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The Church as a Spiritual Gym: Fr. Ted on How the Body Is Trained in the Faith
What the video says
The speaker calls the church a spiritual gym. He says the faith is not only in the mind or heart: Orthodox Christians physically do prostrations, fast, attend services, light candles and kiss icons. He describes this as psychosomatic training through ascetic practices. When people do not engage in these practices, he says, they also tend to neglect other things in their lives, creating an imbalance.
Key moments
- The church is quite literally a spiritual gym, not something esoteric.
- The faith is not all in the mind or heart: people physically do prostrations, fast, attend services, light candles and kiss icons.
- This is psychosomatic training through ascetic practices.
- People who do not engage in these practices tend to neglect other things in their lives, which creates an imbalance.
Fr. Ted Paraskevopoulos, speaking on Episode 81 of the Orthodox Health Podcast, describes the church as a spiritual gym. He argues that the body is catechized along with the mind: what we repeatedly do with the body shapes attention, appetite, endurance, humility, and eventually what we learn to love. This is why Orthodox worship is so physical. Christians do prostrations, fast, attend services, light candles, and kiss icons.
He calls this psychosomatic training through ascetic practices, and says the Christian life forms a person through participation, repetition, restraint, effort, and communion. We are being trained, he says, long before every lesson can be perfectly explained. From this he draws a consequence for how we think about health.
Training the body cannot become a separate self-improvement project running alongside the spiritual life. Spiritual formation also cannot be reduced to having correct thoughts while the body stays irrelevant. The whole person is being formed. That is where askesis becomes bigger than religious discipline: it is training ordered toward becoming the kind of human being capable of offering himself to God.
He adds that when people do not engage in these practices, they tend to neglect other things in their lives, which creates an imbalance. The episode is titled When Life Falls Apart, You Need a Bunker.
Main points
- Fr. Ted calls the church a spiritual gym, not something esoteric.
- The faith is not only in the mind or heart: Orthodox Christians physically do prostrations, fast, attend services, light candles, and kiss icons.
- Repeated bodily practice shapes attention, appetite, endurance, humility, and what we learn to love.
- Askesis is training ordered toward becoming a person capable of offering himself to God, not just religious discipline.
- Neglecting these practices tends to go with neglecting other areas of life, creating an imbalance.