About a year ago, a friend sent me an e-mail asking if I would buy some books to donate to the 'Greatness' (W&M's Theology of the Body group) library. I ended up purchasing two, and checked this one out of the "library" in January. It's been my lunchtime reading for the last week - so the book has acquired some field dust and slight apple and raspberry jelly stains, but I'll be taking it back to the 'Greatness' collection when I'm down at W&M for homecoming.
The whole concept of Theology of the Body was foreign to me until college, and as I explained in my last entry (The Jewler's Shop), I'm not the best at understanding theology. However, Christopher West does a great job of spelling out some really complex ideas about God's love and human love (the subtitle of the book is "reflections on eros and agape"). If I got one thing out of this book, it really made me think. We are called to live to an ideal, such that our relationships mirror Christ's devotion to the Church. But the reality is (I'm a very realistic thinker), we fail a whole lot. It matters most that we keep trying, that we never lose sight of the beautiful, big picture of what God has in store for us. Our earthly lives are at best a shadow of a heavenly future, and as we seek union with another, we must never forget that union with God is what we seek, in our heart of hearts.
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