TOB paper (as it could have been)

My Theology of the Body Paper as it COULD HAVE BEEN!--because pictures make the world a better place--but wasn't.....

        In the Beginning (because where else would you start?)  God created Man in His own Image....and damn was he good!

This was the Original Solitude of man.  The first man’s singularity before God in creation did not simply point to a lack of other human beings, but to his uniqueness and personal calling to relationship with God.  Each person exists in this solitude before God and is called, like the first man alone in creation, to unity with God.

However, since God is a communion of Divine Persons, man was an incomplete expression of the image of God all by himself.  So God put the man to sleep and brought Eve out of Adam.

With the creation of Eve, Adam’s particular expression of humanity -- that of masculinity -- was awakened and confirmed by Eve’s difference from him -- that is, her femininity.  The pope says of this individuality and unity of persons: “Masculinity and femininity express the twofold aspect of man’s somatic constitution and indicate, in addition, through the same words of Genesis 2:23 the new consciousness of the meaning of one’s body.  This meaning, one can say, consists in reciprocal enrichment.” (John Paul II, p. 165, 9:5, 2006) Thus, in the midst of original unity there is found original singularity, which expresses this twofold aspect of man that was made for communion; and through that communion and act of becoming one, a consciousness of what it means to be masculine and feminine, which is deeper and sharper than the differences between male and female, is awakened.  

Then there was the Fall...

O...m...g... Whatever we just did...was really bad. And now we're ugly. Quick! Hide! God can't see us in camo!

 (Disclaimer: apologies to the distortions of Chuck and Sarah...they'll come back properly as themselves later)

Before the Fall, the unity of man and woman was like.... Colombian Coffee:

*Cue fiesta music*

In fact, not just like some cup of Colombian Coffee you get out of a roadside cafe.  Imagine to yourself (a priori lens you need to see this metaphor through: coffee is as important to you as it is to me) that your very first introduction to coffee was in Columbia.  Juan Valdez planted the the seed, watered it, sang to it, weeded it, lovingly hand-picked the bugs off of it to preserve it from pesticides, harvested the beans from the full-grown plant himself, and gave them to his wife.  She, in turn, dried them, roasted them with the greatest care, ground them to a fine powder, and brewed, just for you the perfect cup.  Ambrosia!  Truly, this is the drink of gods.

And this is how you always experience your coffee.

Then.  You screw up, Columbia explodes, and you are left with this:

Nasty, instant, DECAF. And probably cold too. You could almost die from grief.  Except that you're sort of addicted at this point, so you stand there pitifully to the last drop, remembering Juan Valdez and using the powers of your mind to get more caffeine out of the cup than exists in reality.

Fortunately for us poor decaffeinated suckers, God came down to save us, and not only restored us to some kind of sanity, but bestowed Sanctifying Grace on marriage, which was sort of like giving us espresso, foamed milk, and some vanilla sweetener.  Not the same as that original Colombian, but hey cappuccinos and lattes are pretty great.

God did this so that, metaphorically, and in addition to a lot of other awesome stuff like adopted sonship and Salvation...

...we can have this. :) Metaphorically. *ahem*

So...back to the actual paper.  In the marital context, through sanctifying grace and the gift of self[1], a man can awaken in his wife the consciousness of that deeper femininity and help her to live her femininity more fully, and she can awaken the same in him and help her husband to live his masculinity more fully. (John Paul II, 2006) This awakening, awareness of one's true self, enables each to give to the other of themselves more completely, and the spouses can continue this spiral of grace upward, where each lives out their own personhood before God more and more wholly and are able, therefore, to give of themselves more and more freely, and in this way they can heal one another from the brokenness caused by original sin, generational sin, and personal sin.

(These next two paragraphs are long, but, I think, super cool.)

 

The ability to heal one another through femininity or masculinity is a profound, intrinsic reality, with far more significant meaning than to merely say that men and women can heal each other through their maleness and femaleness.  To be masculine or feminine speaks to a greater reality of man than simple male or femaleness.  John Paul II explains this when he points out that “the Bible calls this first human being ‘man,’ (ʾādām), while from the moment of creation of the first woman, it begins to call him ‘male’, ʾîš, in relation to ʾiššāʰ (‘woman,’ because she has been taken from the male = ʾîš).” (John Paul II, p. 139, 3:2, 2006) The first creation of man as ʾādām encompasses all of humanity; femininity cannot exist apart from man and in fact is brought into existence, in the bodily form as ʾiššāʰ, out of man and can only be fully lived in relation to man.  Masculinity, or maleness, ʾîš, by comparison is only differentiated from ʾādām with the creation of the female, ʾiššāʰ, and only fully discovers itself when seen in light of femininity. (2006) The question then arises, if man as ʾādām was complete in his singularity before being divided into ʾîš and ʾiššāʰ, why did God say, “It is not good for man to be alone”? (Gen. 2:18) The answer lies in the unity of man and woman as a reflection of the communion of the Trinity.  God is in communion with himself because he is three persons in one divine nature.  Man and woman, created in the image of God, reflect that Trinitarian communion through their relationship as two persons becoming one in a way that ʾādām alone never could. 

