I used to be a teacher. I taught college English. I adored it. I loved working with students one on one and talking about their writing and encouraging them. I loved to see their confidence grow as they became more and more comfortable expressing themselves in their writing.
Every now and then though, I would have a difficult time. During these times, would catch a reflection of myself in a window or I would imagine how I looked or came across to my students. Then I would stop. I would no longer even know what I was even saying if I could say anything at all. A panic would rush over me, and it would take a bit for me to bury those thoughts again and move forward.
And I think perhaps that is why I like writing so much. As much as my students had a difficult time showing themselves on paper, I had an equally difficulty showing myself in the real world. Writing was my arena. It was where I could exist as myself, purely myself, without having to worry about my body distorting myself. It was where I could truly be myself. It was my response to the idea of “a face made for radio.”
Those little glimpses of myself as an embodied spirit didn’t only haunt me in my teaching. They have haunted me for as long as I can remember. The deepest longing of my younger being was that I could finally get rid of my body. I never wanted my life to go away – I wanted to continue to live and to thrive right where I was. I just desperately wished that I, that we, could all do it without the hinderance of the temporal.
Looking back, I could see that my struggles were just as much spiritual as they were physical. In fact, they were probably more ontological than sensual in every way. I just simply didn’t understand what the purpose of a body was, and I most definitely didn’t value the one I had. I didn’t understand that it was a part of me just as much, even more so, than the feelings I thought so deeply and the thoughts I held so earnestly.
The sad thing is that I don’t think I’m really alone in this. At this moment, I think our culture is at a bit of a crisis point when it comes to understanding what it truly means to live in a body. This crisis is important and it’s worth giving ourselves over to fix it because as much as this crisis can affect all of us, it affects most those who come after us. Those who have to learn what it means to be a physical being from the people and the world around them.
I decided a few years ago that I needed to fix these misperceptions of mine. I saw that I had four daughters to help develop into whole and holy women, and I knew I couldn’t do it as I was. I couldn’t teach what I didn’t know. And so I searched. I started trying to understand the spiritual answers to all of those questions and doubts and fears that had plagued me for most of my life. I sought answers in the teachings of the Catholic Church.
To be honest, sometimes the answers sounded odd. Sometimes they almost sounded backwards. They didn’t make sense in the framework I had been operating from.
And then it hit me.
The reason the answers seemed backwards was because they were being proposed in a culture that has it all wrong and that has had it wrong from well before I was even born.
Our media and our thought leaders and our political movements all tell us that our bodies are a means to an end. They tell us that they are to be a source of pleasure. Something to be bartered in exchange for pleasure or companionship or a high or an escape or a thrill. They tell us that they are a means to productivity. That their health is meant to be sacrificed on the altar of success and money and promotion. And they tell us that they are billboards meant to advertise our worth – but not, and never, our dignity.
In today’s world, our body’s appearance is our barter, but its dignity is ignored.
You don’t have to dig deep into the archives of the internet or listen long to what is portrayed on the news to hear about how Catholic social teaching is hateful. How it discriminates. How it marginalizes those whose lifestyle choices it deems to be against God’s will. How it’s repressive and harmful and dangerous. And perhaps it does seem like that to those who believe it is arbitrary. Who believe the purpose of the social teaching is to maintain a status quo and to punish those who are different, to keep those who are in in and those who are out out.
But you also don’t have to dig deep into Catholic social teaching to discover just how erroneous that is. To realize that the teachings don’t stem from hatred but from a deep belief in the dignity of each and every human body. That they stem from a belief that our bodies tell us both about ourselves, our world, and our God and that they are worth so very much more than we could possibly understand. They are worth more than the food or the drug we use to numb them, and they are worth ever so much more than the pleasure we attempt to derive from them.
We can learn that God gave us gifts, sensual gifts, that can bring us all sorts of temporal joy but that to exploit those gifts at the expense of our bodies hurts not only God, not only our society, but our very selves. Even if we don’t believe it does. Even if it the self-abuse makes us feel empowered. Even if it’s what we really, really want.
I hear people condemning the Church and her teachings. I hear people wondering how I could raise my daughters in a Catholic Church that does not respect women, and I no longer know how to respond. I know they are wrong. I know our Church’s teachings are beautiful and that they can only enhance my daughters’ understanding of their bodies and their lives and their inheritance. But I also know that those words will most likely just fall on deaf ears to those who don’t wish to understand.
It is in those times that I’m reminded that what we do will always speak more loudly than what we say, and that in these circumstances, what we do refers most strongly to how we treat our own bodies — how we treat them with dignity and respect and understand that what we do to and with our bodies affects every other aspect of our lives.
As human beings, we are embodied spirits. To ignore either aspect of that is to deny an absolutely crucial aspect of all we were created to be.
If you would like to learn more about talking to your kids about principles contained in Theology of the Body, check out this site by Colleen at Elevator to Heaven. She has some great resources there.
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