Reflection on January 9, 1980

http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp2tb13A.htm

We seem to skip right over God saying man alone is not good. We look to the first story of creation and everything is good, with the climax of the creation of humanity as very good. But here, God’s sees male alone and says it is “not good”. The first account does not distinguish between male and female, so we can see that male and female being created is very good. But in order to get to that place, we must discover that male alone is not good. God says this and male sees it as well, although whether he knows it from the beginning or discovers it only when he sees female, I couldn’t quite make out.

JPII focuses on the words “alone” and “help” in looking at the essence of humanity. Man was alone and it was “not good”. God says man needs a help. I talked already that I thought man was not complete without woman, but that this is a misunderstanding. SO, we must try to dissect this as showing that a human essence is something different than a complete human. And maybe there is more than one essence of a thing. The essence of the physical human being verses the essence of humans in the image of God.

I think it is important that JPII points out that you do not live with someone, but “for” them. This is a point that, I am sure, will come up more and more. The whole idea of sacrificing “for” another is, what I have come to understand, the most fundamental part of this communion of persons. It took me a while to understand that and I still struggle with it at times, but my life is never more at peace than when I am fully sacrificing myself “for” the other. It may mean I am more tired, it always means I doing something I would rather not, but it also brings me peace unlike any of those things that I always think will.

Reflecting on the idea that the male body was made as a gift for the female and vice versa makes you think about what a gift is. Have you ever given a gift and gotten a very negative response. My poor wife gets this all the time. She has given several gifts that I have not enjoyed, or not enjoyed long enough. For a lawyer, I am not a good liar, so it easy to tell when I don’t care for something. This gift of male to female is a perfect gift, given by God, to fulfill our very essence. Sin brings a barrier and defilement to that gift so that we don’t understand what it truly looked like at the beginning. The world seeks to fulfill the essence of this gift in numerous different ways, but each is only a lie and only goes to damage our understanding of the true gift God gave. That is why Catholics should take contraception, homosexuality, premarital sex and the like so seriously. They are all trying to replace the gift God gave us from the beginning, the gift that made all that God made “very good”.

He says he will get to it in more detail later, and I hope that is true, but he ends here with a point that is obvious from what we have already read, yet new in its form. The sexual act of humans in unique and different than that of the animals. How does the world feel about that. They would say its nonsense. Male organism and female organism unite and a new organism is formed. That is what cows and elephants and deer and humans all do. We are not different. JPII says the difference goes back to this unity of persons being the “image of God”. Because this unity is different, it is unique from all other animal unities. I hope this is explored more and in the sense that when humans put barriers up, like contraception, it takes away that “image of God” aspect and becomes animalistic. The world wants to turn it into an animalistic idea, Satan is helping to lead that charge and we are following his every lead, because he understands how special it was created “in the beginning”.

Words I looked up

Individuation - the determination or contraction of a general nature to an individual mode of existence; development of the individual from the general.