When I was a kid growing up in Texas sports were simply a part of everyday life. Everyone I knew played sports and it’s what we did for fun and exercise. As my friends and I got to middle school and high school, our coaches started pushing us to workout and exercise outside of the sport, but always for the sport. The reason we went to bed, ate a certain way, drank water, and ran was to improve our ability to perform on game day.
But once the sports ended (thanks to a rotator cuff injury) I was faced with a mini existential question - what’s the point of this pain when I can’t play anyway?
With no strong faith foundation I wasn’t sure what was supposed to be the guiding star of my life. I saw men I looked up to in my family seemingly obsessed with sports, women, and drinking, so I figured that’s just what men were supposed to be preoccupied with.
Insert freshmen year of college here. Let’s just say that’s a story for another post.
Praise God he broke into this hedonistic heart and empowered me to walk with him for the first time ever when I was 19. It was shortly after that time when a couple of friends of mine invited me to do the old Insanity workout videos by BeachBody. I was bored and it was the summer so I agreed, also because my dad owned the DVD’s and they had to come to my house to do them.
If you ever did these workouts you know they weren’t made to be technically excellent. They were made to burn a lot of calories and to have you end up in a puddle of sweat on the floor, and they certainly accomplished that goal with us.
But this is when things started coming together for me. You see these friends were also old friends from Church and they invited me to go to daily mass before we would do the workouts. This was also a few weeks after my reversion and I was realizing that even though I had given my heart to Jesus, I was still struggling with corporeal temptations.
It was one morning when I really didn’t want to workout when the thought struck me, “if I can force my body to do this workout, maybe it will help me stop my body in moments of temptation.”
I don’t want to position exercise as only being needed by Catholics because of corporeal discipline, but this is a major aspect of what it can be. Using Pope John Paul II as my guide I eventually discovered what he calls the Hermeneutic of Gift. This is the interpretive key he used in his Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. He takes it from Gaudium et Spes:
“Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, "that all may be one. . . as we are one" (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” (GS 24)
The Pope then took this beautiful line and added his own brilliance to it that we must now reflect on:
In fact, in order to remain in the relation of the “sincere gift of self” and in order to become a gift, each for the other, through their whole humanity made of femininity and masculinity (also in reference to the perspective that Genesis 2:24 speaks about), they must be free in exactly this way. Here we mean freedom above all as self-mastery (self-dominion). Under this aspect, self-mastery is indispensable in order for man to be able to “give himself,” in order for him to become a gift, in order for him (referring to the words of the Council) to be able to “find himself fully” through “a sincere gift of self” (TOB 15.2)
Here is how I believe a Catholic should approach exercise. Not as a means to look a certain way, not merely as a means to health, and not even as a means to have more energy for your family and career. But rather as a tool that the Holy Spirit can use to make us more like Jesus Christ, who gave of himself perfectly to the Father on the Cross.
This is by no means the only tool. But it is important because if our goal in life is to be like Jesus in all things, that includes his total gift of himself to his Father, and to his Bride the Church. But he is God, so he has perfect self control. We don’t.
So we must strive for self mastery for the sake of self gift. To learn to conquer ourselves in order to fully give of ourselves to the Lord who loved us into existence and who calls us to love others in return.
If you are someone who is struggling to show up to your workouts, whether they are at home or in the gym, remember this: you can’t give what you don’t have. The workouts don’t need to be crazy difficult. No, you don’t have to look like a body builder. But you need to learn the art of asceticism in the modern world. To master your passions and the pleasures that your body so desperately seeks.
You must learn to follow in the footsteps of Pope St. John Paul II who invites all of the faithful to a full and total gift of self to Jesus through Mary.
Tutus Tuus
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