Dear Souls & Hearts Member,
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?” So asked St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:19.
But what does that mean? That “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, within you”?
There’s a lot, a whole lot in that one line, in that one verse.
This is the fifth reflection in our series on our identities – we’ve covered how we are:
- Beloved sons and daughters of God the Father in Self Images and Identity from March 24, 2025
- Heirs of God the Father in Our Identity as Heirs of God from April 15, 2025
- Friends of Jesus in “I Call You Friends” from April 28, 2025
- Sheep in Jesus’ flock in Your Identity as Jesus’ Sheep
Being a temple of the Holy Spirit is one way to understand our identity in relationship with the third Person of the Trinity.
Let’s unpack being a temple of the Holy Spirit. .
Most of the Catholic commentary and discussion of this verse centers around avoiding sexual immorality. After all, Paul was writing to residents in Corinth, “one of the most sensual cities in the ancient world” according to Fr. George Montague’s commentary [p.17].
We’re talking Corinth, a metropolis, a bustling seaport, cosmopolitan and worldly, the city of Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, love, sensuality, and fertility a place “notorious for its decadent moral climate…and prevalent sins against chastity” according to the Navarre Bible Commentary [p. 609].
We’re talking more than 1,000 prostitutes in one city.
According to the Ignatius Bible Commentary by Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch, during the five years after St. Paul founded the Church at Corinth and “During his absence, the community has fallen prey to a number of vices that were beginning to fracture its unity and drawing numbers away from the faith.” [p. 283).
All right. We get it. Paul’s message might be as simple as “Stop the fornicating. Stop the adultery. Stop the sexual perversions. Be chaste and holy.”
But there’s a lot more to it than that.
This is Scripture. This is the Word of God. And this verse is more than a reiteration of the Sixth Commandment. Let’s go deeper. Let’s understand who the Holy Spirit is and what a temple is and what it represented to the Corinthians and to Paul.
Who is the Holy Spirit?
If each Catholic, each Christian is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit is the third Person of the Trinity, that means we are to have a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit. But this is hard.
Professor Emeritus of Theology at the Catholic University of Steubenville, Alan Schreck in his 1995 book Your Life in the Holy Spirit wrote that:
“I think that while most Christians have some clear idea of the person and work of the Father and the Son, and thus find it possible to have a relationship with them, the same is not true of the Holy Spirit. The typical Christian’s notion of the Holy Spirit and his work is often vague and muddled.” [p. 8].
Vague and muddled ideas of the Holy Spirit are so common and Schreck explains some reasons why:
“Breath, wind, water, dove, fire, cloud, gift, oil, and the gesture of imposing hands over a person – reviewing this catalog of biblical images, it is easy to understand why Christians find it hard to have a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, why they tend to view the Spirit as a mysterious force or power. It is difficult to have a personal relationship with the wind or fire! But as the Catechism of the Catholic Church (hereafter, the Catechism) indicates, these are only symbols of the Holy Spirit, not the Holy Spirit himself (see 694–701). They represent important aspects of the Spirit’s identity and work, expressing attributes of a person who does not have a human face.” [p. 15-16].
Now we are getting a deeper understanding. It is hard to have a personal relationship, much less an intimate one, with an entity that does not look like or feel like a person. We have thousands of images of Jesus as a man, with a face, with a body, we see and feel his very human way of relating deeply in the Gospels, we know that people touched him, that he had a real body. And while the First Person of the Trinity, God the Father, is incorporeal, we still can see him as a father – personified in the fictional character of the father of the prodigal son, and even though the images of an old man with a white beard do not capture the fullness of His being, there is still something to capture personhood in the imagination.
Dr. Schreck again:
“Although there are many prayers and hymns to the Holy Spirit to be found in the history of Catholic spirituality, devotion to the Holy Spirit, though always accepted, has been sporadic and often hidden in the Catholic Church. This neglect could be because the Holy Spirit cannot be given a human “face” or form, and is portrayed in biblical images as breath, wind, water, cloud, oil (for anointing), and a dove, and it is not so easy for us to conceive the Holy Spirit as a person with whom we can have a personal relationship.” [p. 30].
