Meaning of The Body
I am aware, and grieved, that the Church has lost its institutional authority when speaking on issues of sexual morality. In that spirit of compunction, I hope you will receive these words as coming from a friend and fellow Christian on the road to full conversion with you. The thesis of this column is this: Life has meaning, and the human person embodies that meaning. Further, the body itself has a meaning most clearly seen in the relationship between man and woman.
This past Monday, the Church celebrated a Memorial that I believe can help us to respond to our loved ones about sensitive and contentious issues surrounding sexual morality, and it does so by reminding us of the meaning of our lives, even our bodies.
On June 3rd, we remembered Saints Charles Lwanga and his companions, martyred in Uganda toward the end of the 1800's. The reason for their martyrdom is striking. They were pages in the courts of King Mwanga II. And while their deaths were primarily incited by the king’s desire to suppress the Christian Faith altogether, it was ultimately their refusal of his homosexual advances that would cost these martyrs their lives.
Here’s how I think the witness of these particular Saints can help us. Firstly, although we are told that our lives are ours to do with as we please, these martyrs, preferring death to sin, proclaim that there is a greater Good to which all human events are ultimately subject. Likewise, although we are told in our times that our bodies are our own, to do with as we please, these martyrs - by resisting the king’s perversity - remind us that even our bodies have inherent meaning.
So, although we are all told that the only purpose of life is to discover its futility, and that the human body is likewise meaningless, the martyr rebels and proclaims that we belong to an Eternal Mystery, and that He designed us in such a way that even our bodies can aid us in coming to know something about who we are to Him.
As Christians, we refer to this Mystery as God the Father, as Christ has made Him known to us. But we also believe that every human person was made in His image and likeness, and that every human body reveals something of the divine.
But - and this is the thing - it is not the male body alone, nor the female body alone, that reveals God; it is the relationship between the two. Since the human person was created male and female, it is the relationship between the body of the man and the body of the female that is “made in the image and likeness of God.”
To use the body for physical pleasure, therefore, would be to privatize the sexual powers of the body, denying the meaning of the person and reducing the human experience. This is why sexual acts outside of marital openness to life leave a person unfulfilled and empty. It is because premarital sex, contraception, and homosexual acts do violence to the relationship between man and woman, and, as a result, to the man and the woman as individuals.
To the extent that we isolate man and woman from one another by promoting and practicing disordered heterosexual and homosexual acts, we prolong our attainment of the happiness we desire, whereas a restoration of the relationship between man and woman, male and female, renews our sense of meaning and destiny, and, with that, our goodness.
Prayer, and the sacrifice of abstinence and celibacy that prayer makes possible, will save the day. It’s a high calling, but far from being an objection to the fulfillment of human happiness, the martyrdom of chastity can accomplish growth as effectively as the blood of the martyrs. Look at the Church in Uganda today: amazingly vibrant! And it’s not despite the martyrdom of Saints Charles and his companions. In some mysterious way, it’s because of it. +