             The division of masculinity and femininity brings forth a “new consciousness of the meaning of one’s body…[one of] reciprocal enrichment” (John Paul II, p. 165, 9:5, 2006) and this consciousness, the pope says, is “deeper than their somatic structure as male and female” (ibid), as it speaks to their original wholeness as ʾādām and their mirroring of the image of God as ʾîš and ʾiššāʰ.  Since femininity was called forth out of masculinity, and masculinity only recognizes itself in relation to femininity, the communion of these two primordial expressions of man always looks back to the Beginning and forward to the Beatific Vision.  Therefore, the sexual act of self-gift between spouses is not only unitive and creative, but also restorative.  In this intimate and vulnerable state, a husband’s masculinity has the capacity to restore his wife’s femininity—which has been wounded in other vulnerable states, attacked and disparaged by the world, and violated by harmful intimacies—by awakening that original state of her being and healing her through the sanctifying grace Christ bestowed on marriage.  The wife as well, through her femininity, can heal and restore her husband’s masculinity, which has likewise been damaged and belittled through personal sin, the sin of others, and the sins of the nation, and arouse in him a consciousness of original and sanctified masculinity.

So, this is all well and good but a little theoretical, no? I know that's what you're thinking.  Not only is it NOT theoretically but REAL, but it is SO TRUE that even faithless, secular, t.v. show writers have discovered it.  (Disclaimer again, I don't actually know that the writers of Chuck are faithless, but for sure their morals are skewed, to put it mildly....)

I bring you Chuck and Sarah.

In a day and age when the media is blitzkrieging us with girly-men and really, really, frighteningly "sexy" women, Chuck and Sarah stand apart.  At first glance, they might look like all the rest: she's hardcore, dangerous, and powerful, he's dorky and doesn't know one end of a gun from the other, but by the end of the first episode, it is pretty clear that such is not the case.  Sarah is tough and lethal because she's wounded, and Chuck might be emotional and unwilling to kill anyone, but it's because he is a fully integrated human being (body, mind, emotions, and soul all on the same page -- or at least very willing to communicate with each other), and can use his particular skill sets to protect Sarah and the team without harming others.  John Casey, another member of the team, is set up as a foil to Chuck.  Where Chuck is a fun-loving dork, Casey is all business; Chuck is sensitive to the tensions in the group while Casey grunts in disgust at the very idea of feelings; Chuck cannot take a life no matter what the circumstances are, and it is not unusual for Casey to take down up to ten Black Ops single handedly.  Even in their physicality they are set up in comparison to each other, for in the first season Chuck has shaggy hair and is lean and rather undefined, whereas Casey has a crew cut and is powerfully built.  Yet of the three characters, Chuck is the most well-rounded, and he is a genuinely good human being.  He cares deeply about people and when he talks about the emotions it never seems effeminate.  He may not have any natural kick-butt inclinations like Sarah and Casey, but his character still manages a free, masculine, quiet kind of strength.  

As the team works together, Sarah and Casey come to have an appreciation, even respect, for Chuck, and eventually, his refusal to kill, or even shoot at others, plays a big part in Sarah falling in love with him.  In the early episodes, Sarah is so divorced from her femininity that at times she seems almost like a killing machine -- the Terminator, actually, comes to mind.  Through her friendship and eventual relationship with Chuck, however, she becomes a real woman.  His gentle masculinity draws out her femininity and, by helping her to heal her old wounds and teaching her how to love and trust, she is brought into a fuller life: one that desires communion with another, belongingness, and family.

By the end of the series, Sarah and Chuck are married and Sarah wants to live a normal life, have a family, and just be a wife and mother.  This transformation from a wounded, angry soul, to a woman desiring to more fully live her femininity, speaks to the power of the healing agent found in the relationship between masculinity and femininity.  The pope sums it up thus: “femininity in some way finds itself before masculinity, while masculinity confirms itself through femininity” (John Paul II, p. 166, 10:1, 2006).  

Sarah isn't the only one to change though. Sarah’s femininity, which Chuck recognizes and seeks to protect long before Sarah is truly open to it, does in fact confirm Chuck’s masculinity.  Through his relationship with her he grows into full, confident manhood – even altering his look by cropping his hair short and becoming more physically muscular. By the end of the series, the dorky guy Sarah and Casey started out protecting has become the leader of their team. The friendship of Chuck and Casey is worth noting, because it illustrates how important male friendships are as well to the right-development of masculinity (and female friendships for femininity).  Casey, as was stated, at the beginning of the series is the gruff and grunting no-nonsense agent, who abhors any hint of emotionality as something anti-man and anti-soldier.  His friendship with Chuck, however, opens him up to the possibility that it is okay, and even good, to have, acknowledge, and sometimes even express feelings.  By the end of the series it is clear that Casey has developed some very deep friendships and has allowed himself to love and be loved by those friends, thereby living his humanity as a relational being more completely.  Through Chuck’s friendship with Casey, alternatively, Chuck has learned how to grow from a boy into a man, accept great responsibilities, and rise to challenges he never would have dreamed of before.  Casey, in fact, cultivates and strengthens in Chuck the virtues of loyalty, courage and perseverance.

Best. Team. Ever. Stand aside James Bond!

 Although portrayed imperfectly by a secular media company, the truth of the value and restorative power inherent in right-ordered masculinity and femininity is apparent in the growth of the characters on the show, particularly with Sarah’s character.  In fact, she illustrates well what John Paul II calls “discover[y of] herself” (John Paul II, p. 196, 17:5, 2006).  The pope writes that woman discovers herself in the way she is received by man, through her gift of self to him, and her acceptance of his gift to her (2006).   Through the reciprocal gift, woman comes to the full possession of herself “in this acceptance, the whole dignity of…what she is in the whole truth of her humanity and in the whole reality of her body and her sex, of her femininity” (p. 196-197, 17:5, 2006).  Through the example of Sarah’s relationship with Chuck, it is possible to see how a woman, however wounded, can begin to recognize and possess her inherent femininity through the aid of man’s masculinity.

The End!

 

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[1] The gift of self – that is, the interior freedom and disinterested self-donation of and to the spouses to find each other reciprocally and each “for his own sake” (Gaudium et Spes, 24:3; Theology of the Body, 15:3).