At the Heart of the Gospel: Reclaiming the Body for the New Evangelization by Christopher West

Author:Christopher West
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307987129
Publisher: Image Books

We can see in expressions like “spiritual intercourse,” “spiritual seminal fluid,” and “spiritual milk” the linking of two worlds—the invisible-spiritual-mystical world with the visible-physical-sexual world. This link is based on the very logic of the Incarnation, Christ’s descent into the flesh—a descent that “is intended to draw us into a movement of ascent,” as the future Pope Benedict said. “God seeks us where we are, not so we can stay there, but so that we can come to be where he is” (SL, p. 123). Hence, employing physical, sexual imagery to describe the mysteries of our faith is not a matter of reducing Christianity to the “sexual level.” Rather, it is a matter of fully receiving Christ’s “descent into the flesh” so that that flesh can fully “ascend into the Trinity.”

It’s precisely through this divine descent “in the flesh” and human ascent “of the flesh” into the Trinity that the sexual relationship (that is, the relationship of man and woman consummated maritally in the two becoming one flesh) is restored in its full dignity and splendor as the primordial icon in creation of the “great mystery” of Christ’s relationship with the Church. Applying this iconography as it is given by God in its integral goodness is not a matter of “sexualizing” Christianity. It is a matter of recognizing what Christianity already is: a “great mystery” that “clothes itself” in the splendid “wedding garment” provided by the primordial sacrament (marriage). Oh how beautiful this royal and mysterious “wedding garment” is! And oh how important to our salvation! Between here and the Marriage Feast of heaven, Christ tells us that we must all “put it on”—that is, we must remove all our soiled garments, and take this immaculate “wedding garment” to ourselves (see CCC 1682). We must be clothed by it and in it; we must enter into its mystery and be transformed by it. For, according to Christ’s own seemingly harsh words, if we try to enter the heavenly celebration without this “wedding garment,” we shall be bound “hand and foot” and cast “into the outer darkness” (see Mt 22:11-14).

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