We have seen from all the preceding sections of Christopher West’s article the sort of teachings we’re going to be encountering from the Holy Father as we work through the individual sections of the Theology of the Body.
Authentic Sexual Liberation
Authentic sexual liberation is the aim and goal of the Theology of the Body. We have seen from the past few weeks that the Holy Father’s ultimate project is turning our view of the Church’s teaching on sexuality around. He’s trying to show us that what the Church offers is not abstinence from the freedoms of love, but abstinence from lusts that make true love truly free.”Sin’s tactic is to “twist” and “disorient” our desire for the eternal embrace.” is what West says in this concluding section and I could not agree more. We live in a sexually disoriented society, a society that has no conception of the common good, no conception of what a polity truly is, because its sexuality (the very thing which lies at the heart of political thought As Augustine understands in the City of God) is unchaste. Where there is unchastity, injustice and deception will also flourish.
However, there is hope. “Be Not Afraid!” were the words of the Holy Father in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope and this is exactly what we should hear through all this. The Holy Father’s clarion call that pierces through the darkness is not intended to steal our hope, but to renew it. We find ourselves in the midst of a generation beginning to reject the “freedoms” that the 60’s culture in our country thought would make the world a better place. Our youth are starting to become dissatisfied with the base sexuality that is offered to them as the height and culmination of sexual experience.
There is hope because the world’s vision of sexuality is ultimately counterfeit, and as such, it has no place in the future which God intends. There is hope because this counterfeit has failed to satisfy. The tragic reality is that the world is in the state it is in partly because the teachings of the Church are not adhered to, and when this happens, souls and bodies are wounded. And yet, there is hope. There is hope because despite the tragedy of the wounds that this counterfeit has endured, we are the people for whom confession of sin, penance, and reconciliation with God, and with neighbor are core to growth in perfection.
The world is ripe for the harvest, and the best way we as disciples may be sent out as laborers is to faithfully live the teachings of the Church as authentically as possible. It is in these teachings that we find the freedom to Love as we ought. The Church has never intended for her teachings to be a burden imposed from the outside, but that they should spring from the faithful heart in gladness, and become a wellspring of the living water of salvation from within. When we adhere to these teachings we overthrow a culture that would thwart us, that would seek to make us weak and sick with counterfeit.
We are all of us, tempted by our culture, by our medias, by our distrusts to be very afraid in the midst of a world so backwards and challenging. We are tempted to distrust that there can be hope. We are tempted to stand at the door and keep ourselves from hurt through skepticisim, not realizing that this unhealthy skepticism is itself a wound. We are tempted to stand at the door in fear, timid in the face of a ravenous culture, and we are tempted to assume that salvation’s breaking forth is still a long ways off.
To this, the Holy Father gives us one piece of holy advice, one tenet with which to approach this great labor of hope in the midst of peril, of evangelizing a world ready to overthrow the lies, “Be Not Afraid!“
A Journey with the Holy Father 