The Holy Spirit, represented a dove? I’ve never had a close relationship with a bird, let alone a dove. When my daughter Grace was a young girl, she had three parakeets named Windplume, Warbeak, and Battlehawk. Truth be told, I did not share a lot of closeness with any of them. On the rare occasion when their cage hadn’t been cleaned for a while, they also smelled quite differently than chrism oil.
And we had a rooster on the farm that we named Dr. Harmon C. Bridges. He was both a bully and a coward, brutal and vindictive to those who feared him and the biggest avian weenie when faced with real danger. When dogs attacked our laying hens, did the valiant Dr. Bridges defend his female charges? No, he did not. He was pecking desperately at the sliding glass door on our deck, hoping to con one of the kids to letting him in to save his wretched hide. (At least he was useful in alerting us to the dogs.)
Those are all the birds I’ve known personally on a first-name basis. None of them were near and dear to me.
So this lack of a human face and this lack of a human form can get in the way of a deep relationship with the Holy Spirit. Schreck continues with a different image of the Holy Spirit “… Bonaventure and his great Dominican counterpart St. Thomas Aquinas have much in common in their writings on Holy Spirit. Both, following St. Augustine, speak of the Holy Spirit as Gift and as Love.” [pp. 34-35].
The Holy Spirit as Gift and as Love. Now we are moving somewhere. Pope John Paul II picks up the theme of the Holy Spirit as Gift and Love in his 1986 Encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem:
“In his intimate life, God ‘is love,’ the essential love shared by the three divine Persons: personal love is the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of the Father and the Son. Therefore he “searches even the depths of God, “as uncreated Love-Gift. It can be said that in the Holy Spirit the intimate life of the Triune God becomes totally gift, an exchange of mutual love between the divine Persons and that through the Holy Spirit God exists in the mode of gift. It is the Holy Spirit who is the personal expression of this self-giving, of this being-love. He is Person-Love. He is Person-Gift Here we have an inexhaustible treasure of the reality and an inexpressible deepening of the concept of person in God, which only divine Revelation makes known to us.” [§ 10].
I like St. John Paul II’s elaboration on Bonaventure and Aquinas, calling the Holy Spirit “Person-Love” and “Person-Gift.” Such language brings in the “personal” nature of the Holy Spirit.
What is the temple?
To understand the reality of St. Paul’s teaching that we Christians are “temples of the Holy Spirit” we need to understand something about a temple. Most Catholics have probably never set foot in a temple, unless when visiting ancient ruins. Or maybe you have visited a Hindu temple (often called a mandir) or a Buddhist one (called a vihara) or perhaps a Sikh one (gurudwara) or maybe a Shinto one (a jinja) in the modern era. The idea of a temple can seem “vague and muddled” to modern Catholic understanding.
So, what is a temple, in general terms?
Guy Mansini in his 2021 book titled Ecclesiology provides us with a pertinent definition, more importantly, the function of a temple:
Temples are enclosed spaces where gods are said to dwell and where men may meet them and worship them. Does a temple withdraw some space from ordinary and profane use, and dedicate it to the assured and easy realization of a sacred presence for religious purpose? Or does a temple withdraw most space from the unpredictable and dangerous presence of the divine so as to liberate it for man’s use, so to control the perilous presence of the gods within the confines of a sacred grove or a sacred building? A temple does both things: it organizes space. It makes the divine regularly accessible, and it frees up both time and space for the economic and political affairs of men. [p. 97]
Temples are where men encounter the Divine, because God (or the “gods”) dwell within. This is generally true across all religions, with some variations on the them.
Temple of Apollo at Corinth, built ca. 540 BC, from Flickr, used with permission by CC BY-SA 2.0
The temple organizes space, granting access to the Divine. I am reminded of our Souls and Hearts staff member, David Saunders, who frequently says in this memorable quote, “God is in you.”
In the Christian context, as André Villeneuve notes in his article, Anthropic Temple and Nuptial Symbolism in First Corinthians, “Paul specifies [in 1 Corinthians] that not only does the community stand as a temple of the Holy Spirit, but the believer’s body does so as well.” [p. 160]. Each body of each Christian thus becomes the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. And that makes sense, because it is each Christian’s body that organizes the space, that sets the physical limits of this temple of the Holy Spirit, in a way that the soul, mind, or spirit could not.
