I would like to share an article I wrote for the Gyrene Gazette, the student newspaper at Ave Maria University, where I am studying as a senior:
How does Valentine’s Day go down at Ave Maria University? Well, if you happened to be innocently strolling the pavers and halls during the week before the “celebration of love,” you were probably suddenly jolted from your “just-leaving-class-metaphysical-terms-swimming-through-my-brain glazy-eyed stupor” by something which made your eyes widen in surprise.
I think we can filter out the hippie option. As much as a mosquito and gator-infested swamp 45 minutes from civilization would be ideal for a group of sexually-liberated lovers to revive the sixties, something tells me the romantic revelry wouldn’t be sponsored and funded by Student Life. So I did some quick investigating and found that the purpose of Love week, the Sexual Revolution, is “to reclaim and proclaim the goodness and truth of sex, authentic love, and the good life.”
The slogan “Sexual Revolution” served its purpose: it grabbed our attention and got us to ask questions- questions whose answers were given in the course of Love Week. Sex is severely misunderstood these days. And it’s not just the people living loosely who don’t get it, but many people in faithful and chaste relationships and marriages as well. Really, it’s everybody- and the problem lies in the way our culture raises us to think.
When we discuss sex, or better when we DON’T discuss it, we reveal a strange, disjointed perspective of ourselves which separates the body from our personal identity. This misconception is the root of the misuse of sex these days. Girls starve, mold, and manipulate their bodies to produce the perfect Barbie toy identical to the next one on the assembly line. People give up their bodies to each other like they are throwing away an old couch, not aware that in doing so they are literally giving away themselves.
How will the meaning of sex ever be understood if it is never addressed? Love week offered a solution, by sparking an interest in the question and then providing answers throughout the week. Leading up to Valentine’s Day, there was a coffee house, a concert, a discussion at the pub, a movie night, an art exhibit, a retreat, and various testimonies, all of which opened the conversation and explored in unique and fascinating ways the value of love and the meaning of sex.
Most importantly, Love Week this year was more than just a cutesy celebration of romance. It got down and dirty, to the heart of the meaning of sex, which lately has become so heinously misunderstood. In doing so, we explored the very nature of love itself- because sex, when viewed correctly, is an expression of divine love in us: it demands that we give our entire person to another, and unites us in a beautiful all-consuming way. The erotic love between a man and a woman nurtures the divine characteristics of love in the human heart.
Love Week got people to think, and not just to think- to TALK about the meaning of sex and love with each other. This should not be a taboo topic; it is unnatural to hush it up. We ARE our bodies. We live in a physical world. Our efforts to shove our physicality as far away as possible from our identity are the cause of the tension and awkwardness which often flavor every mention of the word “sex.” The word needs to be shouted; its deep meaning needs to be appreciated. Love week got students at Ave Maria to think, ask, and talk about the meaning of sex. This is a first step in the right direction, a step towards a sexual revolution which will end the civil war between the personhood and the body.” “Me” and “my body” are the SAME THING… but until we realize that, the world will continue to be a big psychiatric ward of schizophrenics trying to maintain multiple identities.
Deidre:
Excellent observations, and thanks for articulating a basic principle of JPII’s “Theology of the Body” — that we really “are” our bodies (“Already in the light of the Bible’s first sentences, man can neither be understood nor explained in his full depth with the categories taken from the ‘world,’ that is, from the visible totality of bodies. Nevertheless, man too is a body.” ToB 2;4″). Our personal identity is truly expressed in our “being” a body, thus elevating our understanding of “body” beyond a utilitarian or dualistic/materialistic understanding and bringing us to better appreciate the intrinsic integrity of our being as spiritual-physical creatures whose bodies can’t be cast off from our personhood.
Good job!
While this is a laudable effort, it seems to smack of some errors prevalent in certain popular presentations of the Catecheses on Human Love(aka somewhat inaccurately as “Thology of the Body)”
It is dangerous to assert that as persons we are indentical to our bodies, and this is not the Catholic tradition, despite what some may claim. Taken to its conclusion this ironically ends up with the same result as the popular culture, of reducing us to our bodies, our physical anatomy, our sexuality. Even the tone of the piece is interesting- no use of more accurate terms like conjugal relations vs. sex and no delineation of such relations as being between husband and wife.
We also must be cautious of saying that we should be part of some catholic sexual revolution which counters some alleged wide-spread tendency to puritanism or prudery. Again this very approach and vocabulary has already fallen prey to the world.
Deidre,
Speaking as a former college student and a current Catholic who simply can not imagine that college students really have a need to talk about sex for aweek (something which, Catholic or not, college boys at least are thinking about a lot more than just during a seven day period in February), allow me to express a few concerns.
