IIC 13: Bodyset: Loving and Reverencing Our Bodies – With Dr. Andrew Sodergren

Dr. Andrew Sodergren returns to guide us what it means to love our bodies, and we discuss psychological impediments to loving our bodies.

[00:00:11] Dr. Peter: Welcome to our podcast, Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem. Let us seize the day. This podcast helps us rise up. It helps us to embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis. And it does so by being thoroughly grounded in a Catholic worldview. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski with Souls and Hearts at soulsandhearts.com. It is excellent to be with you again today, and thank you for tuning in. This is episode 13, and we are releasing this episode on May 1st, the Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker. It is titled BodySet: Loving and Reverencing Our Bodies. And as a special guest, we have Dr. Andrew Sodergren of Ruah Woods in Cincinnati, Ohio. Dr. Sodergren, Dr. Andrew is a clinical psychologist. He is the clinical director at Ruah Woods, which is a ministry of the Theology of the Body in Cincinnati. He is also a longtime friend of mine, a dear friend, a dear colleague, and it is a pleasure and an honor to be with you again. We’ve had just, we’ve had some feedback come in from our previous show that was very positive and so very excited to have you back with us, Dr. Andrew.

[00:01:25] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Thank you, Dr. Peter. Very happy to be here with you for another episode.

[00:01:30] Dr. Peter: Yeah. And we are talking about loving and reverencing our bodies. This is really interesting because, you know, you hear about loving your body and, you know, that’s kind of popular out there right now. But this whole concept of reverencing our bodies, it’s like takes it to a whole different level. So I’m really fascinated to hear what you’re going to share with us today. And to be with you and explore that together with our audience.

[00:02:01] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah, I’m happy to talk about it as a theology of the body ministry or being involved with the theology of body ministry. This is a topic that, you know, I think about a lot. It’s something that’s kind of near and dear to me. So I’m really delighted to be able to share some thoughts on this theme with you and with the listeners. You launched this whole segment of episodes on bodyset by talking about loving our bodies. And you also talked about seeing our bodies as Catholic, which is really, really provocative idea, you know. What does that mean to see our bodies as Catholic?

[00:02:38] Dr. Peter: Right, right, right. Yeah. Because we can see our we can see ourselves as Catholics. But then all of a sudden, when you say, my body is Catholic, there can be like this disconnect, like, whoa, whoa, what is that? Which is like really interesting to think about.

[00:02:53] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Right, right. And there are certain parts of my body that definitely aren’t Catholic. I mean, it’s funny, but I think a lot of us probably feel that way.

[00:03:05] Dr. Peter: Oh man, I’m certain that that feeling is out there. Oh yeah. Yeah, sure. 

[00:03:12] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: So if some parts that are more Catholic than others, kind of like segments of the church, I guess, right? I mean.

[00:03:20] Dr. Peter: Yeah, anyway, we are many parts. We are all one body.

[00:03:22] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: We are many parts. Yes. There’s a certain analogy there, right? So anyway, so coming back to this theme of loving the body, what does it mean to love our body? I would like to to share a few thoughts from theology of the body, which I’m sure many of your listeners are familiar with. This corpus of teaching comes from John Paul II. Just very, very brief background. He wrote this as a text. He was going to publish as a book, when he was a cardinal in Poland. And it was largely in response to the whole crisis over Humanae Vitae and birth control. And so this was his attempt to respond to that, that crisis. Basically, he wanted to give the church a renewed understanding of the human body, human sexuality, and human love in the divine plan, to support the church’s teachings on things like birth control. And then something unexpected happened. And that was namely, he got elected to the papacy.

[00:04:28] Dr. Peter: Like you do. Yeah. You know.

