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Christmas and the Glory of the Female Body

In the midst of a world that continually pornifies and desecrates the female body, it is powerfully healing and redemptive to recognize that Christmas celebrates the ultimate glory of a woman’s body.

Mary reveals what that ultimate glory is: God comes to us through woman’s body!

To recognize woman’s body as the “portal” through which Eternity enters time, through which the Infinite enters the finite so we can be taken into Eternity, into Infinity … to recognize this is to be filled with awe and wonder at the mystery of woman.  It is to be filled with the “spiritually mature fascination” St. John Paul II spoke of in his Theology of the Body.  It’s a holy fascination in woman’s “mystery” that untwists the distorted fascination so prevalent in our world today.

St. John Paul II tells us that the “spiritual maturity of this fascination is nothing but the fruit born of the gift of fear [reverence], one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit” (TOB 117b:4).  Allowing the Holy Spirit to fill us with this gift is to be filled with the wonder of the Church who, as St. John Paul II wrote, “honors and praises throughout the centuries ‘the womb that bore you and the breasts from which you sucked milk’ (Lk 11:27).  These words,” John Paul affirms, “are a eulogy of motherhood, of femininity, of the feminine body in its typical expression of creative love” (TOB 21:5).

Through the mystery of Christmas, God takes on flesh to redeem our flesh.  How can we let the celebration of Christmas redeem our vision of the human body?

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cwestChristopher West is a renowned educator, best-selling author, cultural commentator, and popular theologian who specializes in making the dense scholarship of the late John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” accessible to a wide audience.  As Founder of the Cor Project, he leads a global outreach devoted to cultural renewal through a dynamic and fresh proclamation of the Gospel.

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