By: Christopher West

I was pushing the “seek” button on my car radio the other day looking for a decent song.   Station 1: “love me, love me, say that you love me….”   Station 2: “Baby-eyah-eyah-eyah, my world stands still when I’m with you oh-oo-oh….”   Station 3: “I’m keepin’ you forever and for always, we will be together all of our days….”   Station 4: “Love, love me do, you know I love you….”

Thirsting for God’s Love

In the midst of so many songs seeking or celebrating love, I was reminded of something Pope Benedict said in his grand encyclical God is Love.   He observed that in the “love between man and woman… human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness” (n. 2).   Why, then, do we also have songs on the radio like “Love Stinks” (J. Geils band, anyone)?   How is it that something promising such happiness leads so often to misery and despair?   Are we mistaken to look for happiness in the love between man and woman?   What light does the Gospel shed on any of this?

When some Pharisees questioned Jesus about the meaning of marriage, they recalled to him that Moses allowed divorce.   Jesus’ reply provides one of the keys to understanding the Gospel:   “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so” (Mt 19:8).   In effect, Jesus is saying something like this: “You think all the tension, conflict, and heartache in the male-female relationship is normal?   This isn’t normal.   This isn’t the way God created it to be.   Something has gone terribly wrong.”

The Catechism teaches us that “the disorder we notice so painfully [in the male-female relationship] does not stem from the nature of man and woman, nor from the nature of their relations, but from sin.   As a break with God, the first sin had for its consequence the rupture of the original communion between man and woman” (CCC, n. 1607).   That’s the bad news.   But here’s the good news: “Jesus came to restore creation to the purity of its origins” (CCC, n. 2336).   Therefore, by “following Christ, renouncing themselves, and taking up their crosses …spouses will be able to ‘receive’ the original meaning of marriage and live it with the help of Christ” (CCC, n. 1615).  Men and women are not entirely mistaken to seek happiness in the sexual relationship.   But eros (human, erotic love) has no possibility of granting the happiness it promises if it is cut off from agape (divine, sacrificial love).

Wasted on Heaven‘s Wine

Where did Jesus perform his first miracle and what was it?   The newly married couple at Cana had run out of wine and Christ restored it in superabundance.   The “new wine” Christ offers at this marriage celebration is a symbol revealing the heart of his mission: Jesus came to restore the order of love in a world seriously distorted by sin.   And the union of the sexes, as always, lies at the basis of the human “order of love.”

Wine is a biblical symbol of God’s love poured out for us.   In the beginning before sin, man and woman where “inebriated” on God’s love, so to speak.   Divine love flowed from them and between them like wine.   Since the dawn of sin, however, we have all “run out of wine.”   We don’t have what it takes to love each other in a way that corresponds with our heart’s true desire.   And so, the man-woman relationship offers an “irresistible promise of happiness,” but lacking God’s “wine,” it cannot deliver.   Or, as the J. Geils band put it, lacking God’s wine, “love stinks.”

This is why the miracle at the wedding feast in Cana is such cause for rejoicing.   Christ came into the world to restore the wine into man and woman’s relationship — to penetrate eros with agape.   As we drink deeply from this “new wine,” we find ourselves empowered to love as we are called to love.   This doesn’t make love easy — true love always passes by way of the cross — but it does make true love possible.   This is good news in a world of wounded lovers

By: Christopher West

Many people have an erroneous “super-spiritual” view of eternal life.   Such people tend to see the body as a shell that they’re anxious to get rid of, as if death were the moment in which our souls were finally “liberated” from the “prison” of our bodies.  This was great, ancient philosopher Plato’s idea, but it is not  the Christian view of things.   In fact, the idea that the body is a prison or merely a shell is based in heresy.   Christians conclude their Creed with the bold proclamation: “I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.   Amen.”   The Catechism observes, “‘On no point does the Christian faith meet with more opposition than on the resurrection of the body.’   It is very commonly accepted that the life of the human person continues in a spiritual fashion after death.   But how can we believe that this body, so clearly mortal, could rise to everlasting life” (n. 996)?   What a mystery!   In Christ “the mortal puts on immortality” (1 Co 15:54).

