It All Comes Back to a Theology of the Body

Once upon a time, I traveled around the country giving chastity talks.  For some reason, as I sat down to write a conclusion to the two previous posts on NFP, one of the more unique chastity talks I ever gave came to mind.

Let me set the stage for you.  We were invited to give a talk at a Catholic college in Louisiana.  It was a mandatory talk for all the fraternities and sororities on campus.  That in itself made for an interesting setting.

We were pleasantly surprised by the incredibly enthusiastic frat boys, who came running up to fill the front rows of the room.  They were just so excited — hooting and hollering — I had never seen anybody so excited to hear a chastity talk!

Then just minutes before our talk began, a very classy looking southern lady walked up in her high heels and pencil skirt to show us the flyer she had made for the talk.

In bold letters, right across the top of the flyer, the wording said something along the lines of, “All Fraternities and Sororities Come and Hear About the Ultimate Sex.”

Well, that explained the enthusiasm.

Chastity was nowhere on that flyer. We knew we were in for an interesting talk. And so we began with a bit of trepidation.

Pretty quickly, the cheers and hooting began to dissipate. Eventually we started getting some death stares — I swear, a few people in the crowd seemed to be wishing they had laser eyes so they could blow us up. It wasn’t pretty.

By about halfway through the talk, the couples in the crowd literally began to distance themselves from each other.  There we were, ruining all their fun.

But then something amazing happened. It was at the point in our talk where we discussed the meaning of sex, the language that the body and soul speaks in sexual union, and it was like a truth bomb exploded inside of some of them.

Believe me, it’s not because we were amazing rhetoricians — it’s because we were sharing the truth, the truth about themselves and the truth about sex — and this truth was already written on their hearts by God, and we just needed to be willing to remind them of it.

Slowly, the death stares turned into a smile here or there and by the end of our talk, there was actual applause for the things we had shared with them.

Not everybody instantly accepted the message, but honestly, these things can be really hard to accept — at the very least we got the conversation started.

We left knowing that we had tried our best to give the truth to these kids, and now it was up to them to decide what they were going to do with it.

The moral of the story is that our kids need to know why we believe what we believe about sex and it’s place in our lives.

They need to be reminded that God created sex — it wasn’t just something man stumbled upon when God wasn’t looking — and if that is the case, then God must have a plan for sex.

So what is that plan?  And are we sharing that plan with our kids, because if we’re not, however are they going to navigate the world they are going to be living in?

The good news is that the church has an incredibly rich and life-giving approach to human sexuality.  We call it a Theology of the Body.

The even better news is that living according to the Theology of the Body is a pathway to happiness — far deeper and more satisfying than the imitation happiness the world can offer us.

The Theology of the Body (TOB), as the Catholic world knows it, rose out of a series of talks, given by one of the greatest Saints of modern times, John Paul II.

In the TOB, John Paul II urged us to go back to the beginning.  He urged us to look at the origin of man, because without a look back to the beginning, we can’t understand anything about the meaning of human sexuality and the freedom and happiness God wanted for us from the beginning.

In the beginning, God made Man and Woman, and He didn’t just make them good — He made them very good.  He created them out of love, in His image and His likeness.  Man and woman were in perfect harmony, of equal dignity and worth in the eyes of God.

They were in awe of each other, they loved each other,  and they walked side by side with God in paradise. They were naked, and without shame.

God also created sex to be very good. It was meant to be life-giving and it was meant to mirror the Love of the triune God in this world.

I just love the picture above.  Michelangelo shows God creating man, with woman in mind from the beginning.  You’ll notice the shape around God and Eve is the shape of a brain — the mind of God.

Woman wasn’t an afterthought, she was the intended partner for man from the beginning.

Perhaps more beautiful is that God allowed Adam to feel the absence of woman — to see that no amount of beauty, no other creation could satisfy him.

It was only after he felt that absence that God created woman, from the side of Adam.  And that is how man and woman were meant to live — side by side — cultivating beauty together and loving each other in perfect harmony.

Which brings me back to that talk I gave in Louisiana so many years ago.  What was the truth bomb that exploded in the heart of those frat boy and sorority girls?  It’s really quite simple.  It had to do with the language of sex that is inextricably intertwined with the act of sex.

In a nutshell, sex speaks a language, it has meaning, and it’s up to us to discover the meaning of sex if we are ever to truly find joy in it.

Sex says “I give all of myself to you, I receive all of you in return.  I will love you, honor, cherish,  and serve you — until death do us part.”

Sound familiar?  It should, because you have probably heard or spoken a variation of those words if you have ever attended a Catholic wedding.  At every marriage ceremony, the spouses vow, before God, to love honor, cherish and serve till death parts them.

The spoken words are important, but the marriage does not actually become a marriage until the spouses consummate it in sexual union.

That’s right.  The marriage ceremony speaks the words, but without the actual sexual act, the Church recognizes that no marriage has actually taken place.

So let me assure you, the Church doesn’t see sex as bad or dirty or just a nice thing that married people get to do — sex speaks the marriage vows, renews the marriage vows each time the spouse engage in it, and strengthens and sustains the marriage through difficult times.

Sex is meant to be a total gift of self and a total receiving of the self-gift of the other.  It’s also meant to unite a couple so that they can provide a loving, stable environment for the children that most likely will come — because, surprise (not really), sex is the act that makes babies.

And we see the devastation of souls who try to speak the language of total self-gift, of the marriage vows, when they’re not married.

We see it in physical repercussions like STD’s and unwanted pregnancies. We see it in people being blinded to truly dangerous traits in the other person because they are sexually involved.  We see broken hearts and sadness and not being able to “move on” afterwards, we see affairs and divorce and families separated from each other.

It makes sense.  If you’re lying with your body, then you’re also lying with your soul — and how can any relationship grow and thrive if it’s built on a lie?

And the research backs this up, too. Did you know that married couples without previous partners were found to have the highest level of sexual satisfaction among all people surveyed — single, married, contracepting or not — and the divorce rates of couples who practice NFP is around 5%, whereas the national average is above 50%.

It just goes to show you, if you live according to how you’ve been made, you will be happy.

And yes, there is forgiveness and the chance to begin again — even if we’ve strayed far from the truth — but the happiest, the surest, and most satisfying path is the one which respects the truth about sex from the beginning.

At the end of the day, a Theology of the Body goes way beyond human sexuality.  It is a pathway to discovering the unique and irreplaceable way that every man and woman — married or single — has been created to reflect God’s truth and beauty and goodness in this world.

So much more could be said about the Theology of the Body.  So don’t stop here!

If you want to read JP II’s own words on the Theology of the Body, you can go here.

Honestly, it’s a lot to absorb, so I recommend recommend starting with Fr. John Riccardo’s podcasts here . Fr. Riccardo gives a great overall picture of the Pope’s teachings on human sexuality and why discovering the truth of our sexuality  just might change everything.

Have a great weekend!

Sharing over at Kelly’s.