Christopher West Is Back

After a six months sabbatical Christopher West is back; West is a well known and lately controversial teacher of Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body (TOB).

West came under scrutiny after editors at ABC News sensationalized some of his quotes out of context (they would never intentionally misunderstand Catholics would they?) by saying Hugh Hefner and JPII rescued sexuality from the prudishness of Victorian morality.

But West came under even heavier fire from the "friendlies" at the JPII Institute and various theologians and philosophers, including Alice Von Hildebrand and David Schindler. Well known chastity speaker Dawn Eden criticized West in her master's thesis saying "West risks sexualizing Christianity rather than Christianizing sexuality".

Now, I am no expert at all in this field and have only a surface understanding of TOB, West, Hildebrand, and Eden's thesis. I suspect without being able to prove that Eden may have a point.  I also know people who have attended West's seminars and they tell me they are very solid. (It is important to remember that it is possible to critique someone's work and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.)

West himself said in a statement that he had gained many insights from his critics and appreciated the need for greater balance in his life. Although he does not agree with all of his critics, he has handled the entire controversy with great humility and grace. This is a tremendous witness to all of us, especially after the public nature of the criticism he endured.

Now, since I've already admitted to offering an uninformed opinion (i.e., not from original sources), is there anybody out there who has any experience with this?

Adam And Eve's Unhappy Sex Life

Fellow Catholic Dads blogger, John Jansen posted this picture entitled Adam and Eve. It's a "painting that ... has [been] used in Theology of the Body presentations".

I don't know who painted it or where, but I feel compelled to re-post it. John says it speaks for itself, but I feel like it needs talking about.

It's just so potent, so visceral. I see boredom and pain. I see people trapped in a mechanical sexual relationship without pleasure. I see addiction. The half-nakedness suggests a hot summer night whose carnal activities has not brought relief from the heat outside or passion from within.

She looks old, worn out, tired; but she continues to apply make up to try to make herself alluring -- yet failing. She actually looks older than he does, suggesting some kind of cougar-love where the past-her-prime sexual aggressor actively seeks out the younger man to try to recapture her fading flower. Her vanity mirror is in front of her while she applies the makeup, but her eyes are sliding to the side, as if to see if Adam is still there, still caught in her wiles. Extending the metaphor, the classic pose of turning her head one way and her eyes another gives the viewers the impression that she is looking at us, to catch us too.

Adam looks spent, bored, and non-vital. He's either asleep, in pain, or both as his slack-jawed expression suggests. He looks post-coital, as if he's only just pulled on his pants. He grips the apple near his prominent crotch as he sits splay-legged. The apple here is a symbol of the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden, something that was taken in a way that was not supposed to be taken. It doesn't bring him pleasure, but he keeps hanging on to it, unable to let it go. In this picture the apple represents sex, but without love: a mechanical, even boring pursuit. He looks as if he meant to eat the apple, but fell asleep in situ before he could muster the energy.

The colors are flat: brownish and dull reds, symbolizing a lack of vitality. The browns also suggest earthiness, recalling the Garden of Eden by contrast -- in this case a barrenness, a lack of green growing things, of life. The lighting and shadows are harsh, non-flattering, as if the glare of reality is too much. The window shade is open and it's dark outside, giving the impression that it is a hot night. Since there is light on inside and darkness outside, the open window implies that anyone can see what the couple is doing from outside. The couple's half-nakedness shows a lack of modesty for their own bodies and for the sexual act. It is on display in a form of exhibitionism, but again without pleasure. In fact, Adam's base torso and passed-out pose implies they only just completed the act while the window was open the whole time.

These are just gut reactions I'm having. I'm sure others could explain it better. But I've never seen in one picture the damaging effects of sex without the proper understanding, context, and respect it demands that this picture affords.

Sex outside of marriage, contraceptive sex inside of marriage, self-gratification and selfishness: this is you -- and I've never seen you so unhappy.

Trinity: Ineffable Mystery

First, the systematic theology way.

Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity, on the Trinity on this, the feast of the Holy Trinity:

The First Person knows Himself; His act of knowing Himself produces an Idea, a Word; and this Idea, this Word, the perfect Image of Himself, is the Second Person.

The First Person and the Second combine in an act of love and ... produce a state of Lovingness within the Divine nature. Into this Lovingness, Father and Son pour all that they have and all that they are, with no diminution, nothing held back.

Thus their Lovingness too is Infinite, Eternal, Living, Someone, A Person, God.

Thus the Son is generated by way of knowledge and the Spirit is breathed, or spirated, by way of Love.

