Theology of the Body Quote

For your daily dose of Pope John Paul II's theological time bomb.

John Paul says that the human body in all the original truth of its masculinity and feminity expresses the gift of creation. "This is the body: a witness as a fundamental gift, and so a witness to Love as the source from which this same giving springs. Masculinity-femininity--namely, sex--is the original sign of a creative donation [by God] and of an awareness on the part of man, of a gift lived so to speak in an original way" (TOB 62).

We cannot understand human existence if we do not understand this reality of "gift." All is gift. God initiates the gift and creates man to receive the gift, which is God's divine Life and Love. This understanding of gift provides the interpretive key to the Pope's anthropology. Through this "hermeneutic of the gift" we approach "the very essence of the person." Man is created as a person first to recive the gift of God's gratuitous love, and then to recapitulate that love by being gift to others. In fact, this call to be gift is "the fundamental element of human existence in the world" (TOB 66). God inscribed it in the mystery of human sexuality. The complementarity of the body itself as male and female, as the revelation of the innermost being of man, of his subjectivity and freedom, summons man and woman freely to recapitulate the giving and receiving of the divine gift. Now the words of Genesis 2:24 take on their meaning: For this reason--to recapitulate the divine gift--"a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh." This, as John Paul says, is "the meaning with which sex enters the theology of the body" (TOB 62).

Taken from Christopher West's Theology of the Body Explained (p.95-96)