“The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25). As I mentioned last week, for Adam and Eve nakedness wasn’t accompanied by shame, that pervasive internal sense of being dirty or broken or unlovable. What made their nakedness different from ours? Most of us don’t like our bodies, and the few that do often have a disproportionate sense of pride in how they appear (google ‘looksmaxxing’ and be horrified). Yet the body is not a shell or a cage housing our soul. We are a body-soul combo from the start. Because our bodies are an integral part of our humanity, they reveal our personhood to other people. When we say “Bill entered the room,” we do not mean that merely Bill’s soul is present but that Bill’s body is present too. We know that Bill the person is here because Bill’s body tells us so.

   The body is also a sacrament of God’s love and the capacity for self-gift. A sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible reality. So likewise the body is a visible sign of the invisible soul contained throughout it. How does the body signify God’s love? As one author puts it, “Our masculinity and femininity is the physical sign given to us so that we might know that we are called to enter a loving communion in imitation of the Trinitarian communion. This is what John Paul has called the nuptial meaning of the body.” Our male and female bodies ‘speak’ a language of union and communion through our eyes, ears, smile, facial muscles, bodily gestures, and even the complementarity of our sexual organs. All of these features clearly demonstrate that we were not meant to live solitary lives, but ones rich with interpersonal interaction of self-giving love.

   In this vision of self-giving love, it’s clearer why nakedness doesn’t come with shame. Adam and Eve, full sharers in the divine image and equal in dignity, gaze upon each other with a desire to give themselves fully to the other. They notice how the body reveals the person, and so bride and groom sense that their beloved sees them completely, not merely as a collection of body parts that give them pleasure. “Nakedness signifies the original good of God’s vision,” according to St. John Paul II. “It signifies all the simplicity and fullness of the vision through which the ‘pure’ value of humanity as male and female, the ‘pure’ value of the body and of sex, is manifested” (TOB 14). There is no fear, no risk of being violated or taken advantage of, no sense of unworthiness. Basking in God’s creation and united with their beloved, Adam and Eve can be completely vulnerable and unafraid. This is the original vision of romantic love, one from which we have fallen quite far. Let’s learn about why we have trouble seeing each other as our first parents did in the Garden.

   -Fr. Stephen