[00:04:29] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Just happens sometimes, you know, going along, writing books and all of a sudden wake up one morning, you’re wearing a white cassock. So then he decides to publish, instead of publishing this as a book, he breaks it up and uses it for his Wednesday audiences over about the next five years, and eventually gets put back together in book form and translated and retranslated, etc., etc., etc., to its current, the current shape that we have it. And this is a dense teaching. It’s challenging for lay readers and scholars alike. There’s still a lot of disagreement about how to interpret some aspects of it. I’m just going to share a few basic concepts that are really helpful to me, and help keep me grounded in my understanding of what it means to love the body in a Catholic way. So one of the things that he says in the early part of theology of the body, which is a little bit novel, but I think makes a lot of sense, is that the body, in a sense, is the sacrament of the person. Now he’s using sacrament here, obviously in, you could say in a lowercase “s” form, not one of the seven sacraments. But there is a certain sacramentality of the body that he’s speaking of. And what he means by that is if you think about the function of a sacrament, it makes something visible in an efficacious way. It makes something really present that is is otherwise invisible and mysterious. And that’s the sense that he’s using the word sacrament here. So when he’s talking about the sacrament of the body, he’s saying that the body in a sense makes present or reveals the person, this reality, the reality that we call person or personhood.

[00:06:26] Dr. Peter: Okay, so that means that my body is a way of making me present to you, correct?

[00:06:32] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: That’s right. And in that way, we meet, Dr. Peter, you and I meet in and through our bodies. Without our bodies, we would not have a point of connection.

[00:06:44] Dr. Peter: Ah. So it’s essential to relationship.

[00:06:46] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: It is.

[00:06:47] Dr. Peter: For a human being.

[00:06:49] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: For a human being. Yes. Right. And that’s what makes human beings unique, in fact, is that all other persons, namely angels and the persons of the Trinity, they relate to each other in a direct spiritual way, whereas human beings, our experience of communion is mediated in and through our bodies.

[00:07:10] Dr. Peter: So this whole thing, like when we pray, it’s a bodily thing and when I talk to you, it’s a bodily thing. And it’s not just about physical contact. It’s not about hugging or, it’s about any type of relationship. It’s happening through our bodies.

[00:07:24] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: That is correct. That’s right. Right. Yeah. And I’m glad you mentioned prayer because we often think of prayer as a purely spiritual activity, and it certainly is spiritual, but it’s never divorced from the body, you know. This is so interesting to me why, as Catholics, more than any other denomination of Christians that I know of, are so particular about how we use our bodies in prayer and in worship. You know, we kneel, we sit, we stand, we cross ourselves. We do all these things. We have all these little gestures and postures and things that we do because we believe that the body is integral to all of this. What we do with our body really matters. Because going back to John Paul II, what you do to the body, you do to the person. Right. And so what I do with my body is, is a reflection of my personhood. It makes me present. It makes present in a visible way what my intentions are, what my attitudes are, and what I do to the bodies of others again conveys my attitude towards them as a person. Yeah. So this idea of the body being a being sacramental is, I think, really, really helpful, especially when you see a living human body, you are seeing a person, and even more so, a person who is called into communion with God. So we’re seeing a person revealed in a body that has a relationship with God. And if this person is someone, a Christian, in the state of grace, in a sense, we are seeing God in this person’s soul revealed through their bodies.

[00:09:08] Dr. Peter: Right? So whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers that you do to me. Right. We’re connected into this mystical body of Christ too, right? So our bodies are part of that body of Christ because they’re obviously part of us, right?

[00:09:24] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: That’s right.

[00:09:27] Dr. Peter: This isn’t some negligible thing, then. We can’t just, you know, sort of want to leave our bodies behind. I mean, that actually is part of, like, a number of heresies, right? Manichaeism and so forth, where there was a devaluing of the body. Right? That’s correct. And that was actually a huge deal that Saint Augustine fought against, back in the fourth century. 

