The First Word, Part 2

Learning how to pronounce the first syllable

12/28/2023

We continue now our series of homilies on the theology of the body, reflecting on the first of three “words of Christ,” which make up this new language, which we will discover is really the oldest language. The greatest movie of all time is undoubtedly “Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan.” One of my favorite scenes is when Admiral Kirk outsmarts his old adversary Khan in the Mutara Nebula. Even if you are not a science-fiction fan, try to imagine this cloudy nebula in outer-space where a starship’s advanced navigation system is rendered useless. It is equivalent to driving in dense fog. Each captain, therefore, must rely on his own intuition and instinct. At one point Spock informs Kirk: “Khan is intelligent but not experienced. His pattern indicates two dimensional thinking.”

That is, Khan is an unequaled tactician and can out-maneuver anyone on the horizontal plane, when everything is on the same level or two-dimensional. He has “eyes in the back of his head.” But he is vulnerable when you add the vertical or the third dimension. Kirk, however, can think vertically and horizontally and outsmarts Khan. How does he do it? Well, first he drops the starship Enterprise below the level at which Khan’s ship Reliant is flying. He is entirely outside Khan’s field of vision. Then, Kirk moves in behind him, and coming back up to the same level, fires his photon torpedoes, and destroys him. In other words, by thinking three dimensionally (vertically and horizontally) Kirk surveys the battlefield better than Khan, who can only think two-dimensionally.

I mention this scene because this three-dimensional thinking is another way to describe Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the body. What do I mean? Well, how do most people tend to think about marriage and sex? We think of human love exclusively in terms of earthly life, which is only two-dimensional. For example, we might think: when I was a teenager I fell in love with my high school sweetheart. We got married after college. We had children, and now we have grandchildren. And when we die, the story ends. While this version of human love is true, it only scratches the surface and stays on the horizontal level, exclusively earthly thinking. Like Khan, we are missing an entire dimension of the reality of human love, namely, the vertical, both lower and higher than earthly life.

I would suggest to you that in this lower level we learn the first word of Christ, and in the higher level we will learn to speak the third word of Christ. That is, meditating on the first word of Christ in Mt 19:8, John Paul goes below, or more precisely, deeper, into the reality of love, marriage, and sex by examining Genesis chapters 1 and 2. In the first two chapters of Genesis, in other words, the Pope discovers the deepest truths about who human beings are, how we should love one another, and what the Creator originally intended marriage to be. The pope’s analysis of Genesis reveals the uncharted depths of human love.

But then jumping ahead to Jesus’ third word in Mt 22:30, where Jesus gives a glimpse of heavenly life, teaching, “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven”, John Paul also wants to sort of fly above the ordinary, earthly level of human love and marriage. That is, whatever else heaven will be like, we will not be married to our spouses like we are here on earth. Many newly married couples may think, “Awww, that’s so sad!” But older married couples will breathe a sigh of relief, “Whew! Thank you, Jesus!” Not a few older couples live like the cartoon strip “The Lockhorns.”

In other words, these lower and higher dimensions of love and marriage help us to understand Jesus’ first and third words respectively. And then, once we have become fluent in the language of the theology of the body on these two vertical dimensions – speaking Jesus’ first and third words well – we will return to the horizontal dimension – that is, Jesus’ second word in Mt 5:28 – and see earthly life in an entirely new light. Finally, we will perceive how earthly marriage is really a pilgrimage that originated in Eden and will culminate in eternity.

I will just point out three profound insights the pope offers us about human love and married life from Gn 1-2. Think about each following insight like a “syllable”, that is, as only one part of the first word of Christ. The Holy Father marveled at the richness of Christ’s words, stating: “We were able to realize how vast was the context of a sentence, or even just a word, spoken by Christ” (Man and Woman He Created Them, 226, pope’s emphasis). As the Prologue of John’s gospel declared, each word spoken by Jesus is “full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14). The first insight or syllable John Paul calls “Original Solitude.” Think of the card game Solitaire, or solitary confinement if you are in prison, things we do alone, and Adam was originally created alone. The pope explores the human experience of solitude (this is phenomenology) in Gn 2:20, which reads: “The man gave names to all cattle, and to all the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him.” When I first got my dog, I asked parishioners to help me name him. The most popular name people suggested was “Bruno.” “But we don’t talk about Bruno, no, no, no. We don’t talk about Bruno!”

John Paul explains, however, that Adam did not just name the animals – like I named my dog – and acknowledge that none of them were a suitable partner. The pope surprisingly adds that it was precisely through his body that Adam figured out that he was different from the animals. Now that should shock us. Why? Well, usually people think that our bodies make us similar to the animals. But John Paul disagrees. Try wrap your mind around this insight – this first syllable of Christ’s first word – because this is exactly the three-dimensional thinking of the theology of the body: namely, our body makes us different from the animals.

Let me share a lengthy quotation from the text of the pope’s theology of the body to give you a taste of how he writes. John Paul’s theology is meaty, and the 532 pages of his book are like that Amarillo, Texas 72 ounce steak that only a few can eat all at once. The Holy Father reflects on Gn 2:19-20, and explains: "Man, formed in this way, belongs to the visible world: he is a body among bodies…The body, by which man shares in the visible created world, makes him at the same time aware of being ‘alone’. Otherwise, he would not have been able to arrive at this conviction, which in fact he reached (as we read in Gen. 2:20), if his body had not helped him to understand it, making the matter evident to him” (Man and Woman He Created Them, 152).

Did you catch that innovative insight? The pope is arguing that it is not just the soul that makes us different from the animals – and certainly it does – but the body does too. In fact, John Paul will dare to go even further and claim that the body makes us similar to God! He writes, therefore, what could arguably be the thesis statement of the whole theology of the body: “The [human] body, in fact, and only the [human] body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the 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” (Man and Woman He Created Them, 203).

Now, I admit that this spiritual, divine capability of the body may be hard to visualize when we look at our own bodies, which often look more like poor Mr. Magoo. Remember that cartoon character who was rather weak, frail, potbellied, gray-haired, blind, subject to disease and finally death? How could this body, which Hamlet described as “this quintessence of dust” (Hamlet, II, ii), make us similar to God? Exactly the opposite seems self-evident! But even if we are blind to that vision, that is precisely what Adam saw: the body was a sign of the divine. The pope calls this “Original Solitude” because Adam’s body taught him he was alone and unlike the animals. You see, before original sin, Adam was capable of this sort of three-dimensional thinking, or put differently, he spoke the theology of the body fluently. It is our sinful state (after original sin) that limits us to our two-dimensional thinking and makes us stutter trying to pronounce this first syllable of the first word of Christ. Original sin darkens the intellect and therefore causes us to think that our bodies make us like the animals. Let me leave with you a startling example.

On April 25, 2022, Newsweek reported the remarkable story of Deborah Hodge in London who legally married her cat, named India. Why couldn’t she have named her cat “Pakistan”? In any case, her landlord threatened to evict her because he did not allow pets. So Deborah decided to marry her cat to prove that the cat was her spouse rather than her pet. Listen to Deborah’s logic (and many modern people would have no difficulty agreeing): “I had nothing to lose and everything to gain, so I married my cat! I recited vows under the universe that no man will ever tear myself and India apart.” Thinking you can marry your cat is an extreme example of two-dimensional thinking because we think there is essentially no difference between human bodies and animals bodies. On the other hand, when we grasp what John Paul means by “Original Solitude” we can enunciate the first syllable of the first word of Christ.

Praised be Jesus Christ!