Now the Theology of the Body way:

Can you see now how the very image of the Godhead is imprinted on human nature? A man and a woman when they have intimate knowledge of each other, when they give themselves to each other completely with nothing held back, then a third person, a child, comes into being by way of Love.

[This ineffable mystery can barely be comprehended by our poor finite brains.]

Christopher West Corrects Nightline Editors

Recently Christopher West, a Catholic educator, author, lecturer, and faculty member of the Theology of the Body Institute was featured on Nightline. And the criticisms have come raining in from all quarters, somewhat unjustly. But this is a case of editorial skew. Based on the meida report, I thought "this guy is a raving sex lunatic giving Catholics a bad name". Doing my own homework, I find the opposite to be the case.

Several editorial comments which have also been picked up by other news outlets have led to misleading statements which seem to paint West as a radical Catholic sex therapist / preacher who equates Pope John Paul II and Hugh Hefner's approach to sexuality.

[ChristopherWest.com] Regarding the connection between John Paul II and Hugh Hefner, Christopher often points out the interesting historical “coincidence” of the work of these two profoundly influential men. In the early 1950s, as Hefner was founding Playboy magazine, Karol Wojtyla began to lecture and write about the need for Christians to experience a redemption of their bodies and sexuality. In their respective work, both Hefner and John Paul II responded to a puritanical /Manichean approach to sexuality, but they offered completely different solutions to the problem. This is the historical "connection" of which Christopher spoke in the Nightline interview. ABC latched onto this point, but they failed to provide the larger context Christopher offered in his extended interview with Nightline’s correspondent. This lack of proper context has led some to misinterpret Christopher’s remarks as somehow endorsing Hefner’s views.

The point Christopher made—but which wasn’t included in the Nightline piece—was that, as Catholics, we agree with Hugh Hefner’s diagnosis of the disease (i.e., a puritanical rejection of the body and sexuality is utterly contrary to Catholic faith), but we radically disagree with his cure.

This kind of misunderstanding is almost inevitable given the culture's 5 second attention span and the media's desire for shocking headlines and scandalous stories. The plain fact of the matter is that context is everything. If you take a complex subject and thousand pages of instruction and try to distill it down to a sound bite, you're bound to come away with a distorted view.

WBN has covered the topic of media selective hearing before, and it seems like it applies now.

West: The Song of Songs presents an unabashed biblical celebration of the chaste love of a husband and wife, including multiple references to the intimacies of "tasting" the goodness of the other. Let my lover come to his garden and eat its choice fruits. Songs Ch 4

Media: Did he just say "oral sex"?

Bumper Sticker Theology

Let's face it: nobody likes your bumper sticker.

For every person who likes your bumper sticker, there are two others who'd like to run you off the road for it. I'm one of them.

Many people have written much more eloquently about the reduction of public discourse to "sound bites" and "sloganeering". They function much like stereotypes in that they convey a world of standardized details in a handy label. Like junk food, they are tasty as a treat but sickening as a full time diet.

Today's inane bumper sticker read:

We are spiritual people having a bodily experience.

The nuances and vagaries of what is wrong with this statement I am probably not qualified to tell, but in the main it misses the point of what we are.

We are NOT mere flesh with no immortal spirit, same as the animals; but God made flesh and matter and saw that it was good.

We are NOT merely pure spirits or intellects or even "consciousnesses" -- those are angels. We are NOT angels. But God gave us an imperishable spirit made after his own image and saw that it was good.

We are NOT even souls who happen to inhabit bodies or "shells" for a short time until we die and our souls go to Heaven or Hell (Purgatory is just a pit stop.) Our souls have NOT been hanging around in Heaven waiting for our turn at a body.

And we are sure as shootin' NOT spiritual people having a bodily experience.

What we ARE is that amazing and absolutely unique creature who is both body and soul at the same time. Your soul is not "more you" than your body, and your body is not "more real" than your soul.

Body and soul go together always and everywhere -- that's why we die if they're separated; and that separation is unnatural -- it only exists because of sin. That's why we will be reunited with our bodies on the Last Day. For us to be completely alive in Christ, we're going to need our bodies and souls conjoined. We are ONE thing, not two things stuck together.

Our selves are both mundane and mystical, at once apprehendable and ineffable. Our bodies are a prayer and a temple. Pope John Paul II wrote extensively on the Theology of the Body which attempts to explore the mystery and holiness of our existence. We have the secret of God's inner life stamped into our natures. It goes on and on ...

I need my own bumper sticker that says:

Your bumper sticker is stupid.