It all started about two and a half months ago. It was mid-August and I had just returned from a trip to Oklahoma. An older friend of mine had told me about an interesting YouTube video by a guy named Christopher West that he suggested that I check out. The title of the video contained the words "Playboy and the Pope," and I'm thinking, what the....... I'm not really interested in anything catholic post-St. John of the Cross (late 1500's), so this is probably a waste of time. BOY WAS I WRONG! That video has changed my life. Now I know that it is Jesus alone that changes lives, but that was a tool that He used to do it, being the carpenter that He is.
Since that time I have dove head first, from the highest point I could find, into Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body teaching, which is basically what that video was about. My...is it wonderful! The glory of this teaching is beyond the adorning ability of my vocabulary. In the context of learning this material, there have been moments where new light was dawning upon my mind and heart and got beside myself. I felt like I jump through this 3-story apartment building I live in, through the roofs. I could hardly contain myself.
What makes this teaching so powerful to me is that JPII has meditated deeply over what it means that we are made in God's image, and what that has to do with us being male and female, because it is in that, that we see a revelation of the eternal plan of God for us.
So, two weeks ago, I went to see Christopher West speak at a half a day seminar in Pennsylvania.
It was mind blowing. At the end of the day, I picked up a couple of books including this one; Christopher signed it for me, we exchanged some very beautiful heartfelt words, and now a few weeks later I finished reading this first book.
Book Review:
Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing. First, the backdrop of this book is today's broken culture, and one of the deepest and most obvious ways in which it is broken is in the realm of sexuality. Remember that God made us in His own image, and He made us MALE and FEMALE. We are made in the image of God who is Love. We experience that as this deep call to and need of union, call to intimacy, call to love, and That meaning of our existence is told and shown forth in the design of our own male and female bodies. We embody this call and need of love, our bodies show forth these things, and in our bodies we can ultimately see what life is about. We exist for God, because of His love and good pleasure, which us destined for a union with Him.
The design of our bodies correlates to the deepest longings and aches of the human heart. This is so plain, yet so radical. I don't know how, but I have never thought of things in that way. Right now it is so clear, but in the 26 years I have been alive, I have never even once come close to thinking about something like that. I doubt you have either. And this is all still new to me, so if you are not getting what I am communicating, it's probably my fault.
Anyways, FILL THESE HEARTS. What I really took away from this book is this ache of the human heart, this longing for something eternal, it has become something very real to me....and more and more I am being un-deceived as to what or Who can truly fill that ache.
Eros is the word that some of ancient Greeks used to describe this Ache in the human heart....an ache for something/one Good, True, and Beautiful. West in this book does a great job at surveying the contemporary culture: music, movies, art, etc. to discover where that ache is showing it's face, where in our culture it is surfacing. The truth is that it is everywhere. Turn on the radio, pay attention to the words, and before long you will catch it. Our origin is love. But we were separated from God's love as our origin, and now experience a deep ache for it, although most people are not conscious that that is what that ache is pointing towards. By the way, you might say, "that is just your interpretation of it....." Sure it is, I probably wouldn't have interpreted the ache in that way until the last month or so, but right now...I AM EXTREMELY CONFIDENT that the union, the utter closeness, and wanting to know and be known utterly, that our hearts ache for was made by God for Himself.
That's the kind of stuff this book talks about.
"What we experience as an urge toward union with another human being is, in fact, at its deepest level, a longing for something far greater than anything another human being has to offer. Eros is a longing for the infinite." (page 65)One thing I have enjoyed is that our desires, or our capacity to desire is something very, very, very, very, very, very good. We can say, human desire is wonderful, in and of itself, it is something very beautiful, very good, like Genesis 1 very good. However, because a certain decision by the first man and woman, our desires got very, very, very twisted......but that doesn't make it bad in and of itself. God loves to satisfy the desire of our hearts!!!! He likes doing it!!! (Obviously not evil desires) So a lot of what this book goes through is talking about this process of untwisting our desires so that we can really find them fulfilled in the Eternal Lord. This is the good news, that God's Son comes into our hearts and His desires are birthed within us. That is salvation.
Okay, I could go on and on and on...so I'll just close with some more quotes from the book.
"if a Christian is not passionately pursuing the satisfaction of his deepest yearnings, then he's not really following Christ." (37)That one blow my mind
"Think about it: if "the banquet"- infinite satisfaction of our desire in God - is real, then there's no need to repress desire as the "starvation-diet gospel" would have us do, and there's no need to reduce desire to addicting, finite pleasures as the "fast-food gospel" would have us do. Rather, if the banquet is real, we can and must learn how to unleash desire so God can fill us full." (80)
"God wants to fill us full with his own divine life...Oh how we long for this infilling! It's the fulfillment of the creature's deepest "ache"....the collective cry of humanity is "fill these hearts!..." (93)
"The yearning of Eros reveals that we are incomplete, and that we are in search of another to make "sense" of ourselves. Although that yearning originates deep in our souls, it's also manifested in our bodies. Our very bodies tell the story of our incompleteness: more specifically, those parts of our bodies that distinguish us as male and female. Think about it - a man's body makes no sense by itself; and a woman's body makes not sense by itself. Seen in light of each other, the picture becomes complete: we go together!....might a loving God be trying to tell us something fundamental about who he is and who we are by creating us in this way?" (8)Yes!
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