By I first heard the words “theology of the body” when my husband and I started the Couple to Couple League’s teacher training program (for natural family planning). Father Richard Hogan talked about it in a video lesson, and it was an eye-opener for me.
Up till then, I used NFP because it was one of “the rules.” Hearing Father Hogan break open the reasons why the Church teaches what it does made my heart beat faster.
I liked how TOB made sex about more than rules and sin, how it put marital intimacy in context, how it delved into the experiential and drew lessons from ordinary life. I’m a storyteller, so that resonated with me.
During the years we battled infertility, I really came to appreciate the holiness of the body and fertility. The absence of normal function in my own body made me hunger to experience what others had taken for granted throughout the ages. And when pregnancy came at last, I was really tuned into the sanctity of the experience — even when it was hard. (And it was hard. We never once had a drama-free birth.)
But gradually, listening to those talks again and again as we taught NFP classes, I started seeing deeper layers in theology of the body.
I don’t remember when it was, or even what precisely Father Hogan said to spark it. But one day a door opened in my mind, and I realized: theology of the body isn’t just about sex; it’s about everything.
It’s about openness to life and chastity, yes — but it’s also about environmental stewardship and consumerism. It’s about self-care and time management. It’s about race and guns and immigration and disability and education and health care. The dignity of the human person is… everything.
I got a lot of opportunities to ponder this as I wrote for Family Foundations, the Couple to Couple League’s membership magazine. My editors used this phrase: “where the rubber meets the road.” I came to realize that the theology of the body is a way to take the faith out of the realm of the theoretical and ground it in a profoundly practical world.
Without that grounding, we risk the faith becoming an intellectual exercise, a self-focused piety that misses the dozens of ways every day that discipleship is meant to be lived out in concrete, practical ways in a concrete, practical world.
A new pro-life lens
There were, of course, other influences that helped me in this process. Rory Cooney’s wonderful song “We Will Serve the Lord” is one I share often. The birth of my second child, who has Down syndrome, was another. Becoming a disability mom rocked my world in the best, which is to say the most difficult, of ways.
For this child of the pro-life movement, becoming a disability mom was quite an eye opener. Openness to life can come with a very high cost: ICU stays, open-heart surgery, arguing with insurance companies for coverage, battling schools to get services. (This was not always successful; we weren’t able to enroll her in Catholic school.)
Being pro-life, I realized, is easy to talk about in the abstract. When you’re staring down $5,000 orthotics and five therapy appointments a week for tiny children who need that level of support just to learn to walk and feed themselves, you quickly realize what’s missing from that abstract value statement.
Being a disability parent clarified for me how many of the policy questions we think have obvious, simple answers are more complex than our black-and-white political culture ever allows.
In the end, everything crystallized for me into one phrase: intentional Catholic. I knew I was called to stop and really examine the crossroads of discipleship and the practical world — and then to share my story with those who haven’t had the same experiences. (See that experiential piece coming back in?)
These days, theology of the body directs everything I do, both as a mother and in my professional life. TOB is inherent in the music I write for the Church at worship. It’s implicit in the stories I write. And it is something I reflect on overtly in my online newsletter and in talks I give at parishes.
I love theology of the body for challenging us to embrace the messiness. For holding up an ideal of the body as a concrete, visible, tactile image of God in the world. I love the idea that being human is a positive thing, a conscious choice made by God so that divine love (the “unseen”) can be made visible and tangible. Being human is not something we have to overcome to become “good enough” for heaven.
In fact, to be fully human is to live as authentic images of God.
How beautiful is that?