[00:09:46] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: And it seems to be something that we struggle with, you know, kind of cyclically throughout church history. It seems to come up in new forms every few hundred years or so. Some new mistaken idea about the body and about the material world. And so we continue continually have to go back and try to exercise these demons, so to speak. And for some, it may sound strange to think of the body in this way. And just to share one little quote from John Paul II that I think helps set this straight. He says, “Through the fact that the Word of God became flesh, the body entered theology, I would say, through the main door.” So what he’s saying there is that we have to remember that God, who is infinite goodness, infinite holiness, took on our human flesh. And so our human body, a human body like ours, is participating in divinity and will do so forever. And so that conveys, in addition to the natural dignity that’s there, because we’re made in God’s image. And even more abundant dignity to the body, because God himself took one up and really joined himself with our human nature, even our bodily human nature.

[00:11:15] Dr. Peter: That’s like elevating the human body beyond all imagining.

[00:11:21] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Beyond all imagining. Yes.

[00:11:23] Dr. Peter: Yeah. In the person of Christ.

[00:11:26] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Right. In the person of Christ. Exactly. And so what this ultimately leads to in John Paul’s writing is a extended reflection on how we should regard the body of other people, other people’s bodies. He’s, remember, his main thrust here is about the relationship between man and woman and love and sexuality. And so he’s going to eventually get around to this idea of reverence towards the human body. And he means this primarily in our reverence towards other people’s bodies. But I would argue, and I think with good basis, that if we’re going to extend reverence to other people’s bodies, we have to extend that to ourselves as well. And we can’t abstract ourselves out as if my body is somehow less than everybody else’s bodies, like we all have the same.

[00:12:19] Dr. Peter: Yeah. The one body that doesn’t need to be reverenced is my body. Right. That just doesn’t compute, right?

[00:12:25] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: We do see this a lot, don’t we though, Dr. Peter? I mean, in ourselves and our patients too. You know, it’s like, oh, sure, God loves everybody. But does God actually love me?

[00:12:36] Dr. Peter: Yeah, there’s an asterisk, right? Like a footnote.

[00:12:39] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: A footnote, right. Except for this person and maybe a couple others. So God loves everyone. It means God loves me and he loves you, Dr. Peter. Yes. I just want to share that with you today.

[00:12:55] Dr. Peter: I feel very affirmed. Thank you.

[00:12:58] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: But also that God loves our bodies, right? He loves our bodies. He loves all of us. So much so that he wanted to be united to us. So this idea of reverence, he connects it with the gift of the Holy Spirit, fear of the Lord, or in the Latin pietas, which, you know, can be translated as piety, or I think better reverence. This attitude of reverence. And I don’t know if you caught it, by the way, but this came up actually in the readings for Mass on Sunday. The second reading from First Peter. He says, “Conduct yourselves with reverence during the time of your sojourning.” And some translations have that as fear, as in like fear of the Lord. It’s the same concept as piety, fear of the Lord, reverence, this almost awe that we should have in the presence of something holy. This is what he says we should have the attitude we should have towards the human body. This is startling, right? This is startling because as we talked about last time, it’s hard for us even just to accept our bodies, let alone treat them with this attitude of reverence. Right. There’s so many things that can get in the way from certainly accepting our bodies, but even more reverencing them.

[00:14:21] Dr. Peter: Yeah. And this is stuff that happens because of our psychological baggage, our history, our trauma, you know, things like that, that we talked a lot about in the last episode. We got into why it can be hard. Anything that makes it hard for us to accept our bodies is going to make it hard for us to reverence our bodies. But I think there are some people that do have like this grudging acceptance of their body. They’re going to say, okay, this is what I’ve been given. I know I’m supposed to see it as a gift. They kind of treat their bodies maybe stoically, you know, but they haven’t seen what we’re talking about. And I’m curious just about like, what gets in the way of that vision. I mean, first of all, the first thing comes to my mind, just as I’m thinking about it right now, is that it’s divinely revealed. Like, we’re not going to know this without divine revelation, right? Like it’s not going to be apparent to the unaided human reason, right? 

