In the preface to Carl Anderson and Jose Granados’ new book about Theology of the Body, Called to Love, Livio Melina, President of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, writes:

For you formed my inward parts, you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you , for you are fearful and wonderful.
Wonderful are your works! You know me right well. (Ps. 139)

The Psalmist’s wonder before his own body leads him to praise his Creator, who makes himsef and his provident care and intimate knowledge of us perceptible precisely in the body. This is the “prophetism of the body,” as John Paul II used to say. The body speaks of God; it reveals his goodness and wisdom. It also speeks of us, of man and woman and our vocation to love. This is a prophetic word, pronounced by the body in God’s name, revealing to us the path to take toward human fulfillment: the way of love, in which the original image imprinted in man and woman can be realized and shine forth in a fruitful communion of persons, open to the gift of life.

We are made in the image and likeness of God and, just as a work of art reveals something about the artist behind it, our bodies reveal something of the invisible mystery of our Creator.

The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it. (John Paul II General Audience of 2/20/80 – TOB, 19:4)

This mystery, says the pope is the mystery of Truth and Love and of divine life in which we really participate. If this is what our bodies are meant to proclaim, is it any wonder, in a world that is so diametrically opposed to God, truth, love and all that is divine, that nothing is quite as desecrated and abused as the human body?

I have finally started reading this book, so expect to hear more from it in future TOB Tuesday posts.