COMMENTARY: Perfection that Steroids Can Not Bring

c. 2004 Religion News Service (Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.) (UNDATED) Many wonder at the stubborn resistance to the idea of Christmas this year. “Winter […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) Many wonder at the stubborn resistance to the idea of Christmas this year. “Winter Music Festivals” replace “Christmas Music” and a great Manhattan department store forbids its employees to wish customers a “Merry Christmas.”


Theories abound at this superficial embrace of secularism because, at its root, the celebration _ as an overwhelming percentage of Americans profess _ is of the birth of Jesus. Instead of pointing to the bad example of Europe as a continent unsure of everything but its profession of secularism, we might examine America’s own superficial preoccupations and their impact on the feast that we call the Incarnation.

Incarnation means “to take on flesh,” and it refers to the essence of the mystery at the core of Christmas itself. For the Christian God is not an icy and aloof deity who long ago looked away from the pool of stars we call our galaxy. Instead we recognize a God who made himself recognizable by taking on our flesh, becoming human so that nothing of our experience is alien to him.

Beneath the hum and glare of everyday life, most Americans have a feel for this wonder that is almost beyond imagining. There is, however, a fragile dynamic of narcissism in our national life that, like static on AM radio frequencies, interferes with the clear reception of this simple message about Christmas’ meaning that God took on our flesh.

This obsession with the flesh, with taking on and remaking the body, dulls many people to the deeper meanings of this season. The body pervades our consciousness, from warnings about its distortions in an epidemic of obesity to reports that some women are so anxious to keep their bodies from taking on unflattering shapes that they diet and exercise in ways to prevent it, incidentally endangering the wonder of giving birth.

The body is everywhere in the bulky shapes of athletes who take steroids to achieve a massiveness that is alien to a natural physique in order to excel at athletics. “This is my body,” they proclaim over the altar of the gym bench, but, in fact, it is not their body but a grotesque costume that exacts a price from each organ and often brings premature death to the body that seemed so golden in a brief few moments of glory.

“This is my body” proclaim the magazine covers of a dozen journals that whisper to uncertain men that their pages contain the secrets that will make them real men who will attract the admiring eyes of the culture. Where your abs are, these magazines promise, there, too, will your heart be also.

An obsession with the body makes it very difficult for many people to achieve their real goal of becoming persons _ that is, adult men and women whose identity does not depend on the appearance of their bodies nearly as much as on the reality of their inner selves.


People absorbed with incarnating themselves, with perfecting their own flesh, cannot look away from the mirror long enough to grasp the meaning of the feast of the Incarnation. Happy Winter Music Festival to them, but how sad these denatured carols are, and with what melancholy fittingness do they sing of the emptiness of such good but body-distracted people. They do not understand how their own human longings are met not in exercising their flesh to become like gods but in God’s taking it on to become like us.

KRE/JL END KENNEDY

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