[00:15:16] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah. I think, you know, human reason can get around to most of what we talked about last time around accepting the body. It’s a good idea to accept my body and even to some degree, to love my body, to take good care of it, right? But to go to the point of reverence, I only think we really get to that through the Incarnation. That we have to really take to heart what God did for us by taking on human flesh, living among among us, and even suffering and dying for us. That in all of that, he brought such a level of dignity and honor to the human body, that it’s because of that, that we’re inspired and moved to this level of reverence. I think that’s that’s really crucial. And so as we talk about and work on obstacles to reverence, a lot of it, I think, goes back to, unraveling those obstacles goes back to being able to really appreciate God’s love for me and what he’s done for me, and that he wants a relationship with me that includes my body. And certainly in our human experience, all the experiences we’ve had, of how other people have treated our bodies, especially parents and maybe intimate partners or, you know, any significant relational experience we’ve had, can create wounds and blockages that make it hard for us to really see the body as a good thing that God would find lovable. And that, you know, creates limitations for us in our relationship with God.

[00:16:56] Dr. Peter: So what I’m thinking is, you know, so the faculty of imagination, we might have to lead with that. We may have to imagine this. Like, or be open to imagining God loving us in our bodies. Like we may have to actually visualize that in some way. We have to be just really open to that. And that may be something that we just have never done.

[00:17:15] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: That’s a great point. You know, and I often encourage that actually in prayer and we incorporate this into, you know, the work I do in session with patients sometimes too, of let’s say, for instance, you know, we’re working with some painful memory of something that happened in childhood and bringing oneself as a child at that age to Jesus and prayerfully imagining how he would respond and how he would interact with myself at that age, including how he might touch or not touch me. Things like that. I also will sometimes encourage people to meditate on the Scriptures in the Gospels where the children, the disciples, are trying to prevent the children from coming to Jesus, right? It says in, I think it’s in all the synoptics. I could be wrong about that, Matthew, Mark, Luke. But I know that at least in a couple of them, he mentioned specifically that he laid his hands on them. And that’s kind of the end of that little episode is that, you know, after he rebukes the disciples and says, “Let the children come to me.” And so forth, the children come to him and he blesses them and he lays his hands on them. So I think it can be extremely fruitful to to meditate with that. I often invite my patients to do it in sort of two ways. The first is to put themselves in the scene as one of the disciples, but also seeing their child self as one of the children, as if to say, I’m trying to convince Jesus that my child self should not come to him. So you see what I’m doing there. I’m trying to get them to enact this more explicitly, right? Jesus, you don’t want that part of me, right? You don’t want that part of me. And trying to tell that part to, you know, you don’t want to go to him, right? Because he’s going to reject you or whatever. He’s going to hurt you. He doesn’t have time for you, etc., etc.. And so to pray with that and really work through that until they get to the point where they feel some softening of, okay, well, maybe it’s okay to let that part of me go to Jesus. And ultimately, working up to that point of, really from the perspective of the child self, what would it be like to go to Jesus and to feel him put his hands on you? And to touch you in that way with all of his divine love present in that very incarnate moment.

[00:19:56] Dr. Peter: And the wild card in all of this, when I do things like this with my clients, is that Jesus is going to do things too, because this isn’t some sort of like, you know, just some sort of reflection exercise or something. This is prayer. And God, our Lord, gets active in this kind of thing, you know. And it’s amazing what can happen in those kinds of in those kinds of encounters, you know, in a session and when people do this on their own. Because this is where we’re bringing together both the natural and the spiritual realms. You know, it’s like you’re working in both, right? Because the impediments are in both. And so it’s really powerful. It’s really powerful to bring those both together to understand that there, there’s, you know.

