Ch. 10 Respecting the Gift of Sexuality (Courtney)

Notes:  2/27/17

Who are you?

• Created for love
• Human person
• What makes you a person: a body with a soul and have reasoning and will
• God has created us so that we have desires and driven to something
• We have desires, created that way, which is a purpose
• God helped us seek him which is the main reason we are created
• We can use our desire for the other (definition of love)
• Desires are bedrock of love

Theology of the Body:

• "God saw all that He had made and it was very good." (Gen. 1:31)
• The fullness of life lies in the attainment of authentic love.
• "The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the  divine."- Blessed Pope John Paul II, Theology of the Body
• JP II spent time about authentic love
• Authentic love also implies unauthentic love
• Series of homilies that have been collected together, JPII saw erosion of family and was worried about it.

Notes: 3/3/17

Sexuality and the Creation Narratives

"Have you not read from the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female' and said 'for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and two shall become one flesh'? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate." Matthew 19:3-6

A proper understanding of the human sexuality cannot be attained through cultural or legal norms-only through an appropriate understanding of the original design of human existence.

"God said, 'Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves'… God created man in his image; in the divine image he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed  them saying, "Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it…. God saw all he made and it was very good

The Creative Pause

• God differentiated humanity from the moment of existence
• "It is as if he entered back into himself to make a decision." (Theology of the Body, 134).

Image of God:

Reason and will=Rational nature

Community (mirrors the trinity)-"Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion (TOB,46).

Male and Female

• Male and female are complementary both physically and emotionally
• "They are two ways of "being a body" and at the same a man, which complete each other"

Fertile and Multiply

• Sexuality is a gift
• Sharing in the creative and life-giving action of God. "Creation (is) a gift springing from love (TOB, 61).
• Springs forth from spouses, but also God

Very Good

Creation, relationships, sexuality, fertility, etc., are all gifts from God.

Notes: 3/6/17

What is Authentic Love? What is lust?

• Choosing (actively, not just hoping for or wanting), the highest good of the other, for the sake of the other
• Communion of persons (Free)
• Communion is permanent and indissoluble

1. Dedication to and participation in a share goal (i.e. family-fruitful)

• Indissoluble (total)

1. Commitment to permanence. Love is not fleeting.
2. Love remains-always…regardless of what happens.

• Unconditional (total)

1. Love is not based on feelings or what the other person accomplishes. Love is based on a true appreciation of the other.
2. Love is not based upon life circumstance ("for better or for worse, in sickness and in health")
3. "Willing the good of the other for the sake of the other" Bishop Robert Barron

• Faithful

1. Exclusivity
2. Viewing/treating the other person as an object
3. Using someone as a mean to an end (pleasure, power, wealth, fame, convenience, to alieve boredom)
4. Lust focuses on the SELF rather than the other "(Curvatus in se")- St. Augustine of Hippo

Sacrament gives grace, which allows one to be in fully communion with the other.

1. We are required to try to live unconditional love
2. By grace, virtue, access to sacraments, we try to live unconditionally love and we try to reconcile

• Love and Lust cannot co-exist, its either lust where you use one as a tool, or even love where you choose the highest good

Notes: 3/7/17

True Love, The Gift of Self

• Chastity: the right thing in the right order at the right time
• Chastity is the observance of the personhood of every individual
• "In the mystery of creation, the woman was 'given' to the  man. On his part, in receiving her as a gift in the full truth of her person and feminity, man thereby 'enriches her. At the same time, he too is enriched in this mutual relationship. The man is enriched not only through her… but also through the gift of himself" (ToB, 71).
• Personalistic  Norm:  "The person is the kind of good which… cannot be treated as an object of use (means to an end)" (41).
• Sexual Morality:

…." comes into being not only because persons are aware of the purpose of sexual life, but also because they are aware that they are persons…. If I treat someone else as a mean and a tool in relation to myself, I cannot help regard myself in the same light" (33,39).

True Love

• "anyone who treats a person as the mean to an end does violence to the very essence to the other, to what constitutes its natural right….. Love between two people is quite unthinkable without some common good to bind them together. Man's capacity for love depends on his willingness consciously to seek a good together with others, and to subordinate himself that good for the sake of others."
• To seek a good together, what the wife and husband does

Lust-Objectifying

• Lust is the intentional objectification/reduction of a man or woman, treating the human body merely as a mean to an end (pleasure).
• Lust points to a "deep disorder" within the human person (ToB, 114).
• Lust "chip away" of your capacity to love (Fairlie, 180).
• LUST AND LOVE CANNOT CO-EXIST TOGETHER
• "Your desire shall be  for your husband, and he shall rule over you" (Gen 3:16-17).

1. " the lust of the flesh directs desires to satisfy the body, the body , often at the cost of a real and full communion of persons" (ToB, 123).
2. The human person always desires personal union, but lust perverts these desires.
3. Men ---> becomes focused on the physical
4. Women----> become focused on becoming visually pleasing for men

• "The reason why Lust often turns to perversions is that the flesh itself has ceased to please it…" Our excessive for of an old age is the fear that must be expected in a society in which Lust has been made a dominating motive. We would  not fear it so much if we did not fear that it would empty; and we would  not fear so much that it will be empty if we had not emptied our lives already in the pursuit of mere cravings" (Farilie, 177,179).

• "The heart has become a battlefield between love and lust…  (the heart) becomes less sensitive to the gift of the person…" (ToB, 126).
• Lust makes true love almost impossible
• Lust reduces the value of the person "to that of a single value, that is, of ex, as a suitable object for the gratification of sexuality itself" (ToB, 149).
• You have heard it said, "You shall not commit adultery." But I say to you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Matthew  5:27-28).
• Although the act is completely interior, hidden in the heart and expressed only by the look, there already occurs in a change of the very intentionality of existence" (ToB, 151).
• By means of the look a  certain woman begins to exist for a certain man not as a subject of call and personal attraction or as a subject of communion, but exclusively as an object for the potential satisfaction of the sexual need" (ToB, 151).

Notes: 3/20/17

Spousal Meaning of the Body:

• Also called the Spousal Analogy
• In the beginning people did not lust over each other
• It might be easiest to understand love and respect each other like the first people did when we see babies.
• Just by looking at a person's body, we are made for: relationship, intimacy, and community ---> (communion)
• The male/female relationship is precious and sacred because they fit together like pieces of a puzzle
• It makes us know we are made for relationship
• People are meant to cling onto one another, which is demonstrated through our arms
• It's easy to misuse the body

Marriage:

• Holy friendship
• All holy friendships aid us in getting each other to heaven, meant for us to know better
• Characteristics: free, total, faithful, and fruitful
• Wedding vows that speak to the four characteristics
• Free: are you basically being enslaved?
• Total: you give your mind, thoughts, imagination, body, livelihood, finances, fertility, finances, youth, old-age, give your past and future, total just means total, effort, work,
• Faithful: respect each other, no sleeping with others, no sexting, no pornography
• Fruitful: having kids, making money (only good works associated), adopting children, going to serve food pantry, supporting each other in works,
• Communion:  the fullness of community, to be fully known and yet loved,

Contraception: against conception

Examples: pills, condoms, IUD, plan B, clamping of the fallopian tubes,