The Resurrected Body

We often speak of the “souls” in heaven.   When we buried my grandmother, I saw her body go in the ground and I’m confident that her soul is now enjoying some form of union with God.   But the souls currently in heaven (“currently,” of course, is a time-bound word which doesn’t even apply to heaven but is necessary for our human understanding) remain in an “inhuman” state until the resurrection of their bodies.   It can’t be any other way for us as human beings.   Since God created us as a union of body and soul, the separation of the two at death is entirely “unnatural.”   Indeed, it’s a cosmic tragedy.

Our bodies will certainly be different in their resurrected state.   Recall that the disciples didn’t readily recognize Jesus after the resurrection (see Lk 24:15-16).   But at the end of time, we will certainly have our bodies, as does Jesus.   When he appeared after his resurrection in the upper room, he said, “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me and see; for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Lk 24:39).   And then, just to hammer the point home, he ate some fish in their presence (see Lk 24:41-43).

The difference is that in the resurrection our bodies will be perfectly “spiritualized” (see 1 Co 15:44).   This means that our bodies will be permeated entirely by the power of the spirit.   And because the “spirit” that will permeate our bodies is not only our own human spirits, but the divine Holy Spirit, our bodies will also be “divinized.”   In a way totally inaccessible to us now, we will participate, body and soul, “in the divine nature” (2 Pt 1:4).

What is this “divine nature”?

As the Catechism  teaches, “God has revealed his innermost secret.   God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange” (n. 221).   This is what we mean by the “spiritualization” and “divinization” of the body.   To the degree that creatures can, we will share — body and soul — in God’s eternal exchange of love.   And this “great mystery” is prefigured right from the beginning in our bodies as male and female and the call of the two to participate here on earth in an “exchange of love”: the two become “one flesh” (Gen 2:24).

So, many ask, will there be sex in heaven?   It depends what we mean by the term.   Sex is not first what people do.   It’s who people are as male or female.   Pope John Paul II insisted many times in his reflections on the resurrection that we will be raised as male and female.   So, in this sense, yes, there will be sex in heaven: we will be male and female.   But Christ points us to an entirely new dimension of human sexuality and our call to union when he says that “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Mt 22:30).

Marriage and the “one flesh” union exist from the beginning to point us to the “marriage of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7), to the union of Christ and the Church (see Eph 5:31-32).   In the resurrection, the sacrament will give way to the divine reality.   In other words, if God created the union of the sexes as a foreshadowing of heaven, Christ is saying, “You no longer need a foreshadowing to point you to heaven when you’re in heaven.   You’re there.   The ultimate union has come.”  And this is the cry of the Spirit and the Bride: “Come, Lord Jesus, come!”     And the Lord responds, “Surely, I am coming soon” (Rev 22:17-20).   Let us pray that we are ready.

By: Christopher West

The President of Notre Dame made headlines a few years back by granting permission for continued on-campus performances of “The Vagina Monologues.”   This play, in case you haven’t heard, is based on interviews with over two-hundred women regarding their personal feelings about their bodies and their varied sexual experiences.   The details of these interviews, often graphic, are presented in a series of monologues. Still widely viewed in universities and theaters across America, it is more than appropriate to treat the subject at this time.

My point here is not to examine the problems inherent in staging such a play at “Our Lady’s University.”   I’ll leave that to the local bishop, who, in fact, immediately criticized Father Jenkins decision.   Instead, I’d like to dig a little deeper.  Why is there demand for such a play at Notre Dame in the first place?   Is this play merely reflecting our culture’s prurient interest in sex?   Or could there be something else at work here, some ache in the human heart that this play speaks to?   Is it enough for Catholics just to condemn this play as immoral?   Or can and should we do more?

WWJD: What would Jesus Do?

Why was Christ so compassionate towards sexual sinners, especially women?   Think of the woman caught in adultery (see Jn 8:1-11).   Think of the prostitute who wept at his feet (see Lk 7:36-50).   Could it be because Christ knew that these women, who had been deceived by counterfeit loves, were actually looking for him, the true Bridegroom?