[00:20:38] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yeah, that’s a great point. Yeah. Because we don’t know, when we open up like that, we don’t know what God’s going to do with us in that time of prayer, right? I mean, we know how the story is in Scripture, right? So we have some basis, but he may respond to us and act and work with us in that imagery in ways that we don’t expect and are surprising, right? And so for some people, it can make them afraid to try.

[00:21:12] Dr. Peter: And it can be really comforting to have another person there sometimes too, to kind of be with you. And this is, you know, these kinds of things are not unique to therapy. I mean, there’s nothing necessarily inherently therapy-based in all of this. This is prayer, right? So sometimes, you know, people can do this. And you want to be careful and not overextend your reach, right? If you’re really working with somebody who’s got a trauma history and you’re not trained in doing like proper trauma work and they’re experiencing, you know, reactions, they’re kind of flashing back. And so you want to be really respectful of that and not go where you’re not supposed to. But for a lot of us, you know, if you’re in a prayer group or you pray with your spouse, I mean, this kind of stuff can happen. And it doesn’t take a professional to be with you on that, right? Otherwise we’d have to, you know, we’d have to have a clinic at every corner, you know, or something like that. And we don’t need that. So. Right. So yeah, I mean, this is accessible stuff. That’s what Souls and Hearts is all about. We’re trying to like bring this, you know, this psychologically-informed approach to removing these obstacles to relating with God to the public. That’s really what that’s all about. Just kind of like the Theology of the Body ministry is trying to bring this body of work from Saint John Paul II to the people as well.

[00:22:31] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Absolutely. Yeah. And we’ve already touched on a few things that listeners can try on their own, in prayer. And we’ll come back, I have a couple other suggestions that we’ll come back to in a little bit. But I do want to say a little bit more about this idea of reverence and kind of what it looks like, in sort of concrete fashion. And I think a helpful way to do that is to think about the liturgy, our sacred liturgy as Catholics. And if we think of the way that we regard the sacred vessels at Mass, the chalice, you can think of the monstrance, even the tabernacle itself, not the tabernacle with the hosts inside of it, but the tabernacle itself. That these things are designed for a sacred purpose. So there’s a great deal of care and artistry that goes into them. They’re, you know, the church tells us they should be made out of precious materials, and they’re set aside for special use. And there are norms and rights around how they are to be commissioned and decommissioned, and things like this. And so there’s all this care and they’re adorned too. They’re adorned, you know, with care, to make them as beautiful as we can.

[00:23:59] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: And I think this is a good manifestation of what this attitude of reverence looks like. And I don’t think it’s going too far to say that that’s how it should be. That’s how our attitude should be to our bodies. Because after all, Jesus comes to us in and through our bodies. That’s why we have the seven sacraments. They each involve the body. He washes our bodies in the font of baptism. He anoints us with oil. And he feeds us with his own body and blood. Right? We literally consume him. He enters into our mouth and we eat him. And it’s all of these acts are both bodily and spiritual acts at the same time, right? And Saint Paul, of course, refers to the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit. So we often talk about, you know, the dwelling, the indwelling of God in the soul by sanctifying grace, which is absolutely true. But we can’t divorce that from the body. Our souls, you know, are intimately united with the body and are always meant to. Like we sometimes can fall into thinking that at death, you know, the idea of the soul separating the body, it’s like it’s liberation, when in fact this, this is more like a, you know, like a deformation or an unnatural rupture, is a perfect way to put it. That’s right. Because, you know, after all, we’re eventually, the end goal that we all hope for is the resurrection of the body, you know, in which we receive our glorified bodies. And so the human soul is always meant to be incarnate, always meant to be embodied. And so our union with God, while it’s primarily in the soul in a certain sense, is meant to be an incarnate communion. And that’s why he gives us the sacraments. And I think that helps us to begin to visualize, okay, what would reverence towards the body really look like? So like we care for the sacred vessels, we need to care for our own bodies. We need to take care of them to make sure that we’re doing our part to keep them healthy and to keep them functioning in the way that they were designed to function, right. And we can fall into neglect and we can also fall into overindulgence or we can fall into being overly controlled or, you know, harsh towards the body. And all of these, you know, are natural tendencies in a way, they’re very common. But they fall a little bit short of that reverence that I think that we’re directed towards.