You say, “The erotic love between a man and a woman nurtures the divine characteristics of love in the human heart.” Not exactly. Strike “between a man and a woman” and replace with “between a husband and a wife” and insert “when it is an expression of their unity and open to procreation”.
You write, “The word needs to be shouted; its deep meaning needs to be appreciated.” The word is being shouted all over, and its deep meaning can only be realized when you get away from the shouting.
You write, “‘Me’ and ‘my body’ are the SAME THING.” If this were true, I’d better get a gym membership.
There is a duality between the material and the immaterial, which need not result in Manichean Gnosticism, but which, if not acknowledged, tends to lead to mere materialism on the one hand or effete spiritualism on the other. We are more than just our bodies. That’s why sex is a problem.
Deidre, I am impressed with Ave Maria University, with you, and with the eager and intelligent Catholics who go there. But there’s something amiss in all of this. Maybe it’s just that “love week” seems, from your description, halfway between the simplicty of simple fornication and the ineffible purity of chastity, especially chastity expressed in the “marital act”. Sex is so much bigger than we are. It is a daemon, as Socrates would say. And there has crept into Catholic Church pop culture a cheap sloganeering and a weird newspeak about it that seems very much off target.
I spent most of the last two weeks blogging about Christopher West and the errors in his presentation, so you might want to check out my personal blog for more info – though realize going in, that I made a lot of people mad.
Meanwhile, God bless you for your zeal for redeeming the body and for honoring sex (though please note that the “marital act”, the only valid complete expression of “sex” is something much more than “sex”; and Eros is about much more than the “marital act”; this is one reason why shouting “sex” is no way to approach this perennial problem) . It’s just that an old guy like me is a bit skeptical about shouting about sex-strong during “love weak”.
Dierdre,
First, I started a trend in this combox of mis-spelling your name! Forgive me.
I blogged about your article here: http://www.thwordinc.blogspot.com/2012/02/shouting-from-rooftops-about-sex.html , where I go into more detail about my reaction than I do in my comment above.
By the way, I agree with “Anonymous” who commented before David. But what he’s quoting from JPII and saying himself is not that we ARE our bodies, but that our being includes our bodies. This is clearly true, but as David points out, to say that our identity is inseparable from our bodies is both heterodox and dangerous.
Anyway, you’re getting comments. Welcome to your first Ink Desk controversy!
“Moreover, one of the results of the sexual revolution is precisely the pansexualism that surrounds our society. We cannot respond with a different kind of pansexualism, with a sort of ‘Catholic sexual revolution,’ which in the end promotes a similar obsession with sex, even if ‘holy.'”
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– Fr. Jose Granados, Assistant Professor of Patrology and Systematic Theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family; Coauthor Coauthor of ‘Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II’s Theology of the Body’)
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http://www.headlinebistro.com/en/news/granados_west.html
“‘Me’ and ‘my body’ are the SAME THING”
Are you saying you don’t have a soul?
Dierdre: “Our efforts to shove our physicality as far away as possible from our identity are the cause of the tension and awkwardness which often flavor every mention of the word ‘sex.’ The word needs to be shouted”
Alice von Hildebrand: “”Key to my concerns is West’s hyper-sexualized approach to the Theology of the Body. The French have a wonderful word to capture the veiling of one’s intimate feelings, out of a proper sense of shame — pudeur, a ‘holy bashfulness,’ so to speak … West practically ignores the importance of pudeur’ … It is simply not true to claim that, until recently, the beauty and meaning of this sphere had been totally obscured by Puritanism and Manichaeism. Many from my generation can testify … What was communicated, with delicacy, was a sense of ‘mystery’ for something great, that had to be approached with deep reverence, and which, when abused, led to very serious offenses against God. My general criticism of Christopher West is that he does not seem to grasp the delicacy, reverence, privacy, and sacredness of the sexual sphere”.
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/document.php?n=999
Deidre:
My suggestion to you would be to keep those who are naysaying the Theology of the Body at arm’s length.
You have done an admirable job of expressing the truth expressed by JPII regarding the “transcendence” of the body beyond a materialistic description. Those writing critically of your post seem to think you are actually “reducing” personhood to the body in a materialistic sense, which is obviously not what either you or JPII means when saying we “are” our bodies.
