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Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II's Theology of the Body

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I've read other works on John Paul II's theology of the body before, but what set apart "Called to Love" for me was the authors' interweaving of the pope's other literature, as well -- specifically, his poetry and plays. I must say I came away with an even greater appreciation for the late pope and his committment to marriage, families and upholding the dignity of the human person. Clearly, he was steeped in this love.

I think "Called to Love" achieves a nice balance between giving the layman a thorough -- but accessible -- introduction to JPII's teachings on love and human sexuality, and providing a "where do we go from here" approach for those already familiar with theology of the body and want to bring that message of faith-filled love to society. I'd definitely recommend it.

Carl Anderson and Father José Granados have done an amazing job interpreting and explaining Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body". Mr. Anderson and Fr. Granados have presented in Called to Love, a mature and all-encompassing understanding of the "Theology of the Body" that underscores the true subject of Pope John Paul II's catechesis: the vocation of every Christian person to love. In this reviewer's opinion, the authors here have one up on Christopher West-- Mr. West presents a kind of introduction to the "Theology of the Body" that gets your feet wet. Here is the rest of the story. Carl Anderson and Fr. Granados have presented the main attraction: how the vocation to love transforms and informs our understanding of human sexuality and human love.

My favorite aspect of Called to Love is that the authors incorporate not only Pope John Paul II's Wednesday Audiences which comprise the "Theology of the Body" but Mr. Anderson and Fr. Granados also reference Pope John Paul II's poetry, his plays, and his other major work on love (the real point of the "Theology of the Body"): Love & Responsibility. Mr. Anderson and Fr. Granados see that the "Theology of the Body" is not just the Wednesday Audiences of catechesis, but that this vision extends throughout the whole of Pope John Paul II's theology; it permeated everything he wrote. The "Theology of the Body" is the manner of understanding human sexuality and love in the light of Divine Love. Called to Love is then able to present a fuller view of Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body" based on the nature and meaning of love.

I started reading this book because a friend of mine had such a transformation in her life, going from promiscuous to joyfully chaste as a result of a slight study of Theology of the Body. Expecting a discourse on why we are not to have sex before marriage, I have been shocked at the journey God has me on to discovering His deep Father's love for all of us, and the dignity that love imbeds into my being.

This book is rich, deep, insightful, and poetic. The author uses amazing word pictures. I can see the gospel according to the yelling evangelists from the Protestant Church was not, in fact, the whole or true gospel.

We were brought forth to know HIm, to love Him, to be known by and loved by HIm. We got entangled in sin and Jesus Christ comes to free us from original sin to return us to Original Innocence, Solitude and Unity- all places of loving Him and being in AWE of His faithful care.

This is THE BOOK OF BOOKS if you wan to grow closer to Christ and those around your life.

I have read many books and listened to many CDs regarding Theology of the Body from Christopher West and others. This CD set blows the others out of the water in its clarity, depth and comprehensiveness.

The authors do a stupendous job of explaining a very complicated "Theology of the Body" with many examples especially from JPII's play "The Jeweler's Shop".

This book/CD makes JPII's "Theology of the Body" come alive in power and depth. If you have any interest in JPII's "Theology of the Body", this is the best and most profound resource I have found. I can't recommend it highly enough especially given the scarcity of quality material on this powerful and profound theology.

I am studying for a Doctorate in Ministry and I can tell you that you don't have to have a graduate degree to understand this but if you did have a graduate degree you would appreciate the depth of JPII's theology and recognize that you need to find a way to incorporate it into your professional work or research. - Keepin' It Real