[00:26:52] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: And this is true of how we treat our bodies. It’s also true of how we treat others’ bodies. And one other point with that I wanted to throw out there is how we adorn the body, right? I mentioned how sacred vessels are meant to be beautiful and great care is put into their making, to make them beautiful. And everything with the liturgy is supposed to have a certain beauty and awe related to it. And I think the same is true of the body in a certain way, that it’s actually a very good and Catholic thing to have some — properly ordered now — attention to the body, adorning the body, beautifying the body, displaying it in a reverent, respectful way. And this also gets into modesty that the way that we clothe our bodies, the way that we present ourselves, you know, in regards to how we dress can either debase the body, profane the body, or it can present it in a dignified and reverent sort of way. And John Paul admits that there’s a strong cultural aspect to this. What may be considered modest in one culture may not be exactly the same in another culture.

[00:28:15] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: And that’s, you know, due to historical conditions and climate and all sorts of things. But it’s also true that in a certain sense, the parts of the body that we’re most concerned about covering are in a sense the most sacred in a certain sense, because they’re involved in the acts of reproducing or bringing new life, cooperating with God to bring new life into the world. Right, which is one of the most sacred things that we do. And so this whole attitude of reverence should give us pause to think about how I care for my body, how I dress my body, the kind of self care that I engage in. There’s an error of going too far into vanity in which I’m really about, what I get out of this, the kind of attention that I draw to myself, trying to gain the favor of others in a disordered sort of way. Right? And that’s not what we’re talking about. But we are talking about glorifying God by taking care of and presenting our bodies in a dignified way. And that’s really what we’re getting at. And this also applies, of course, to how we treat other people’s bodies, right? We can look at another person’s body as merely an object, as something for us to do what we want with.

[00:29:45] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: And when we fall into this attitude, we end up treating people in less than dignified ways, either as either as objects of desire or objects of repulsion, objects that we would like to control for our own purposes, rather than truly reverencing them as the persons that they are. And this should give us all pause. We all fall into this, every single one of us. And there’s a need here to reflect and to work with God to understand, how do I fall short of this call to reverence my body and to reverence the bodies of others? And I think to unpack that, it’s helpful to think about, again, Christ’s body, how he used his body through his life on earth. One way to do this is just to reflect on Christ’s hands. For instance, how did Christ use his hands as he was going through his 33 years or so on earth? Hands that healed and comforted, hands that drove out demons, hands that broke bread, hands that built things, as a carpenter.

[00:31:15] Dr. Peter: Right. This is released on May 1st, right. Saint Joseph the Worker. Right. How those hands learned, you can imagine Saint Joseph’s hands on Jesus’ hands, showing him hand to hand how this is done. You know, at the workbench.

[00:31:29] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yes. What a beautiful image. Absolutely. And also all the things that Jesus did with his hands, in a sense, have this extra special dignity now. And many of the same things that we do in various ways. But there are also ways in which, you know, we use our hands that are unbecoming, so to speak, of our dignity and the dignity of others. And we can also, of course, you know, still being near to Good Friday, reflect on how Jesus’s hands suffered for us and how we sometimes in our bodies accept suffering and can offer that for others. Right? And so thinking of our bodies in relation to Christ’s body in this way, I think really helps to develop that attitude of reverence. And it helps shine a light, too, on where I maybe habitually tend to fall short of that.

[00:32:23] Dr. Peter: So we may have to lead with the intellect and the imagination here. You know, we may not just feel it. And then from feeling it go into, you know, understanding it. We may need to like, actually use our imagination and deliberately meditate on these things, direct our thoughts along these lines in order to sort of lead the way for the rest of ourselves to come along.

