Theresa Balick
Staff Writer
A religious sister explained how to use the body and its gifts to glorify God in a talk Sunday to students who pushed the Gentile Gallery’s restricted capacity to its limit.
Sister Consolata Crews, FSGM, who works for the Office of Evangelization in the Diocese of Springfield, gave a talk on the different ways a person can use his or her bodily talents, such as dance or sports, to glorify God.
She said that when a person does something that he or she loves, it glorifies God because it is an outward expression of his love.
“What is something that you’re passionate about that you love?” Crews asked the students. “With your gifts and your talents, you can glorify God because it’s expressing the internal through the external.”
Crews also quoted Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians about the importance of the body as a temple of the Holy Spirit and how a person’s perception of his or her body can affect how that person loves God.
“We start to nitpick ourselves,” Crews said. “So, ‘you must know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is within, the spirit you have received from God.’”
Crews challenged students to change the way they view themselves, stressing the importance of recognizing how God sees each person as opposed to how each person views him or herself.
“How consumed are you with the effort and thought with how much you weigh, what clothes you wear, what people are thinking about you, what you eat, what you don’t eat, is it consuming you?” Crews said. “Or … how much time do you give to listening to the father in heaven and how he sees your body and image and who you are?”
Freshman Elizabeth Trossbach particularly enjoyed how Crews ended her talk, demonstrating to students with a dance to the song “Overwhelmed” by Big Daddy Weave how the body can glorify God and express his love.
“I could just picture the heavenly father looking at her with so much love,” Trossbach said.
Crews’s talk was a continuation of the Gift of Human Sexuality Symposium, sponsored by Franciscan Life.