Day 45. Body Beautiful
You look so good it hurts sometimes.
John Mayer, Your Body is a Wonderland
In over 25 years working with college students, I have witnessed firsthand the modern obsession with the body. The rec center is one of the most popular places on campus. Students work out, guzzle high protein drinks, and spend hours developing their physiques to conform to the popular standards of the day. The “stay thin at any cost” cult is particularly demanding on women who resort to binging and purging or avoiding food altogether to attain the ideal super-model body weight. I’m told that the plumbing in women’s residence halls corrodes at an alarming rate because of the high number of bulimic residents.
If the body is a temple, what does this mean? Should we worship the body the way our society worships the sleek, beautiful people we see on movie screens and magazine covers? Face it, attractiveness is power. A person with good looks gets a lot of attention and has significant influence in social settings. Is this what the body is all about? Power, influence, and maximizing one’s attractiveness?
What is the meaning of your body? Some say that it is simply meaning-less. What do you think? Is it a random grouping of muscle, bone, nerves and flesh? A product of the chaotic process called evolution? A biological mechanism that can be tinkered with like any other machine to maximize its efficiency and attractiveness? Or is the body something we can use to provide us with sensory pleasures – to stimulate, to titillate, to placate? Is the body something we need to protect from pain and discomfort at all costs? Is suffering, in fact, the greatest evil since it deprives our bodies of the comfort we feel we deserve?
St. John Paul II wrote much about these matters in what is popularly known as the Theology of the Body. In his analysis of the creation accounts of Genesis he identified a new, deeper understanding of an age old question: What is the meaning of this physical, material, flesh and blood reality we call our body?
You may be aware that raising questions about meaning is not in style these days. Meaning implies order. Order implies design. Design implies a designer – a Divine Designer. It’s an uncomfortable direct-connect for a world that likes to keep discussions of the Designer banished to the basement of myth and superstition. Even Christians are influenced by this prejudice against definitive statements about meaning. “Who really can say what something means? Doesn’t it ultimately come down to my opinion against yours?” Sound familiar? If you haven’t said it yourself, you’ve at least heard it. Here’s the surprising truth: meaning is not a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of fact. The meaning of something can be as real and factual as the color of a tomato or the molecular structure of salt.
And what do I mean by meaning? When something points to a reality beyond itself, it has meaning. The letters on this page are simply marks, yet they have meaning. And reading them in a particular order, you extract that meaning with little conscious thought or effort.
Likewise, we intuitively recognize meaning in aspects of our bodies. A smile, for example, means something. It’s not just a muscle reflex like the jerk of a knee. It expresses acceptance, affirmation, delight, and friendship. We don’t need that explained to us. We instinctively know it. We also instinctively know that it is a lie to smile at someone we hate.
St. John Paul taught that there is a meaning to our bodies in sexuality. The human person is designed with another person in mind. Not just another individual. Another kind of person altogether. I am made for one who is not like me, but who is compatible with me. For one who is female, it is the male. For one who is male, it is the female. The structure of our physical body directs us to consider another type of body that fits together with and unites with our own. That desire for union, made evident in our bodies, is felt at every level of our being. The intense yearning we experience for the opposite sex, which we may too quickly dismiss as mere lust, is written into our very bodies. This desire is not something sinful or “dirty.” It is God’s perfect design, his gift. And it’s not a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of fact.
“This one at last is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone,” exclaims Adam at the sight of Eve (Gen 2:23). It was the sight of Eve’s body that sparked his recognition. “Here is the one I am made for! And who is made for me!” he is saying. In keeping with God’s original intent, scripture points out that although they were both naked, “they felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25). Though sex is the primary point of recognition and differentiation in this relationship, it has not yet, at the moment described above, been disfigured by sin.
John Paul called this the nuptial meaning of the body. We have a great yearning to make a gift or ourselves – body, soul and spirit – to another being, and to receive the same gift in turn. This impulse for self-gift is something we must understand deeply as we continue our examination of the temple, of intimacy and of relationships.
As you continue discerning a celibate vocation, this awareness must weigh heavily on your mind. “Am I closing the door to a life of intimacy and companionship?” “Will my life be lonely and unfulfilled?” The simple answer is “no.” We’re working our way towards explaining why.
Novena Prayer
Jesus says: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
Pier Giorgio responds: What wealth it is to be in good health, as we are! But we have the duty of putting our health at the service of those who do not have it. To act otherwise would be to betray that gift of God.
Let us pray: Blessed Pier Giorgio, help me to seek God’s righteousness, His plan for my life and for the salvation of the world. Show me the way to self-surrender, so that I may desire nothing more than to be of service to the Lord and His Kingdom. Lead me to the table of love, where I will be satisfied.
