Theology of the Body for Repairing Our Vision of Love and Marriage: A Reflection for the Feast of Saint John Paul II

Sometimes it is tempting to dismiss saints who we feel are all too “common.” Praying to Saint Pope John Paul the Great for my current or future marriage? How Catholiche (Catholic cliché)! Reading his Theology of the Body (TOB) addresses as I seek healing in the area of love? So early 2000s. We forget that what is beautiful about the saints is that each one is anything but common, and each one has a timeless witness from which we can draw strength and inspiration.

I was blessed to spend an all too brief two years immersed in the rich teachings of the Church on love and marriage at the John Paull II Institute in Washington, DC. While the theologians and philosophers we studied were varied, Saint John Paul II remained my patron. He was the one on whose prayers I counted for assistance in my studies. It was him to whom I went for help discerning my future vocation and the healing needed to enter it. I sought his friendship and encouragement when times or circumstances seemed lonely and hopeless. And as Catholiche as it is, Saint John Paul II’s teachings, on the Theology of the Body in particular, proved healing, liberating, and life-changing for me.

My experiences and my knowledge of love and Church teaching up to that point were lacking, to say the least. I saw love as give and take where someone (usually the woman) was always losing. I was confounded by the idea of surrendering my autonomy to wifedom, and especially to motherhood. I felt that the Church did not respect, nor acknowledge, my gifts as a woman. Upon reading the teachings of Pope Saint John Paull II, I was amazed to learn about the beauty and truth of love as self gift, the absolute dignity of man and woman, and the great call and challenge presented to each of us in living out life-giving love.

Love as Self Gift

“Man became the ‘image and likeness’ of God not only through his own humanity, but also through the communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning…Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion. Right ‘from the beginning,’ he is not only an image in which the solitude of a person who rules the world is reflected, but also, and essentially, an image of an inscrutable divine communion of persons.” TOB Nov. 14, 1979

We often fail to appreciate that our God is Trinitarian. At least, I did until I encountered the Theology of the Body’s explanation of love as self gift. God, a communion of three persons, is always in a giving-receiving relationship within Himself. The Father gives Himself totally to the Son. The Son returns the Father’s love to the Father. The fruit of their love, AND the love that holds them together, is the Holy Spirit. (This is not something that happens in chronological time, as God has always existed as Trinity.)

In a completely gratuitous act, God chose to pour His abundant and fruitful love out into creation. He invites us to experience the fullness of what it means to be human when we similarly give of ourselves, particularly in the family and through our sexual difference. The husband gives himself completely to his wife, the wife actively receives this love and gives herself completely to her husband, and, God-willing, the fruit of their love is the child of their union.[1] Our maleness and femaleness can be said to be the manifestation of the Trinitarian love of God in us and thus our sexual difference makes possible a total and fruitful gift of self. To summarize this teaching, Saint John Paul II often quoted this passage from the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes:

“This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” (paragraph 24)

I found this understanding of the human person healing and liberating. It meant that my life was not my own, and that that truth was good. It meant I no longer had to question the meaning of my life. As a child of divorce, having often felt that I had lost my sense of self, this truth – that my life was not my own – pointed me to my deepest origin. Now I realize that there is a beautiful plan for my life: a plan that exists because of Love and a plan that I am made for love.

Absolute Dignity of Man and Woman

“Man, whom God created male and female, bears the divine image imprinted on his body ‘from the beginning.’ Man and woman constitute two different ways of the human ‘being a body’ in the unity of that image.” TOB Jan. 2, 1980

Like so many (too many) “modern” women, I wrongly believed that the Church saw women as the lesser of the two sexes. I saw St. Paul’s words to the Galatians as proof that what the Catholic Church taught conflicted with the witness of Jesus Christ. St. Paul penned:

“For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:28 RSV)

I interpreted this to support the modern notion that to be equal to men, women could not, and should not, acknowledge a difference between men and women. I misinterpreted the Church’s respect, love, and admiration for Mary as proof that the Church thought women to be only good for serving husbands and bearing children. Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body broke through my misunderstanding and revealed to me the beautiful and absolute dignity of both men and women.