Jesus’ love for the woman at the well is particularly illuminating (see Jn 4:1-42).   She’s thirsty.   Like every human being, she’s thirsting for Christ, but doesn’t know it yet.   Jesus gently points out her misguided attempts to satisfy her thirst when he says, “Go get your husband.”   She admits that she doesn’t have one.   Jesus then reveals that he knows all about the various men she’s been with.  Does he condemn her for her many sexual sins?   No.   He understands the pains of her heart.   He understands what led her to “drink” from “wells” that never satisfy.   And he desires nothing but to satisfy her thirst with “living water” — water, that if you drink it, you “will never thirst again.”

I encourage you to reread this story in John 4.   Jesus’ heart is burning with love for this woman.   It’s as if he were saying,   “I know the many ways you’ve looked for love and haven’t found it.   If you only knew the gift that I wanted to give you.   If you only knew who I am. I am the love you’ve been looking for.   I am the Bridegroom your precious feminine heart has always desired, and I’m here for you.   Come let us rejoice together in this love and let it well up in you to eternal life.”

Recognize the Wounded Heart

Is this the message the Church is sending to the hurting women who flock to see “The Vagina Monologues”?   Women have been deeply wounded by both a puritanical fear of their bodies on the one hand, and by a pornographic exploitation of their bodies on the other.   This play in its own vulgar way has given women a forum in which to explore their “issues.”   It’s therapeutic at some level just to be given permission to talk about the questions, fears, and longings of the heart that “nobody talks about.”

We would do well as Catholics to reflect: when people come to us with deep aches from the sexual chaos of our world, do we even know how to listen?   Do we even know how to offer them hope in Christ or where and how to direct them for help and healing?   I would surmise that students at Notre Dame continue to demand this play because they have not heard anything better coming from their parents, their pastors, their friends, and their teachers in response to the many pressing questions and “thirsts” of their hearts.

How tragic!   The Church has something far better to offer.   We have the “living water” of patience, understanding, and redemption that Christ showed the woman at the well.   Mere outrage, mere condemnation of this play or of the leadership of Notre Dame isn’t going to get us very far.   We need to take up the redemptive vision our Church has given us, especially as articulated by John Paul II’s “theology of the body,” and let it transform us and the way we respond to our hurting world.

By: Christopher West

Recently, while discussing the beautiful teaching of John Paul II’s theology of the body on a radio show, someone unfamiliar with this teaching called in and asked me to explain what makes the body theological.  “Theology,” he observed, “is the study of God.   How can our bodies be a study of God?”   Good question.   When we hear the word “theology,” “body” is not the first word that comes to mind.

God is pure spirit; our bodies are so “carnal.”   God is so heavenly; our bodies are so “earthly.”   God is all beautiful; and our bodies… well, they are not always so beautiful.   Even a super-model’s body will smell bad by the end of the day if she hasn’t masked her odoriferousness with deodorant.  When people hear that phrase for the first time — “theology of the body” — it almost seems like an oxymoron, like the artificial linking of two realms that have no business together.   Give it some thought: such a reaction only demonstrates how far many of us have drifted from an authentic Christian world-view.   Have we forgotten about the Incarnation?

The Scandal of the Incarnation

As John Paul II wrote, “Through the fact that the Word of God became flesh the body entered theology …through the main door.”   Because of the Incarnation, St. John can proclaim it is that “which we have heard,” that “which we have seen with our eyes,” that “which we have touched with our hands” that we proclaim to you concerning the Word of life.   And that life was made visible (see 1 Jn 1-3).  We cannot see God; he is pure spirit.   But the stupendous mystery of Christianity is that God “has made himself visible in the flesh” (Catechism, n. 1159).   Elsewhere, quoting from the Church’s liturgy, the Catechism teaches that “in the body of Jesus ‘we see our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see’” (n. 477).