Blessed Pier Giorgio, I ask for your intercession in obtaining from God, Who is righteous and just, all the graces necessary for my spiritual and temporal welfare. I confidently turn to you for help in my present need: (in your own words, ask for the Lord to give you greater charity in all of your relationships and to purify them from all self-interest).
A Book of Prayers in Honor of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, by Rev. Timothy E. Deeter
Make it My Own
Daily Discernment Workbook
A QUOTE TO NOTE
1. Unnatural Ideals
Young people rarely acknowledge the impact media has on them. Through advertising and entertainment, men are taught from a young age to think of women’s bodies as tools for pleasure. Women are taught to value thinness over character or even good health. Here’s the way one modern author describes the effect our culture has on girls.
“…the omnipresent media consistently portrays desirable women as thin…even as real women grow heavier, models and beautiful women are portrayed as thinner. In the last two decades we have developed a national cult of thinness. What is considered beautiful has become slimmer and slimmer. For example, in 1950 the White Rock mineral water girl was 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 140 pounds. Today she is 5 feet 10 inches and weighs 110 pounds. Girls compare their own bodies to our cultural ideals and find them wanting. Dieting and dissatisfaction with bodies have become normal reactions to puberty. Girls developed eating disorders when our culture developed a standard of beauty that they couldn’t obtain by being healthy. When unnatural thinness became attractive, girls did unnatural things to be thin.”
Mary Pipher, Ph.D., Reviving Ophelia [1]
Questions for men: Have I ever considered how images of sexy women influence my women friends? Does it change my view of these images when I realize that girls are injuring themselves trying to measure up to these “hot models” because they want to be seen as attractive by guys? How can I be part of the solution to this issue, rather than part of the problem?
Questions for women: Have I ever admitted to myself that my body standards are hugely influenced by the appearance of women in the media? Am I content with the way I look? If not, am I able to look in the mirror and repeat this simple prayer: “Jesus, I give you permission to love me the way I look right now.”
GOING DEEP
2. A New View of the Body
“The body is the whole man in his relationship to God and his fellow man.”
Walter Cardinal Kasper
The following is a quote from a noted modern theologian. It’s dense stuff. Still, it says nicely what we hope to consider in the coming weeks – the body is more than flesh and bones; it’s all about relationships.
Body (soma) is in Scripture not only an important but a very difficult concept. According to Scripture the body is so vital to man, that a being without a body after death is unthinkable (1 Cor 15:35ff; 2 Cor 5:1ff). For the Hebrew the body is not the tomb of the soul as it is for the Greek (soma-sema) and certainly not the principle of evil from which man’s true self has to set itself free, as it was for the Gnostics. The body is God’s creation and it always describes the whole of man and not just a part. But this whole person is not conceived as a figure enclosed in itself, as in classical Greece, nor as a fleshly substance, as in materialism, nor as person and personality as in idealism. The body is the whole man in his relationship to God and his fellow man. It is the man’s place of meeting with God and his fellow man.
Kasper, Jesus the Christ [2]
How is my body the only point of contact between my private, inner self and my social network – the world of relationships I inhabit?
List some ways that my physical actions and reactions make visible and public my invisible, private feelings (hint: it could be something as simple as tears).
SAINTS SAID IT
3. Not for Self-Satisfaction but for Self-Gift
St. John Paul II wrote this in commenting on our modern world’s distorted idea of the body.
Within this…cultural climate, the body is no longer perceived as a properly personal reality, a sign and place of relations with others, with God and with the world. It is reduced to pure materiality: it is simply a complex of organs, functions and energies to be used according to the sole criteria of pleasure and efficiency. Consequently, sexuality too is depersonalized and exploited: from being the sign, place and language of love, that is, of the gift of self and acceptance of another, in all the other's richness as a person, it increasingly becomes the occasion and instrument for self-assertion and the selfish satisfaction of personal desires and instincts. Thus the original import of human sexuality is distorted and falsified, and the two meanings, unitive and procreative, inherent in the very nature of the conjugal act, are artificially separated: in this way the marriage union is betrayed and its fruitfulness is subjected to the caprice of the couple [3].
Re-write this paragraph in your own words.
Conclude with
“Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son,
and to the Holy Spirit.
As it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be.
World without end, Amen.”
[0] lead quote - John Mayer, Your Body is a Wonderland, from the album Room for Squares, released 6/3/2002, by Columbia - Aware
[1] Mary Pipher, Ph.D., Reviving Ophelia, Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, Riverhead Books, New York, 1994, p 27
[2] Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ, Paulist Press, 1976 tr. by V. Green, pp. 150, 151
[3] Evangelium Vitae, The Gospel of Life, #23