[00:32:46] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: I think that’s true. And, you know, and that’s why I hope this podcast is helpful to the listeners and kind of spurring them on, in that regard. 

[00:32:58] Dr. Peter: Can I just interrupt you real quick there? Because we did have a listener, Liz in Indiana. She wrote, this is about the exercise that you did in the last episode. And Liz says, “I really enjoyed that exercise with Dr. Sodergren. Very relaxing and affirming. Today, I love my body. I do wonder if that changes from day to day. Probably depending on what might be freed to come up.” Right. So she’s recognizing, Liz is recognizing that her attitude towards her body can vary, like from hour to hour, day to day, you know, and this is like kind of really an interesting thing because I think a lot of us have had that experience. Like there are times where we might be really disappointed in our bodies, not accepting them. And other times we’re like really appreciative of our bodies, you know?

[00:33:47] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Absolutely.

[00:33:48] Dr. Peter: Yeah. There’s all kinds of things that can go into that.

[00:33:49] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: That’s one of the unique things too, about human beings is that we change. Angels don’t change. They’re constant, in a way. Human beings change. And it’s because we are bodily. We’re bound by space and time, and so we change. The body itself changes and our attitudes about the body can change as well, depending on all sorts of things. So yeah, it’s a certain kind of thing that it’s an ongoing work for us. It’s just, I would lump it in with the ongoing work of interior integration and ultimately sanctification. You know, as you, you kind of talked about towards the end of the last episode, the whole need to be purified of our attitudes towards our bodies, either in this life or the next.

[00:34:44] Dr. Peter: Right? Sort of, you can pay me now or pay me later as far as like the, you know, resolving these things, right? You know, you need to work through it now or work through it later, right?

[00:34:55] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: So yeah. I think that, kind of the take home, one of the take home points for me from theology of the body. And this isn’t a term that JPII uses explicitly, I don’t think, maybe he does and I’m ripping it off, but I can’t recall if he does. And that is that the body is liturgical. That’s kind of what I’ve been saying, and it’s just a nice summary. The body is liturgical. It’s created for divine worship, to participate in divine worship. And anything designed and created for divine worship needs to be treated with the utmost care and respect.

[00:35:38] Dr. Peter: Yeah. Well, I’m really curious about, like, what do you guys do at Ruah Woods? Like what’s that all about over there, that you guys have got going on at that ministry?

[00:35:54] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Well, Ruah Woods is a Theology of the Body ministry here in Cincinnati. We have been in existence now for just over ten years. And it was founded by a group of lay Catholics of their own initiative to bring Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body to the Greater Cincinnati area. And at first that was primarily done through classes and workshops and various on site programs. And gradually a call was discerned, to move the ministry in a slightly different direction. We still do some of that, but our focus now is primarily on bringing Theology to the Body into classrooms in our Catholic schools throughout the nation, and maybe even beyond. So over the last several years, we’ve been developing a Theology of the Body curriculum that is age appropriate for kindergartners all the way through 12th grade. And it’s designed to be integrated into what Catholic school teachers are already doing. And we’re trying to get this out there as widely as possible into our Catholic schools and also into the hands of homeschoolers. And so if anyone’s interested in learning more about that curriculum, you can go to RuahWoodsPress.com. Now “ruah” is the Hebrew word for spirit or breath, and it’s Ruah, then Woods, RuahWoodsPress.com. Now, the other half of our ministry, so to speak, is what I do. And that is the psychological services branch. And we provide psychological services, psychotherapy, psychological assessment, you know, to a whole age range of people presenting issues, but based in a Catholic anthropology. So trying to see the person from the standpoint of our Catholic faith. And we are based here in Cincinnati for those services. The curriculum, of course, goes everywhere. But in terms of psych services, for now, we’re locally based.

