Since we just celebrated our country’s freedom yesterday, a few good paragraphs from Called to Love: Aproaching John Paul II’s Theology of the Body on freedom and the body (p. 35):

Human freedom is a capacity for creative communication. It is fittingly rooted in the body, because the body opens us to participation in reality. This is what Pope Benedict XVI means when he speaks of the body as the “region of freedom” where real engagement with the world occurs (Deus Caritas Est, 5). Benedict’s words are a warning to avoid confusing freedom with an absence of limits. Freedom is the ability to be open to the world, to receive the new things we encounter in it, and to respond to their call with genuine creativity.

Life is a gift, and this gift deserves to be received ever anew in freedom from the Creator, who formed our bodies in our mother’s womb. His call is written into our bodies, and our freedom is an answer to this summons. By the same token, the body sets our freedom on a journey toward divine transcendence. Fecisti nos ad te, said St. Augustine in his Confessions: You made us “toward” yourself. The body is like a road on which our freedom journeys to God and grows in relationship with him. In the words of John Paul II, “God has assigned the body to man as a task” (TOB, 360)