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I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but we have come to the end of Theology of the Body.  I have enjoyed the journey immensely.  This will be the last Book Club Monday Post until we come up with a new book.

If you have any suggestions, let’s hear them!

To sum up what Theology of the Body has taught us let’s look at some words from Christopher West.

Chastity, so often considered “negative” or “repressive,” is supremely positive and liberating.  It’s the virtue that frees sexual desire the “Utilitarian attitude,”  from the tendency to use other for gratification. 

As the Pope expresses, “If conjugal chastity (and chastity in general) is manifested at first as the capacity to resist [lust], it later gradually reveals itself as a singular capacity to perceive, love, and practice those meanings of the “language of the body’ which remain altogether unknown to lust itself.” 

“Sexual union itself –with all emotional joys and physical pleasures–is meant to be an expression of “life according to the Holy Spirit”.  When spouses are open to the gift, the Holy Spirit impregnates their sexual desires “with everything that is noble and beautiful,”  with “the supreme value, which is love”.  But when spouses, because of their “hardness of heart,” close themselves off to the Holy Spirit, sexual union quickly degenerates into an act of lust, an act of mutual exploitation.

If spouses are not living an authentic spirituality–inn other words, if their hearts are closed to the transforming power of the Holy Spirit–they will inevitable view the Church’s teaching against contraception as an oppressive rule to follow.

For those who live an authentic Christian ethos, the idea of engaging in contracepted intercourse becomes repulsive.  Such people are free from the law!  It doesn’t feel imposed on them.  It wells up from within as an expression of “life according to the Spirit.” 

In the act of creation, God had “in-spired” the human body with his own life and love.  When man an woman sinned, they “ex-pired”; they breathed God’s Spirit out of their bodies.  So once again, I appeal to you:  If today your hear his voice, harden not your hearts!” (Heb 3:15)

As John Paul II boldy proclaims, through the gift of redemption, “there always remains the possibility of passing from ‘error’ to the ‘truth’…the possibility of conversion from sin to chastity as an expression of a life according to the Spirit”

I’d like to leave you with this quote from Thorton Wilders’ , “The Skin of Our Teeth”.  I think it sums up everything we have been learning since last November.

“I didn’t marry you because you were perfect.  I didn’t even marry you because I loved you.  I married you because you gave me a promise.  That promise made  up for  your faults.  And the promise I gave you made up for mine.  Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage.  And when our children were growing up, it wasn’t a house that protected them;  and it wasn’t our love that protected them -

It was that promise”