I learned that as men and women, we each have unique calls with different and complementary gifts to offer the world. Thus our “equality” is not based on sameness; rather, our differences are what guarantee our equality. What women have to offer the world simply cannot be offered by men (and vice versa). Venerable Fulton Sheen put it this way: “It is for our age to decide whether woman shall claim equality in sex and the right to work at the same lathe, or whether she will claim equity and give to the world that which no man can give.” 

In Theology of the Body, Saint John Paul II explains that the word “man” had no meaning until the creation of woman. He refers to the original Hebrew text of the opening chapters of Genesis and explains that the endings to the Hebrew word for human that distinguish a human as male and female are not added until the creation of woman. Thus man and woman as we know them come into existence at the same time. While it is true that Adam possessed a male body and soul prior to the creation of Eve, his maleness meant nothing until it could be contrasted and complemented by Eve’s femaleness.

We also learn that the word that God uses to describe Eve (ezer kenegdo), translated in English as helpmate, is only ever used in the Bible to describe God Himself as Israel’s “helpmate.” This is a far cry from the submissive handmaid to which it is often reduced. With this enriched understanding of the creation of man and woman, I no longer needed to worry about keeping tabs when it came to love. I now understood the dignity of each gender and how, together, men and women image God’s love for the world at large, and image God’s love for His Church in particular.

The Call to Life-Giving Love

“The human body includes right from the beginning…the capacity of expressing love, that love in which the person becomes a gift – and by means of this gift – fulfills the meaning of his being and existence.” TOB Jan 16, 1980

Our culture is thirsting for meaning; it is desperate for the healing that comes from loving and being loved authentically, entirely, and in true freedom. Saint Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body answers that longing while describing in beautiful detail God’s plan for the human person: to love and to be loved, to give our lives over to a community of persons. Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, put it this way:

"This is the foundation of the civilization of love: that to be made in the image of God is not simply to be fashioned as such, but to function as an image of God - that is, to be ontologically destined for and capable of a life of loving communion with others."

I write this in the fall of 2020, a year that has struck in more ways than one at our need for relationship, for community. Perhaps this year has left you questioning when it will be possible to experience loving communion with others again. Perhaps it seems odd, even impossible, to see your life as gift right now. Maybe the suffering of the past several months has made you more keenly aware of the gift of life now more than ever. Whatever the case, discouragement and despair can remain a temptation. When life seems so complex and rife with seemingly unsolvable problems, you can return to this simple truth: you are made to love in this moment, in this time, and in this place. You are created for, and called to, love. If each of you respond to this call, we will build up a civilization of love. It really is that simple. Moment to moment, one need only to ask, “what is the most loving thing I can do in this situation?” This simple question, if answered and acted upon, will help to save marriages, it will help to save families, and it has the power to change the seemingly unchangeable in our culture and in our world.

As we celebrate the feast of Saint Pope John Paul II, may we live with renewed vigor the lifelong mission, lived out daily, to which God has summoned us through his abiding message encapsulated in Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.

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Shaina Pia lives in Connecticut with her husband and children. Prior to receiving her Masters in Theology of Marriage and Family at the John Paul II Institute, she worked as a medical journalist having obtained a Bachelor degree in Journalism from Boston University. After briefly working for a diocese in New England, she taught high school theology for eight years and now works as a stay at home wife and mother.

[1] For couples who experience infertility, the fruit of their love may be a ministry, the act of adoption, or other beautiful ventures the two do together. Even for couples who bear the cross of infertility and/or those who have discerned the need to space children using fertility awareness-based methods, such as Natural Family Planning, the act that brings them together is fruitful, unifying, life-giving, and open to life whether or not it actually results in the creation of a physical new life.