God has chosen to reveal his deepest mystery through the human body, through the body of his Son who, in the fullness of time, was born of a woman.   The Catholic Church remains forever immersed in wonder at this mystery, honoring and praising the womb that bore him and the breasts he sucked (see Lk 11:27).  “Theology of the body,” then, is not only the title of a long series of talks on sex that John Paul II gave the Church.   Theology of the body is the very “logic” of Christianity.   It is also the particular scandal of Christianity.

In Christ “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9).   The implications of this never fail to confound the human heart.   If God himself took on a body, this would imply not only a blessing of the highest degree upon the whole physical world; it would also imply in some sense the “making divine” (theologians would say the “divinization”) of human flesh.   This may seem like too much to accept.   A phantom deity is much more tenable and, let’s be honest, much more becoming than a God who wore diapers.  Christians are those who have faced squarely the scandal of an incarnate God and proclaim: “I believe.”

Christ is the Answer You Seek

So, in answer to my caller’s question, it is Christ’s body, above all, that makes the body “theological.”   Christ’s body conceived of a virgin, born in a stable in Bethlehem, circumcised on the eighth day, raised by Mary and Joseph, baptized in the Jordan river, transfigured on the mountain, “given up for us” in his passion and death, risen in glory, ascended to the Father and participating eternally in the life of the Trinity — the story of this body is the focal point of all Christian theology.

And everybody that comes into the world is invited to share in this mystery by becoming “one body,” one spirit with Christ.   This is the deepest meaning of our creation as sexually embodied persons — we are destined for union with the God who, himself, has taken on a body.   For the body is meant for the Lord, and the Lord is meant for the body (see 1 Co 6:13).

By: Christopher West

In his encyclical letter “God Is Love,” Pope Benedict addresses the widely-held notion that the Catholic Church devalues the body and sexuality.   He admits that “tendencies of this sort have always existed,” but he asks, is Christianity really to blame?  As I wrote in my book, Good News About Sex & Marriage, “The objective person will admit that a deep ambivalence about the body and its functions, particularly its sexual functions, is not a limited Christian phenomenon, but a universal human phenomenon.   As such, Christians, like many others, have not been exempt from the failure to appreciate fully the goodness and beauty of sex.”

Tragically, many Christians grow up considering their spirits “good” and their bodies “bad.”   Such thinking couldn’t be further from the authentic Christian perspective!   God made us as an integral unity of body and spirit and “behold, it is very good” (see Gen 1:31).

Divinizing the Body

The idea that the human body is “bad” is actually a heresy (a blatant error repeatedly and ardently condemned by the Church) known as “Manichaeism.”   Mani, or Manichaeus — after whom this false teaching is named — condemned the body and all things sexual because he saw the source of evil in the material world.

In his theology of the body, John Paul II observed that if the Manichaean mentality places an “anti-value” on the body and sexuality, for Christianity the body and sexuality “always constitute a ‘value not sufficiently appreciated.’”   In other words, if Manichaeism says “body-bad,” Christianity says “the body is so good we have yet to fathom it.”  Think about it: If the body is evil, then the Incarnation is blasphemy.   Condemnation of the body attacks the very foundations of the Christian faith.   In the fullness of time, God sent his Son, a male child, born of a woman.   That would be impossible if the body and sexuality are “bad.”

Christianity doesn’t “demonize” the body, as it is commonly claimed.   No, quite the contrary, Christ has divinized the human body.   This means he has raised it up to participate in the divine nature.   As Catholics we believe that right now there is a male and female body (the New Adam and the New Eve, Jesus and Mary) participating in the eternal exchange of God’s ecstatic, trinitarian love.   And the Church teaches that this is God’s invitation to every-body.

Handle with Care

If the Church’s teaching regarding what we should and shouldn’t do with our bodies here on earth is “strict,” this is not because the Church devalues the body, but because she values it so highly.   The typical sentiment goes like this: if the Church says you can’t do this and you can’t do that — everything that it seems people want to do — then the Church must think sex is bad.  Hold on a minute.   “Handle with care” — or even “handle with extreme care” — in no way means “this is bad.”   What are those things in life that we handle with the most care?   Are they not precisely those things that have the most inherent value?