I haven't reviewed a book in a long time but felt the great impact of this book needs to be emphasized. I am listening to the audio version and am 3 hours in but it made such an impact on me I had to review on my impression so far. This book, is quite simply, one of the best books that i've heard or read in my entire life. It was a central hub to my own personal quest in meaning in my life and love. In initially looking at morality and the purpose of it all I ended up having to make this sort of "outline" thing to see how a bunch of these ideas connected. The books I was uniting idea-wise were the following: The male and female differences with Adam and Eve I was primed for it and books like Captivating and Wild at Heart by Eldredge and Brain Sex by Anne Moir and David Jessel was an interesting look at very general statistical biological differences between men and women. The fact that science doesn't tell it all and meaning to be found beyond it I was primed with the philosopher and scientist Michael Polanyi in the book Everyman Revived : The common Sense of Michael Polanyi by Drusilla Scott, which saves us from being mere brutes to evolutionary forces but ruled by higher principles as far as I can tell anyway more tellingly in "Life's Irreducible Structure found here" [...]. That God as something beyond that of the the philosophers of pure thought but relationship I encountered in Introduction to Christianity by Benedict XVI p. 143-148. Less directly Family and Civilization by Zimmerman attempts a look at family and the relationship to civilization. In my own look at morality and connecting ideas from The Closing of the American Mind by Bloom, Catholic Social Teaching in general, Reasons to Believe by Scott Hahn, The Logic of the Heart by James Peters, Crossing the Threshold of Hope John Paul II, Parenting With Grace by Popcack, Our Babies, Ourselves : How Babies and Culture Shape the Way We Parent by Small, Your Childs' Growing Mind by Healy, The Fulfillment of All Desire by Ralph Martin, Logicomix by Doxiadis and Papadimitrou, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost by Liedloff, Introduction to Philosophy by Jacques Maritain, The Dialectics of Secularization On Reason and Religion by Habermas and Ratzinger, Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, and Islam by Pope Benedict XVI and Pera, The End of the Modern World by Romano Guardini, 50 Philosophy Ideas by Ben Dupre,The Intercollegiate Review Vol. 41 No. 1 with "The Homeless Modern" by Mark T. Mitchell", After Virtue by Alisdair MacIntyre,
a speech by Pope Benedict XVI [...]
and well, I really could go on and on other themes of books. The point is, between all these books that may not seem connected, through philosophy (which deals with our deepest questions) they were, and this particular book about pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body just resonated deeply with deep, very deep philosophical assumptions in the culture today with philosophy and things like the enlightenment and philosophy throughout history serving as a big player. I can't possibly summarize what I'm still working on to integrate how philosophy affects so many things from how we say we know x, to how we view human nature and things like psychology etc..and probably gratefully the book doesn't do this. Reductionism is mentioned by name though. Some ideas that connected (and realize not always directly) for me were relativism, reductionism, nominalism, the problem of universals, positivism, how can we know God exists or not, sorites paradox, natural law, logic, yin-yang, Russell's Paradox, faith and reason and how we approach truth, how we approach God, how we approach government, which people might want to separate and not see how CONNECTED everything is because of our thinking. Actually, one of the critiques of reductionsim seems to be denying this very thing, that more than one factor can play a role. Not all of it connected directly but it all connected in one way or another. Did you know if you went to wiki and clicked on the first linked word not in parenthesis or italics you get to philosophy? It sort of connects it all. So yes, it all connects. I had to write it all out myself to really see and organize more clearly HOW everything connected loosely focused on morality. I can't really describe it all well here as self-expression is not my strong suit. How we approach love gets affected by our thoughts. Basically we all want to be happy and have a yearning with the heart and mind playing a role in what we do with that yearning. The role of the heart and mind play in response to this is affected by our ideas about the world. We all want to be happy and to be loved and the yearn for the true, good and beautiful. Pope John Paul II's theology of the body presented in this book resonated deeply with me and though it didn't get into some deep philosophical lecture, what it has mentioned I was able to find connections to the books already mentioned earlier in maybe not very obvious ways, and in a sense this book helped bring it all together for me because of all I'd looked at previously, as a central hub for connecting ideas about love and what truly makes us happy, a morality in a love that is true and answering the meaning of life. God is love, a person, and therefore relational and this reflects into reality. Something it does mention explicitly in the book however is reductionism, a good definition as any is

An attempt or tendency to explain a complex set of facts, entities, phenomena, or structures by another, simpler set: "For the last 400 years science has advanced by reductionism ... The idea is that you could understand the world, all of nature, by examining smaller and smaller pieces of it. When assembled, the small pieces would explain the whole" (John Holland).

