 

Yuja Wang from China & Khatia Buniátishvilli from Georgia are two of the world’s leading classical pianists today. Both are virtuosic, especially when playing bravado pieces. Agile and light, their fingers go at break-neck speed. Left hand nimble as right, their monstrous octaves leap seamlessly up and down the piano with no extraneous notes, no slips, no falls.

When Yuja plays a slow Chopin nocturne, you find yourself waiting for the passages where she’d showcase her phenomenal finger dexterity. That’s what she’s known for: technical superiority. But when Khatia plays the same piece, something different happens. Her playing calls up childhood memories, people’s faces, feelings. Oh, both pianists know “the way”—technique, accuracy, volume. They know “the truth”—principles of interpretation, composer’s biography, period/era of composition. But, while Yuja draws attention to the adroitness of her hands, thanks to her almost robotic virtuosity, Khatia blesses the piece with a beating heart, and makes it breathe and sigh, and gives it a voice so that it whispers to you, or yells at the world, or cries with you. One makes you think how far ahead of you she’s gone. The other holds your hand & assures you that you’re not alone.
 - Fr. Arnel Aquino, SJ, homily on the 5th Sunday of Easter, May 7, 2023

 

When you come to Mass this Sunday, we invite you to keep an ear out for the themes of integrity and orthopraxis in our music selections, and to reflect on these themes as we sing together in joyful worship.

With my peace,

Carlo Serrano, Music Director