It is this indwelling of the Holy Spirit in a Christian’s body that makes possible a depth of intimacy that prior to Pentecost was unimaginable. Villeneuve provides a description of the the intimacy that is now possible:
Paul’s practical directives to the Corinthians turn out to be much more than mere casuistic and occasional moral exhortations. Rather, they actually describe the sanctified life of love that ought to flow from the believer’s consecrated nature as temple of the Holy Spirit. 1 Corinthians is rich in a temple mystagogy that describes the intimate indwelling of the deity within the Corinthian believers and is often associated with nuptial/sexual themes: through baptism, the body is consecrated as temple of the Holy Spirit, and it becomes the locus of communion with God, as the physical Temple in Jerusalem was the place of encounter with the divine presence for the Jewish people. [p. 157].
Jesus Himself, in His humanity, with his human body, identified Himself as a temple in John 2:19-21 when he answered the Jewish authorities by saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he spoke of the temple of his body.
How elevated are our physical bodies now? The body as the “locus of community with God.” Our bodies share being a temple with Jesus body. To the first century Christians’ ears, this might have been almost unfathomable – if they had not experienced the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and afterward.
Temples as systems
As a Pharisee, St. Paul was no stranger to the temple in Jerusalem; he know it very well. He would also have known the temples in Corinth, as he lived there for 18 months (see Acts 18:11-12).
I can share with you the first moment that I understood that the temple in Jerusalem was a system – that moment is at the 43:30 mark in episode 163 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast (see below) when Dr. Gerry explained it, and the implications of the insight were tremendous for me as he described all the people and activities that went on in the second temple of Jerusalem.
Episodes 163 (Video Audio) and 164 (Video Audio) of the IIC podcast are all about systems for those who are interested in learning more.
So in investigating the temple as a system further, I read the short 2017 book Understanding the Temple that Jesus Knew by Leen and Kathleen Ritmeyer. I was so surprised by how much of a system the temple was as revealed in the book. Here are some descriptives.
- Size: First off, I was surprised by the sheer size of the temple. The temple ground were roughly 1100 feet by 400 feet, or about 440,000 square feet covering about 10 acres of ground. That is nearly twice the size of St. Peter’s Basilica and the surrounding piazza in Vatican City. The temple’s monumental stairway alone was 210 feet wide.
- People: And the immense size makes sense, as during the holy days estimates varied, but somewhere between an extra 800,000 to 3 million people would come to Jerusalem to worship in the temple.
- Time to build: The initial temple build was small, taking about five years. King Herod the Great greatly expanded the grounds, which took 80 more years.
- Variety of spaces: Beside the Holy of Holies and the altar, there were baths, a slaughterhouse, a chamber for the Nazarites, many gates, a defensive tower, a marketplace with shops, storehouses for wood, oil, and many other products, a chamber for lepers to be examined by priests, the treasury in the court of the women, meeting rooms for the Sanhedrin, etc. And not only is there a variety of spaces, there is a hierarchy of spaces: the Holy of Holies is elevated above the animal holding pens, for example.
- Integration. All these spaces within the temple have a function and work together; all the people have their roles.
- Beauty: The temple was beautiful, with amazing amounts of precious metals, rare wood, and striking stone, all ornately worked.
Image from the World History Encyclopedia, used by permission CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
One can imagine the complexity of all that went into the temple, all the hustle and bustle, all the quiet and calm, all the variety of experiences and relationships.
All that goes on inside us. In our bodies, too. We have complex systems, with our parts.
We are indeed “fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139:14).
