Blessed are the Pure of Heart

Every marriage goes through rocky periods sure.  Dunno if it’s just me but a lot of marriages of my age bracket (late forties) have permanently splintered on rocky reefs.  The kids must feel like they’re drowning and if they haven’t been taught to float yet must quickly learn to cope and heal.

My Christmas shopping at the recycled book counters yielded George Wiegel’s “Witness to Hope-the Biography of Pope John Paul II 1920-2005″ (at PhP 270.00).

It was a joy to go through the well documented life of one truly inspiring man who wrestled philosophically with the problems of the age (human sexual relations, among many others), and emphatically having won the wrestling match, bequeathed us with such spiritually reviving gifts that I felt genuinely orphaned half-way through the thousand page tome.

…In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is laying out the moral implications of living a life of beatitude — a life that includes “purity of heart” — and says “You have heard it said “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say unto you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5.27-28).  It has seemed for centuries, a very difficult, even impossibly high, standard.  …..

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…. Lust, the Pope suggests, is the opposite of true attraction.  True attraction desires the other’s good through the gift of myself; lust desires my own transitory pleasure through the use (even the abuse) of the other.  The woman at whom a man gazes lustfully is an object, not a person, and sex is reduced to a utilitarian means to satisfy a “need”.  This “adultery of the heart” can even take place within marriage–not because the object of a man’s lust is not his wife, but because the lustful look turns a wife into an object and shatters the communion of persons.

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The Christian sexual ethic, John Paul taught, redeemed sexuality from the trap of lust.  Far from prohibiting eros, the Christian ethic liberates eros for a “full and mature spontaneity” in which the “perennial attraction” of the sexes finds its fulfillment in mutual self-giving and mutual affirmation of the dignity of each partner. The “new ethic” of the Sermon on the Mount and Christ’s teaching about the beatitude of the “pure heart” is an ethic of “the redemption of the body” a rediscovery in history of the truth of self-giving as the truth of the human condition “from the beginning”.

This ethic did not do away with desire. Rather, it sought to channel our desires “from the heart”, so that the desires were fulfilled as they should be –in the communion of persons which is the image of God. (at pp. 338-339)

photo from Wikipedia

Now when will I hear a sermon in church as thought-provoking as this?  When will John Paul’s legacy enter into mainstream chats among women who continue to flounder in the seas of shattered self-esteem, betrayal, self-pity and self-loathing?  When will that filthy word “romance” be disrobed and exposed so that young men and women know precisely what it is they should be looking for in a life’s partner?

When will all our Adams wisen up and say to us Eves: “You don’t pull me by my cojones woman; I see your power but I also see how you can drag all of humanity down depending on how you use it. I take equal responsibility for my power of procreation too.”

When will there be true communion instead of a mass of people huddled in fear listening to uninspired sermons in a vague mystic haze of hopefulness?

The author, George Weigel, another man unafraid to state his well-founded analyses was called to dinner at the Vatican and specificaly charged by John Paul to write his biography with full license to be unafraid..writes:

John Paul’s Theology of the Body is emphatically not made for the age of the twenty-second sound-bite, or for a media environment in which every idea must be labeled “liberal” or “conservative”.  It may also be the case that John Paul II’s theology of the body will only be seriously engaged when John Paul, lightning rod of controversy, is gone from the historical stage.  These 130 catechetical addresses, taken together, constitute a kind of theological time bomb set to go off, with dramatic consequences, sometime in the third millenium of the Church. (p. 343.)

The sooner the Church takes up on this challenge the good Pope left us with..the better. I’m through with all this bull-shitting between men and women.  Happy New Year All!!