Made for This. Mary Haseltine
so. But God is not a haphazard designer. His intentional design of all of creation, peaking in his design and creation of the human being — specifically woman — is meant to bring glory to him and lead us back to him.
Christian tradition has confirmed time and again the goodness of the body as a creation of God. We see in our body the absolutely amazing, intricate design of a heavenly Father, and we believe God when he says his creation is “very good.”26 The human person is uniquely composed of both body and soul, not just one or the other. We are not pure spirits like angels. Pope Benedict XVI reminds us: “Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united.”27 In fact, this truth is the foundation of the sacraments of the Church. It is only through our bodies that we have access to the sanctifying grace of every sacrament.
This means as Christians we should view and treat our bodies with dignity as a good and beautiful gift designed by God to be used as a gift to the world. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.”28 We need to honor our body and the way God designed it to function.29
This gets confusing in our culture, which urges us on the one hand to worship the body, yet simultaneously digs deep at the hearts of women, convincing them that their bodies are never actually good enough. How many of us have been scarred by this view of the woman’s body? From our earliest years, we hear that we must be sexy enough, pretty enough, thin enough, and readily available for sexual use. For many women, these wounds run deep. And these ideas seep into our images of and expectations of pregnancy and birth. How many of us can look in the mirror at nine months pregnant and feel truly good and beautiful? Precisely when we are at the epitome of our physical femininity, swollen with new life — our bodies doing exactly what they were designed by God to do — we battle feelings of being too fat, too ugly, too self-conscious, and too embarrassed to be seen in public. It can be a fierce battle to believe that our bodies are good and holy, designed by God for his glory.
Saint Gianna Beretta Molla, a brave Catholic mother and medical doctor who gave her life to save her baby, said, “Our body is a cenacle, a monstrance: through its crystal the world should see God.” This remains true even at the end of our pregnancies and at the time of birth. If anything, it becomes even more clear as we prepare to bring new life into the world. Our bodies are made by God, and they are good. You are good.
Yes, with your growing belly, your swollen feet, your widening hips, and your exhausted eyes, you are very good. You are a visible witness to the world of life and hope. God designed birth precisely and intentionally. Birth may be a private act, but just like the conjugal act that brought this baby into existence, that does not make it any less good. In fact, just like that marital act of making love, we can say that our instinct to keep it private actually highlights just how good and holy it truly is.
Through the Incarnation, God redeemed the whole physical world, making our bodies holy. “Through redemption, every man has received from God again, as it were, himself and his own body. Christ has imprinted new dignity on the human body — on the body of every man and every woman … the human body has been admitted, together with the soul, to union with the Person of the Son-Word.”30 What we do with our body can give glory to God. Saint Paul reminds us: “The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body…. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?… Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”31
As a mother, you get to do exactly that in a very tangible way through your pregnancy and birth.
And the Two Shall Become (Really!) One
From 1979 through 1984, Pope John Paul II gave a series of talks during his weekly General Audiences. In the talks he formulated a brilliant worldview that tapped into the Catholic understanding of the human person being integrally united as body and soul. This series of talks over five years has come to be known as the Theology of the Body. The entire scope of the talks outlined the ways that our bodies can speak a theological language, especially through the Sacrament of Matrimony. The talks formulated the Church’s traditional teaching in a new and more detailed and comprehensive way. In fact, many people were shocked by the pope’s unembarrassed exegesis on the topic of sexuality and the ways in which it is designed to witness to God and even lead us to him.
Saint John Paul insisted that Christ gives us a model for understanding our bodies (and marriage and the family) when he speaks to the Pharisees about divorce.32 We must go “back to the beginning” to understand God’s original plan. The intentional design of our bodies as male and female speaks to us of who God is, and their very design proclaims the Gospel. Our femaleness and maleness, and the way they complement and quite literally fit together, tell us about God and his design for family, and they can be the instrument through which we become more like him. Sex is designed by God to be a way that married couples can experience and grow in holiness. In their very bodies, husband and wife replicate the relationship of Christ to his Church. Marriage is thus “a sacrament whereby sexuality is integrated into a path to holiness.”33
Man and woman, through their bodies, provide a glimpse of the mystery of the Trinity.34 They fit together, and neither the female nor the male body makes sense when seen in isolation. The husband gives of himself to his wife as the Father pours himself out to the Son, and the Son lovingly receives that outpouring. The love between Father and Son is so real that it begets the Person of the Holy Spirit. Mirroring this reality, the love between husband and wife is also designed to be so complete that it has the potential to create an entirely new person — a person who is then born.
Our bodies are good, holy, and beautiful, and sexual intimacy within marriage is also good, holy, and beautiful. “Since God created him man and woman, their mutual love becomes an image of the absolute and unfailing love with which God loves man. It is good, very good, in the Creator’s eyes.”35 The physical love between a husband and wife has the capacity to bring forth a completely new and eternal human being. A decision to love with all our body has the potential to change eternity. What an awesome — and sobering — concept!
“Amongst the blessings of marriage, the child holds the first place,” says the Church.36 In the marriage rite, man and woman are asked if they will “accept children lovingly from God.” It’s not because having children somehow makes them “better” than childless couples, but because the child is to be seen as the highest blessing and natural result of the union of man and woman, God’s plan for marriage and family made full. Their complete gift of self to the other in turn becomes a gift given right back to them. “In the newborn child is realized the common good of the family.… Its life becomes a gift for the very people who were givers of life.”37 Welcoming children should never be viewed as a threat to marriage. Children enrich, strengthen, and fulfill marriage. “The children born to them — and here is the challenge — should consolidate that covenant, enriching and deepening the conjugal communion of the father and mother.”38
Being open to children naturally opens the husband and wife to birth. “Both in the conception and in the birth of a new child, parents find themselves face to face with a ‘great mystery’.”39 Through the grace of their marriage, the couple has supernatural help as they walk through these “mysteries” of pregnancy and birth to enter into the new roles of mother and father.40
In some ways it would be easy to choose to stay a little bit selfish when it’s “just the two of us.” Yes, marriage is God’s way of helping us learn to give of ourselves and grow in holiness, but parenthood? Becoming a parent takes it to a whole new level, and that is exactly how God designed it. Our time is no longer our own, our sleep is no longer our own, our hearts are expanded and made more vulnerable. The weaknesses and wounds and self-absorption that we’ve been able to hide thus far often become glaringly obvious under the light of motherhood or fatherhood. But in the new reality of parenthood there is a new and