It certainly seems to me that the students at Ave Maria are playing with fire. It’s all well and good to talk about “misunderstanding sex” or “twisting love”, but the majority of this be-who-you-are modernism tends always to lead to the errors found in the last paragraph of this article. “We ARE our bodies”, “we live in a physical world”, etc. remain fundamentally flawed understandings of the human person. It is truly disappointing when an Anglican writer should express it so much better than people who are supposedly Catholic: “You don’t have a soul; you are a soul. You have a body.” (C.S. Lewis)
St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the definition of heresy is not unbelief in itself, but that which leads to unbelief. How difficult, truly, is the leap from “we need to embrace our physicality” to “we are merely physical”. The human being naturally already bends toward the physical, as anyone who looks at modern society can see. We are always given to embrace our animal nature. Is attempting to embrace our imperfection and call it “understanding physicality” truly going to solve this problem, or only exacerbate it? For centuries, the Holy Catholic Church has made efforts to teach us that we will do nothing by trying to drag God down to our level: we must elevate ourselves.
It is interesting that we who do not embrace this corrupt vessel as our identity should be dismissed as “schizophrenics” — if we, whose souls strive to overcome the animal drives of corruption to embrace the perfection of the Divine, are schizophrenics, what does that make our Lord Jesus, who is both Fully Human and Fully Divine? Herein lays the incipient heresy in such approaches to Christianity.
I am myself the graduate of another Catholic University (*the* Catholic University of America, as we never tire of reminding the world) that embraced this sort of thinking – and only produced a crowd of 500 (we were prepared for 2000) for the visit of the Pope to our campus. It is a small step from small heresies to great apostasies, and so long as human beings are imperfect, we will continue to make such mistakes; or, if I may be cliché, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Pax vobiscum.
Stephen,
I think Lewis in the line you quote is WRONG–and I think St. Thomas, to whom you also refer, would agree with me.
We say we HAVE a body; we also say that we HAVE a soul; but we are not one or the other, but a being made up of both. To use Thomas’ language, which he adapted from Aristotle, the soul is the form or the act of the body. (See the Summa, First Part, Question 75, Article 4 [http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1075.htm#article4] where Thomas addresses the question directly, and quotes St. Augustine in support of his position.)
Re Thomas on heresy and unbelief, what he actually says (Summa II.II.11.1 [http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3011.htm#article1]) is: “a heretic is one who devises or follows false or new opinions. Therefore heresy is opposed to the truth, on which faith is founded; and consequently … heresy is a species of unbelief.” I suppose he may have expressed a different opinion elsewhere. However, I doubt he would insist that everything that leads to unbelief is heresy. Even the truth, poorly expressed, can lead to unbelief; but heresy is by definition false; therefore, not everything leading to unbelief is a heresy.
Note–this is not to defend West, or Ave Maria–I actually don’t have an opinion the larger question, as I don’t think I’m qualified to form one at this point. But in critiquing what seems dangerous or wrong, we should be careful not to overstate the case, or go too far in the other direction.
Deirdre:
Good job. As you know it is difficul to write a piece on theology where very word is chosen perfectly and every base covered. Congratulations on generously contributing to the Kingdom by your sacrifical efforts. You have articulated your points well. You are a loyal daughter of the Church, and a good and loyal daughter of your father, yours truly, and a loyal sister of your 18 siblings, so you get extra experiential credit in living amongst the fruitfulness of deep spiritual and conjugal love.
Many great points in the resposnes here as well, Interesting reflection. I think I will side with the wisdom of the great philosopher Tevia, from Fiddler on the Roof here, “You’re right, you’re right. You are both right!”
God bless.
Hi, Deirdre!
You Dad has every right to be proud of the fine job you’ve done in responding to the culture’s claim that “we are *not* our bodies”–which is of course the whole point of stating that yes we “are”.
Fear not the misplaced criticisms of those who somehow don’t see that you are properly using the lexicon of JPII himself who speaks of our existence as male and female as “two ways of *being* a body”! And even if C.S. Lewis is off a bit on this point (which may or may not be borne out by further inquiry), if given the choice of Lewis or JP II I’d still stand with JP II!
Btw, as the father of eleven children, I give your parents two enormous “high-fives” for their loving service as parents of such a blessed family!
God bless,
Deacon Jim Russell
Please note that Deacon Jim Russell is theologically quite confused on Christopher West, as you can discover from his comments on my blog and on other blogs. For instance, the dichotomy between C. S. Lewis and JPII on love and sex is a false dichotomy.
Nevertheless, Deirdre, I concur that you are clearly well-intentioned in your efforts. Just be careful.
As Chesterton said, “All healthy men, ancient and modern, know there is a certain fury in sex that we cannot afford to inflame, and that a certain mystery and awe must ever surround it if we are to remain sane.”
Hey Deidre,
I Agree with your points you have brought up, being a student myself i could easily understand the gist of the article.
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