Read more: [...]

Polanyi did a critique on reductionism summarized here from wiki ( I know, I know not the most reliable source...anyway)

Critique of reductionism
In "Life's irreducible structure" (1968),[5] Polanyi argues that the information contained in the DNA molecule is irreducible to physics and chemistry. Although a DNA molecule cannot exist without physical properties, these properties are constrained by higher level ordering principles. In "Transcendence and Self-transcendence" (1970),[6] Polanyi criticizes the mechanistic world view that modern science has inherited from Galileo.
Polanyi advocates emergence i.e. the claim that there are several levels of reality, and causality. His argument relies on the assumption that boundary conditions supply degrees of freedom that instead of being random are determined by higher level realities whose properties are dependent, but distinct, from the lower level from which they emerge. The process by which meanings are generated shows us that intentions are downward causal forces.
Mind is a higher level expression of our capacity for discrimination. Our pursuit of self-set ideals such as truth and justice enriches our awareness of the world. The reductionistic attempt to reduce higher level realities into lower level realities generates what Polanyi describes as a moral inversion, in which the higher is rejected in favour of the lower. This inversion is pursued with moral passion. Polanyi identifies it as a pathology of the modern mind, and traces its origins to a false conception of knowledge; which although relatively harmless in the formal sciences, generates nihilism in the humanities

[...]

Now you may not come from it with this background knowledge nor does it go into all that philosophical "mumbo-jumbo" but it is still profound in it's applications of true love. I am just a very avid reader with a desire like a raving furnace to know truth and had a large schema that I took with me when reading and I read quite voraciously. Your schema is probably different than mine. Listening to this I felt it sort released some inner tension and restlessness that had so driven my reading. I finally achieved some sort of rest. It all came together, the nature of man, the nature of reality (please realize it doesn't get all above your head philosophical, what I'm talking about is implicit in it for me after so much reading, not some treatise in this book. I've been making a preface and outline to help give some organization to my thoughts and they are ending up longer than I anticipated! My preface for my outline has been like 53 pages and my outline 80some pages and they're not even done! I just need a visual way to organize! So yes this was my schema!) and the nature of fulfillment. In sum, indeed Lord, our hearts ARE restless until they rest in you who IS love. This book will show you how to make the reflection of divine love manifest in your human love. We can reject him with our wills and mind but He will still draw us with our hearts pining for the infinite, the beautiful, the true, the good. Our desire then and our sense of wonder are our guides. The story of Jesus is the greatest love story ever told. It takes me a while to distill things and I'm still listening, and I tend to overthink, but perhaps the following is a good reflection of just a small part John Paul II's theology of the body....?

Our souls exist at the level of gender and we manifest the nature of God through being male or female....

Pleasure is achieved in relation to others as for example our bodies manifest...
We swing from the puritan duty-rule bound mode suppressing desires with mere decision of will and the hedonistic sex, sex, sex where the desire is continually trying to be quenched by filling it but is never satiated wanting more based on instincts emotions. The way shown here is the balance in between. men and women help to make manifest the presence of love, and therefore God on earth...and for the physical there are spiritual equals.

And yes, sex is pleasure, but it can't be just about that or you reduce the other persons as means to pleasure, an object. Sex is meant to reflect and point to something even greater. Love is a gift and if not given freely, but with fear of what the other person may or may not do, then it is slavery to the other person and to yourself and you are not free. Paradoxically, it is when this kind of love is given freely that we truly receive, for this type of love receives its pleasure in its giving.

18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.(1 John 4:18)

It's about what it means to be human and what it means to bring true happiness.

In learning to love, we learn to live! THIS is the meaning of life.

As John Paul II said in Love and Responsibility p. 83-84

"The person who truly loves longs for the true good of the other with no ulterior motive, no selfish consideration. This is the purest form of love and it brings the greatest fulfillment."

It is with this in mind that I say that this is one of the best books I have ever encountered in my life.

An awesome explanation of the Theology of the Body. This book should be read by everyone, especially those looking to get married and/or begin a family.