“As a being at once body and spirit, man expresses and perceives spiritual realities through physical signs and symbols” (CCC 1146)
It’s important to know, or remember, that Christiany does not reject the human body. If the Manichean mentality places an “anti-value” on the body and sexuality, Christiany teaches that the body and sexuality “always remain a ‘value not sufficiently appreciated'”. Christiany says “the body is so good that you cannot even fathom it”.
But our sex-saturated culture has failed to see just how valuable the body and sex really are. As the Catechism proclaims: “The flesh is the hinge of salvation”.
We should understand our bodies in some sense a “sacrament”. Sacraments are composed of matter and are God’s chosen means by which, through the action of the Holy Spirit, we encounter God’s spiritual treasures. When John Paul II speaks of the body as a “sacrament”, he means it is a sign that makes visible the invisible mystery of God.
He explains: “The body, in fact, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it” (TOB 19:4). We are embodied spirits, or spiritualized bodies. Through the profound union of body and soul in each of us, our bodies reveal or “make visible”. The body is not divine, but it is a “sign” of the divine mystery.
As John Paul says, “through the fact that Word of God became flesh, the body entered theology… through the main door” (TOB 23:4)
The Catechism explains that “God has revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an external exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share this exchange” (CCC 221). God is love; Not only because he loves us, but because within God the three Persons of the Trinity live “an external exchange of love”.
God is an eternal Communion of Persons. A “common union” (communion) of persons is established to the degree that two or more persons mutually “give” themselves to another in love and sacrifice.
And here is why we exist: Love, by its nature, desires to expand its own communion.
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Theology of the Body for beginners
Christopher West
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