JP the Great
So yesterday I was traveling back from family vacation stuffed in a large van with my numerous family, trying to do a little theology. I was reading John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, a work that has had a huge impact on my life through the commentary I’ve read/heard, but one which I’ve never read in the original. Of course, it’s mind blowing stuff (is there anything JP wrote that isn’t?), but partway through I came across this line which was so striking that I hauled my notebook out to copy it down right then and there (jolting and bumping over the construction on I-90): “Man appears in creation as the one who received the world as a gift, and it can also be said that the world received man as a gift.” (Theology of the Body, p. 59)
When I was younger and even more romantic than I am now, I used to think of how a young man, when proposing marriage to a young woman, goes out and gets the biggest, most beautiful gem he can afford to present to his beloved. Some people may see traces of economic bargaining, or think it’s all a materiealistic sham cooked up by jewelers, and I won’t say they’re entirely wrong. To me, however, it’s a worth statement. The young man is telling the young woman through his gift how much she is worth to him. The more beautiful and valuable the ring, the more beautiful and valuable he is saying she is. (Of course, the widow’s mite principle applies – a dime store cubic zirconium from a poor man who loves is worth infinitely more than the Hope diamond from a rich man who mostly wants to display his economic prowess. I say this knowing I’m most likely to marry an impoverished theologian with student loans to pay who will be lucky if he can afford a cardboard band with some dust – not even diamond dust – sprinkled on it.)
Anyway, where this hooks in with the JP II quote is this: I used to think of the world as God’s engagement gift to us – so intricately detailed and exquisitely beautiful: the mountains and oceans and prairies, every rose that blooms, every glistening fish that swims in the waters, every bird that soars strong and light above the earth. It’s all His, and He’s given it to us because He loves us. That’s how wonderful and valuable He thinks we are, and even more. On top of the world, He sent us His only son to die for us. How can we ever doubt the love of God?
So the world is a gift to us, but we are a gift to the world? That’s an interesting thought. But if you take the quote of St. Irenaeus seriously (usuallly translated as “The glory of God is man fully alive.”) it makes a kind of sense to me. We glorify God and consequently glorify the world He gave us when we are fully alive, when we do and say the things that make us most fully human and most fully ourselves, the man or woman God made us to be. By being fully ourselves, we glorify our world. In that way we are an even more beautiful and precious gift to the world than the world is to us.
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