That one about the body...Part 1
How the body images God, what it means to be male and female, and why it matters.
There I was, a naïve and yet seasoned freshman in college. Naïve to all I did not yet know, seasoned in all that I had already experienced. The marriage of the two propelling me to a journey of life and faith that continues today.
I was 6 months into my first year at Western Washington University when that journey began. I was at Mass off campus and one of my new friends I’d met invited me to this thing called “Theology of the Body.” I’d heard something about it before, I think they were 6 weeks in to their study. But until I was personally invited, I had no desire to check it out. Or maybe I was busy. But I then found myself sitting with 20 other college students on the night they were talking about “what it means to be a woman.”
And I’ve described that moment many times.
It was like I was St. Paul, the scales falling off my eyes. The years of previous struggle with my body (in the form of anorexia, doubt in who I was as a woman, doubt in God and His plan for me and all that went with it), my identity, all becoming clear in the light of creation, faith, the Church. I saw it all so clearly. Everything. God. Myself. The Catholic Church. My mission. All of it.
And I was changed.
And God came down and infused me with His grace and I wouldn’t be here today without that moment, those truths, and the narrow way of uncovering that followed.
Theology of the Body
The thing that I encountered was called “Theology of the Body.”
The word Theology means “study of God” and Theology of the Body (TOB for short) is the study of God through the BODY. It was the content of St. Pope John Paul II’s Wednesday audiences the first five years he was pope, and it is an anthropological, philosophical, and theological look at God, the Church, the human body, and everything in between. It isn’t “new teaching,” rather it is a bringing forth of what the Catholic Church has taught from the beginning about why/how we were created, why it matters in relation to God, and why it matters for us now. Plus more. LOTS more.
(There are objections to TOB, especially in recent years, especially from Traditional Catholics, of which I consider myself. I understand why and I agree with where they are coming from, especially in regards to using it to stretch Catholic sexual morality. However, I also see how some have taken TOB and made it different than what it was intended to be, therefore becoming a false framework from which to object. And while I don’t have time to debate both sides, I will lay out a basic (basic) summary and let you go from there…)
After encountering TOB as a freshman, I spent the next two years studying it, the Catholic church (early Church Fathers, the catechism, the doctors of the Church, etc, along with various world religions in comparison), and I was charged with helping run our Catholic campus ministry at Western Washington University (where I met Mike and where he started the Newman Center) as a senior. Along with other duties (like starting Bible studies in the dorms), I was charged with leading my college peers in a 12-week study on the Theology of the Body of which I wrote using St. John Paul’s book of the same name along with other well-known authors.
And then, after Mike and I got married and after I quit teaching to have our first daughter, I was tasked with running the high school youth group at our parish, where I taught TOB again (nothing like talking about sex to high schoolers! I think our group grew from 9-65 overnight lol). And from there I began to be invited to teach TOB all over the state to teens, parishes, and couples in marriage prep. I stopped when Mike got sick and I stopped when I moved parishes (mostly due to leaving teaching authority solely to my pastor, but that’s another story…).
And, now, I find myself rediscovering TOB once again as I begin to teach it to my own teenagers (4 of them…). And while I won’t go into the entire teachings of this study in this letter, I felt compelled to share a few basic tenants for a few basic reasons: 1) to combat the lies spread this month of June…the month that hijacks the human body and blurs and twists what it was created to be, to represent. And 2) to show people young (and old) that God is not random, that His Church is not arbitrary…in fact creation is a Love Story - the ultimate marriage between the Bridegroom and the Bride. (A love story I have seen played out in my life is various shapes and forms.) And we can know this marriage here and now through the Church and later, in heaven.
A hunger for love.
We were all created with a hunger for love. With a hunger for God. Some have told us to starve those desires, to shove them down and repress them for the thought was “the body is bad.” On the other end of the pendulum lies a pressing indulgence of all those same desires. “Fill that hunger with whatever you crave!” the world says. “There are no rules…the only rule is to avoid repression for that is the only thing that is bad.”
It is true that our hunger for love should neither be starved nor indulged. For that reason, God gave us the Wedding feast of the Lamb (Rev 19:9). This is why Jesus, Himself came as food (John 6:31-70). To literally and physically fill our hunger for love.
And that is why the Bible, God’s word to us, is a story of marriage from beginning to end: the marriage of Adam and Eve in Genesis, the marriage of God and His Church in Revelation, and even smack in the middle lies Canticle of Canticles (Song of Solomon) and the marriage of the Lover and the Beloved, signifying God’s intimate love for us.
A Love Story. Written by Love, Himself.
And this is what TOB unpacks…what that Wedding Feast of the Lamb is. Why Jesus came to literally fill our hunger for love, how it’s all related to the Bible, how it works through the Catholic Church, and how it all points to heaven and our eternal marriage to God.