Growing up, I was chubby. In my fourth-grade picture I sport a double chin. I also wore glasses, which means my classmates called me “fatso” and “four eyes.” This wasn’t a happy scenario to engender a healthy body image nor to even think of myself or my body as a gift.
Many of my friends had similar experiences. One grew up in a communist country where the message was that God was a myth invented by people who were intellectually weak. Since she didn’t want to be intellectually weak, she rejected any belief in God and embraced science as her god.
In this atheistic, survival-of-the-fittest system, every person was her competitor, a threat to her happiness and survival. So, she worked hard to perform at the top of her class to gain entrance into an elite university and get a top-paying job. And…she failed.
When she didn’t perform perfectly, my friend’s human identity crashed, invaded by shame. To escape this cultural shame, she studied in the United States where she encountered the love of God for the first time. She was surprised to realize it was possible to be intelligent and be a Christian, so she became a Christian and eventually learned about her identity as gift from St. John Paul II.
Oh, how I wish every person could learn that he or she is a gift! And how I wish the Catholic Church would embrace with gusto the centrality of the gift as articulated by St. John Paul II in his theology of the body!
So, where did St. John Paul II get this idea from? He borrowed the centrality of gift from Section 24 of a Vatican II document entitled Gaudium et spes or “GS 24” for short. Here’s the quote he cites repeatedly in his writings: “Man…cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” In other words, the way to experience the fullness of human happiness and life is not by beating out the competition, getting a high-paying job, or marrying the perfect spouse (because there are no perfect spouses!), but by making a sincere gift of yourself.
In fact, the Holy Father uses GS 24 to describes how we image a Trinitarian God: “To say that man [the human person] is created in the image and likeness of God means that man is called to exist ‘for’ other, to become a gift. This applies to every human being, whether woman or man…” (Mulieris Dignitatem 7).
Every person is created as a gift to be a gift, whether chubby, communist, college student, or construction worker. This is our human vocation. But to whom do we make this gift of self?
Jesus provides the answer when He said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
You are created as a gift to be a gift to God and others. No matter what your age or stage in life, your vocation is to make a sincere gift of self with all your heart, soul, mind and strength to God and to your neighbor, both friends and strangers.
What does this look like practically?
My next column will share concrete stories about making a gift of self to God and others. In the meantime, you might want to memorize GS 24, “Man…cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” and begin exploring your own body image to make room for the centrality of the gift.