A Ballad of Flesh and Spirit

“My yoke is easy and my burden is light,” says the man hanging from a cross. And if we only went on what we see with our eyes — flesh driven through by nails and sword, swollen from beating and inches from expiration — it would seem like a joke.

I’ll tell you something we all know: this life on earth is hard. It’s either too long or it’s too short. It’s frequently painful. It’s riddled with problems that seem to make no sense. It is, as Dickens wrote, “made of ever so many partings welded together.”

But it’s also shockingly, senselessly beautiful. It is full of physical experiences of love, joy, and peace that are so powerful they leave you breathless.

It is both these things — good and bad, hard and wonderful, just as we are both body and soul, spirit and flesh.

No one knows the Father except the Son, who entered into our bodily existence to free us from enslavement to it. No one knows the Son except the Father, and the means by which they know one another — the love passing between them, the Third Person himself — has been shared with us, has made its dwelling within us through baptism.

“Brothers and sisters, we are not debtors to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.” — Romans 8:12

©LPi