There’s a parallel here with the Eucharist.   The Church has many “strict” teachings about who can and cannot receive the Eucharist, how it’s to be received, and with what spiritual dispositions.   It would be absurd to conclude that the Church is therefore “down on the Eucharist.”   It’s no less absurd to conclude that the Church is down on sex.   No, both the Eucharist and the union of man and woman are sacred mysteries of the highest value.

A problem with many Christians, then — both those who remain fearful of or suspicious towards sexuality and those who dismiss the Church’s moral teachings as antiquated or “out of touch” — is that we don’t value sex enough.   Similarly, our pornified culture does not overvalue the body and sex.   The problem is that it has failed to see just how valuable the body and sex really are.

To learn more about just  how good  both the body and sex are, check out  Holy Sex!  by Dr. Gregory Popcak and Good News About Sex & Marriage
by Christopher West.

By: Christopher West

In a recent column called “Ostriches at Vatican City” Steven and Cokie Roberts insist that the Catholic bishops have chosen to “bury their heads in the sand” by reaffirming the requirement of priestly celibacy.   Steven and Cokie believe that “ending the ban on marriage is the easiest fix” for the priest shortage.

Priest  Can  Marry

No Catholic would deny that we need more priests.   And it’s true that the practice in the Latin rite of the Catholic Church of reserving priestly ordination to celibate men could change.   The Catholic Churches of the East have valid married priests.

So, if someone asks, “Why can’t priests be married?” the real answer is, they can.   There is more to the Catholic Church than the Latin rite.   However, with good reason, priests in the West are normally chosen from among men who have discerned celibacy as their vocation.

There is a supreme value to the celibate witness that seems entirely lost on Cokie and Steven.   This is understandable.   Generally speaking, the Church in America has done a lousy job educating her flock on the meaning of the Christian vocations, and the scandalous behavior of some avowed celibates within the Church has only added to the confusion.

The Value of the Sacrifice

A short column can’t do justice to the issues, but it’s a start.   First, in order to understand the value of celibacy, we must understand the value of marriage.   Why?   Because the Church bases the value of any sacrifice on the value of that which it sacrifices.   For example, it would be meaningless for me to give up smoking for Lent.   Smoking holds zero value for me.

The Church places such a high value on celibacy precisely because she places such a high value on that which it sacrifices — the union of the sexes.   In the Catholic view of things, the joining of man and woman in “one flesh” is a sacred foreshadowing of the eternal union that awaits us in heaven (see Eph 5:31-32).   God gave us sexual desire, you might say, to be like the fuel of a rocket that’s meant to launch us toward the stars and beyond, to the eternal mystery of Christ’s union with the Church.

But what would happen if those rocket engines became inverted, no longer pointing us heavenward, but pointing us back upon ourselves?   Welcome to the fall-out of the sexual revolution.   The union of the sexes serves as an icon, a sign of our ultimate fulfillment, but it is the beginning of our demise when we worship sex itself.   A culture that worships sex has surely lost sight of heaven.

Marriage in Heaven

Jesus says we will no longer be given in marriage in heaven (see Mt 22:30).   Why?   Because we no longer need signs to point us to  heaven, when we’re in heaven.   The “marriage of the Lamb” (Rev 19:7) — the union of love that alone can satisfy — will be eternally consummated.

In turn, Jesus calls some to remain celibate not for celibacy’s sake, but   “for the sake of the kingdom” (Mt 19:12) — that is, as a living witness to the union that awaits us in heaven.   Authentically lived, a celibate’s life proclaims that, as beautiful and wonderful as the union of the sexes is, there is a greater love, a greater union worth “selling everything” for.

It is entirely fitting that priests would be called to this level of sacrifice.   In a world that idolizes sex, we desperately need the courageous witness of priestly celibacy.   For, when it is properly lived, it very effectively reorients our rocket engines toward the heavens.

Perhaps the bishops, rather than having their heads in the sand, were actually looking toward the stars.