Everybody wants to live “happily ever after”, and that usually involves long-lasting love. Yet we seem to be losing the formula for it. Maybe this is because we’re confused about what love actually is.
As a single woman in my 20s, I’m a sitting duck for the cultural love barrage, and having had my heart broken a few times, I wanted to understand love. So I was quick to sign up
on hearing that one of London’s liveliest churches – St Patrick’s, Soho – was holding a symposium on the Theology of the Body for young adults.
And I wasn’t alone. The packed-out church for acclaimed speaker Christopher West’s opening address spoke fathoms about how widespread the thirst for (and confusion over) love is. The symposium was fully booked, drawing City professionals, youth workers, doctors and Religious all looking to learn about love.
Over the course of five days, lecturer Robert McNamara of the Franciscan University in Austria took us back to basic principles, answering our burning questions about the meaning of love and the human person by looking at Creation and Christ’s teachings in the Gospels through the eyes of John Paul II. We learnt of the “spousal law of the gift”, in which we only realise our full potential as humans in self-giving. This has been raised to a sacrament both in consecrated celibacy, where the self-gift is to our spiritual children, and in marriage to our spouse and in the birth of children.
Don’t worry, singles, you aren’t in limbo: our self-gift is to those around us, especially in this Year of Mercy. Rather than repressing our sexuality, the theology of the body means that we treasure our bodies as part of our unique human person. We express our self-gift (and thus our person) through our bodies to those around us, whether it’s through a smile on the Tube or hugging a friend.
This is all because, being made in the image of God who is all love, we are marked for ultimate union with Him through self-gift. Read the Psalms and elsewhere in the Scriptures: it’s all there. The relationships we have with others in this life are a training ground for this ultimate union. The better we love now, the bigger our capacity for love of God in the next life.
Perhaps what surprised me most about the symposium was just how beautiful the theology of the body is. It’s pure poetry and I’m hooked.
Before I went I expected to hear some baffling words. Admittedly, “self-gift” does sound a bit weird and pretty impossible to live out fully. But this is where the structure of the symposium worked so well. In addition to having room for questions and discussions during the lectures themselves, we also had workshops tackling how it plays out in our lived experience, and group presentations on topics such as “the language of the body” for children, young adults and engaged couples.
I began to realise that self-gift is all around us. We see it when a mother gets up in the middle of the night to feed her baby or when we spend our weekend mopping the tears of the friend who’s just been dumped.
But most of all, we see it at Mass, when Christ uses His Body to express His all-consuming love for us through self-gift: “This is my body, broken for you.” Nothing is impossible for God, and so the symposium was centred upon the sacraments: those active signs of God’s love for us that help us to love ourselves and others, and so to realise our full meaning as human beings. Reconciliation was available throughout the symposium, allowing us to take advantage of the dedicated “Door of Mercy” at St Patrick’s to secure an “indulgence – our sins being lifted thanks to God’s indulgent love”.
And now the baton has been handed over to us, to go out and proclaim this truth about love: that you gain most when you give most, to our hurting world that wants love so much.
On the fourth day of the symposium we took part in Nightfever, which is held bimonthly at St Patrick’s. We took to the streets of Soho to invite people into the church. Not to condemn, but to love – inviting them to light a candle and sit in the presence of the One who loves them more than words can say and who can fill even the most aching human heart.
Marie-Louise Van Spyk is a recent Cambridge graduate now working in Catholic Fundraising for Youth 2000
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