[00:38:13] Dr. Peter: Locally based. Yeah. So basically you’re trying to take everything that we’ve been talking about here, about accepting the body, loving the body, referencing the body and getting that out, both through the curriculum that you were talking about for the K through 12 crowd, and then also on the psych side where you’re the clinical director, you’ve got a couple psychologists with you, right? And that’s a beautiful thing. And I will say that I have frequently referred to you and to your other clinicians at Ruah Woods because we’re kind of neighbors, right? We’re only like 90 minutes away from each other.

[00:38:43] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Yes, we are.

[00:38:45] Dr. Peter: So that has been a great gift. It was a great thing when you moved to Cincinnati. A little backstory. I did recruit Dr. Andrew here pretty hard to come to Indianapolis back in the day. But he found himself in Cincinnati, which was great, because at that time, I didn’t have somebody to refer to there either. So that was good. I’m still getting over the rejection. You know, I’m still getting over the rejection. It’s okay. It’s something we’ll work out, you know.

[00:39:18] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Well, what’s that old saying about, you know, good fences make good neighbors or something like that, right?

[00:39:25] Dr. Peter: Yeah. Setting those limits and boundaries, you know, you’re doing it, you’re working through that.

[00:39:29] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: 90 minutes, 90 minutes between us just seems to work really well.

[00:39:36] Dr. Peter: It’s funny. Dr. Gerry Crete, who was a co-founder of Souls and Hearts, the CEO of Souls and Hearts. He actually has a, I don’t know if you know this, Dr. Andrew, but he has a course that’s just released a week or two ago on what happens when pornography is discovered in the marriage. It’s really geared to both the husband and the wife. And that’s available at soulsandhearts.com. We are really encouraging people to register for this podcast, to keep up with what’s happening. We have also just released a new course called The Catholics Guide to Choosing a Therapist. So this is 90 minutes of Dr. Gerry and I kind of going through like all the ins and outs, all the little details about choosing a therapist. And so, you know, any of you in the Cincinnati area could go through that course and be totally ready to go in and, you know, if you need therapy to go to Ruah Woods, but it’s actually got a lot of exercises, you know, about, like just helping people step by step, baby step by baby step, through the whole process of finding a therapist.

[00:40:36] Dr. Peter: So I also want to let people know that starting next week, the frequency of this podcast is going to go down to once a week. We’re going to do longer episodes, but that’s going to free me up to really build up the community aspects of it because until now, it’s been kind of a hub and spoke model where the email address has been the hub, where each of you have been coming into contact with me. Many of you have been coming into contact with me. And I’ve really wanted to find a way for us to be able to communicate together more like in a web rather than in a hub and spoke model. So I’ve been putting a lot of energy into how do we build the infrastructure on the website so that we can come together as a group. There’s going to be a lot of exciting things happening with that, in the next few weeks. So please keep that in your prayer. And so with that, I don’t know, any final things you want to leave our listeners with, Dr. Andrew, what do you think?

[00:41:29] Dr. Andrew Sodergren: Anything I’m just so grateful for you, Dr. Peter, for Souls and Hearts, for the opportunity to be with you on these two episodes. And I hope they’ve been helpful to the listeners. And maybe, God willing, we can do this again sometime.

[00:41:44] Dr. Peter: I would love to be able to do this again sometime. If you have questions for Dr. Andrew, you can email them to crisis@soulsandhearts.com. And I will personally make sure that they get to him. And you can also call the voicemail for this podcast, which is (317) 567-9594. We definitely want to stay in touch. If there was something in here that really moved you or something that you thought was really great, or something that you thought was really problematic or off, let us know. We’re looking for feedback of all kinds. And I’m also very grateful to you, Dr. Andrew, for taking the time and sharing with us your clinical experience and your wisdom. And so I definitely want to do all kinds of joint projects with you in the future with Souls and Hearts. Hope you’re a frequent contributor to what we’re trying to do and getting that word out. So thank you again, my dear friend. And with that, we will call it a wrap. And we’ll invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.