Raymond Corriveau in his 2008 article Temple, Holiness, and the Liturgy of Life in Corinthians (PDF download here) captures the dynamism and the relationality that the system of a temple implies when he writes:
“…the Christian is a Temple of the Holy Spirit, who has become such precisely in virtue of the redemption of Christ. Transformed by Christ, the Christian participates in Christ’s life-giving Spirit. The “presence” of the Holy Spirit makes of the body of Christians a consecrated temple with all that that implies—a special sanctity and separation for the service of God. This divine presence is a dynamic presence. It is the moving force of the moral life of Christians, which gives to their whole life a cultic value. The sanctity and service demanded of the believer are no longer essentially ritual. It is the whole existence of the Christian, united to Christ in the Holy Spirit, which becomes the worship of the new Temple. The Christian, in the living out of one’s moral life, becomes a priest in the temple of his own body, dedicated to the service of God. The person’s life, lived in moral purity and holiness, becomes an extension of God’s glory in the world and a constant worship and praise of God.” [p. 166].
Our whole existence as Christians is to be in union with Christ in the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit makes us His temple, by His presence as Person-Gift and Person-Love.
It remains for us to allow the Holy Spirit to transform all of your being, all of the spaces of your temple, all your parts, for those spaces and your parts to become integrated and harmonious, perfected by grace, which builds on your human nature.
Implications
One implication of these realizations, of how precious and important my body is, was that it was easier for me to go and get medical care (and spend a lot of money on it, too) when I was ill with a leg infection (I discussed this in my last reflection, On Being and Doing in a Time of Illness).
It also makes it easier (but not easy) for me to exercise and to take care of my body, as my body is not really mine – it is the temple of the Holy Spirit. As God remarked in Genesis 1:31 in seeing all He had made, now including Adam and Eve in their bodies, that they were “very good.”
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The Resilient Catholics Community is open now for applications
So, are you interested in overcoming the issues in your human formation that keep you from being more fully the temple of the Holy Spirit?
The Resilient Catholics Community is all about overcoming our natural level impediments to a deep and intimate union with God in the three Persons. It’s all about shoring up our natural foundation to live out the three loves in the two great commandments – to love God, our neighbor, and ourselves. It’s about organizing our inner space to make room for the Holy Spirit.
And St. Thomas Aquinas states that the way we love ourselves is the root and form (radix et forma) of the way we will love others. That which we reject within ourselves, we will reject in others.
In order to love ourselves, we must know ourselves. This is not just some self-absorbed navel-gazing exercise. Self-knowledge, especially about our identity in relationship to God is essential. St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, drives home the point when he say in his book Holiness of Life, “If you do not know your own dignity and condition, you cannot value anything at its proper worth.”
So, are you interested in knowing and loving your own parts better so that you can love your neighbor in his or her parts better? And so that you can love God wholeheartedly, with all your parts?
The RCC provides a step-by-step, structured year-long program to walk you through connecting with your parts in love. The RCC is informed by Internal Family Systems and solidly grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person. You’ll begin by taking the PartsFinder Pro, which is designed to help you identify 10-15 of your parts, and their interrelationships inside of you – check out these downloadable PDF sample reports for a man and a woman. And we have our 19-minute experiential exercise to help you discern about applying to the RCC.
RCC registration is open now, until June 30.
Read and watch video testimonials on our RCC landing page from so many of our members to see how the RCC has affected real lives.
The sooner you apply, the faster you’ll get your PFP report. While the report is part of a mutual discernment on whether the RCC would be a good fit for you at this time, it is valuable in and of itself as well. Many past applicants have shared their report with their therapists, spiritual directors, priests, and coaches, helping to better inform their individual work and healing.
And if finances are the issue, please apply for a scholarship. We want this important human formation tool to be available to anyone who is willing to put in the effort in loving God, neighbor, and themselves more fully. Every Catholic who takes up the challenge strengthens the mystical body of Christ.
Listen to Dr. Peter on the Belt of Truth Podcast
The fourth podcast of a five-part series entitled “Understanding the Roots of This Silent Killer” was released today. Dr. Peter continues his discussion of shame with host Josh Bach on the Belt of Truth podcast. Part One, Part Two and Part Three are available as well.
Talk to me
You have questions, I have answers. Readers of these semi-monthly reflections or listeners to the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast, RCC members, anyone who is taking in our Souls and Hearts content can have a private, 10-minute conversation with me most Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM on my cell phone at 317.567.9594. It would be great to connect with you.
Warm regards in Christ and His Mother,
Dr. Peter