Every year, I aim to be productive on New Year’s Day: eat a balanced diet, pray the rosary, read the breviary, and jog in the evening to burn the Christmas calories.
But to sneeze, cough, and nurse a low-grade fever on the first day of the year?
I experienced exactly that on Wednesday, January 1, as we entered 2025. It was a bummer.
I ended up taking an Indonesian herbal remedy, drinking lots of water, and curling up in bed as I listened to the audio version of the Office of Readings. I read a few pages of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, but managed to pray only the first five beads of the rosary.
It was not the New Year’s Day I imagined.
But it was the wake-up call I needed, having downplayed the need to rest last year. Christmas week itself, due to the influx of religious content, was one of my busiest weeks as religion reporter.
It was a fact, with the wall clock as my witness, that I spent more hours working in 2024 than I did in my previous years at Rappler. By my personal choice, even most of my weekends weren’t spared as I worked on this Sunday column. I was excited returning to full-time reportorial work last year that I couldn’t quit working.
My fever on New Year’s Day, however, was but a symptom of another illness — a societal plague.
We are a world that knows no rest, reaching our dreams, building our names, or helping our families survive this tumultuous world, sadly, at the expense of our bodies.
Many of us don’t listen to our bodies enough. Is it tired? Can it breathe? Does it need more hours of sleep instead of four or five?
Many of us don’t respect our body enough.
We understand that many of us don’t have the privilege to rest as much as others do. We need to toil for our families, we need to work hard for our future. But we need to care for our bodies to the greatest extent possible because it is a duty, not an option, if we want to live long.
Disrespect for one’s body is also the root cause of many other forms of disrespect.
If we are deaf to our own bodies, how can we listen to the groanings of others? How can we be sensitive to a tired coworker? How can we empathize with a waiter who, after a long day at work, mixed up our orders and begged for our patience? How can we be truly humble in the face of our weaknesses?
Respect for one’s body — its potentials and limits, its strengths and frailties — is the first step to respecting other living creatures, who are fragile bodies as well.
It is also the first step to acknowledging the source of our being, that we are not the be-all and end-all of our existence.
I begin 2025 with this testament to human fragility because only then can we find our true strength.
We can learn this from the world’s great religions.
In Islam, the Qur’an (82:7) states that it is God “who created thee, fashioned thee in due proportion, and gave thee a just bias.” Life, then, is a gift from God, and human beings are not absolute owners of their bodies but are God’s stewards.
Dr. Tesneem Alkiek, director of content strategy at the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research in Texas, emphasized how “our bodies are a trust from God.”
She quotes one of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad: “There are two particular blessings that people miss out on or don’t take advantage of: health and free time.”
From the Confucian text Xiaojing (The Classic of Filial Piety), we read that honoring our bodies is also a way of honoring our parents: “Our body, skin, and hair are all received from our parents; we dare not injure them. This is the first priority in filial duty.”
In the Bible, we read that the body “is a temple of the Holy Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 6:19)
Pope Francis, in the 2018 documentary Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, emphasized the need to take care of our health. The Holy Father said: “Today, really, we live with the accelerator down from morning to night. This ruins mental health, spiritual health, and physical health. More so: it affects and destroys family, and therefore society.”
He cited a Jewish practice, adopted by Christians, to rest on the Sabbath, that is, at least once a week. That is “out of gratitude, to worship God, to spend time with the family, to play, to do all these things.”
“We are not machines! So when we live such a fast-paced life, we lose our most human gestures. A husband forgets the day he got engaged to his wife, parents forget to caress their children or the grandparents, because there’s no time for a caress, there’s no time for tenderness. There’s no time to enjoy life, which is so beautiful!” the Pope said.
One of my favorite authors, the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, writes in his classic book Living Buddha, Living Christ: “In modern life, people think that their body belongs to them and they can do anything they want to it…. This is one of the manifestations of individualism.”
“But, according to the teachings of the emptiness, non-self, and interbeing, your body is not yours alone. It also belongs to your ancestors, your parents, future generations, and all other living beings. Everything, even the trees and the clouds, has come together to bring about the presence of your body,” he said.
Nhat Hanh stressed, “Keeping your body healthy is the best way to express your gratitude to the whole cosmos and to all ancestors, and also not to betray future generations.”
The topic of “ownership” of the body is always a touchy topic. What about “my body, my choice”? Don’t I have autonomy over my body? Why should I allow Allah, Jesus, Confucius, or Buddha to dictate on me?
I believe that “my body, my choice” is true. Freedom is the greatest attribute of the human person.
However, we need to situate “my body” and “my choice” in the context of the big picture.
Yes, I have the right to make choices about my own body. But my personal choices need to be informed by a wider view of the world. Where did my body come from? Why am I on earth? How will my choices affect the people around me, the children who will come after me? I do have autonomy, but is it autonomy as creator or creature, as owner or caretaker?
We cannot live as if it were “I and I alone” in this world. We need to acknowledge that we are part of a whole.
This 2025, may we learn to listen to the body, and listen to the soul of a world in anguish. – Rappler.com
The Wide Shot is a Sunday column on religion and public life. If you have suggested topics or feedback, let us know in the faith chat room of the Rappler Communities app.
