If you were to walk into my living room, besides seeing my wall of icons and my shot-glass collection from around the world, you might notice a rather unusual decorative item: A box of Total cereal. This  may seem quite odd, until you recall the end of last week’s blog – every person is created for a total gift of self in love through the body.

You see, my hope is that people will see my living-room Total box and ask me, “Katrina, why do you have a box of Total cereal in your living room?” Immediately, my eyes will light up and I won’t be able to contain myself: “Oh!” I will say, “because it reminds me of the way God love us – with a total gift of self – and what I am created for – a total gift of self in love.”

You see, what I’ve discovered is that through concrete, tangible reminders like a living-room Total box, Theology of the Body is taken out of the abstract and gradually seeps into our head, heart, and most especially, our identity. So permit me for a moment to open this “Total box” and pour out a little bit of TOB concreteness into our lives.

Many of us grew up hearing the amazing truth  that “God is love.”  My whole world changed at age 16 when I attended a Youth Encounter Retreat weekend. On that weekend, I experienced in the depths of my being that God is love, and that he loves me personally! Perhaps you’ve had this same experience, where the words “God is love” suddenly moved from being intangible sound waves in your ear to tangibly gripping your heart so that you knew in the depths of your being that God loves you personally, concretely.

While this amazing truth that God is Love and He loves you personally must reach every cell of our bodies, there’s even more “love” in the Total box than we could ever absorb. God is love first and foremost not because He loves you and me (sorry to break it to you…), but because God, in Himself, is Love.

While Jesus indeed came to die on the cross to forgive our sins, there’s an even more fundamental reason why He became Incarnate – to reveal the inner life of God as Trinity. I realize this might seem like stale news to you, but we need to remember how passionately the Jews guarded the Oneness of God for millennia. Every morning, they recited the central profession of their faith: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one!” (Dt 6:4) When Jesus claimed equality with God, the Jews took up rocks to stone him for blasphemy (see John 10:31). How could Jesus of Nazareth be one with God if God is only One?

As Christians, we also passionately profess and guard the central truth of our faith, that God is not only One, but Three: a Divine Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We profess this every time we make the sign of the cross, baptize a baby, pray the Rosary, say grace before meals, or begin the celebration of Mass.

In his apostolic letter “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women” (MD) which I referred to last week as being my “crib notes” for the Theology of the Body, St. John Paul II caused me to ponder the meaning of God’s inner life as Trinity. Here’s what he wrote: “…the New Testament will reveal the inscrutable mystery of God’s inner life. God, who allows himself to be known by human beings through Christ, is the unity of the Trinity, unity in communion” (MD, no. 7).

Think about this for a moment – through Christ, God has opened the door for us to know and see his inner life. This should send us reeling. Through my words and actions, I can try to reveal to you what’s going on inside of me; I can try to disclose to you my deepest thoughts and feelings. However, when all is said and done, my inner life remains largely inaccessible to you because, well, it’s hidden.

Through Jesus Christ, God’s inner life as a Trinitarian Communion of Love, has been made visible. We can begin to understand God not as rules, but as relationship, a relationship of total, self-giving love. St. John Paul II says that being a person, made in the image and likeness of a Trinitarian God, means “striving toward self-realization… which can only be achieved through a sincere gift of self” (MD, no. 7).

Ah, we are back to that powerful word: gift. Why are you created as a gift to be a gift? Because the inner life of the Trinity, the inscrutable divine mystery that only Jesus Christ can fully reveal, consists of the Father pouring himself out in a total gift of love to the Son, and the Son pouring himself out in a total gift of love to the Father, and the Holy Spirit bursting forth, overflowing, as the fruit of their total, self-giving love. Through Christ’s total gift of self on the cross, the veil between heaven and earth is torn and we can glimpse the inner life of the Trinity, the total, self-giving love of God that holds nothing back, that gives away all. As St. John Paul II piercingly said: “…the expression of God’s love is human, but the love itself is divine” (MD, no. 23).

The expression of God’s total self-giving love takes a human form, the form of a human body. This means we hit a double jackpot – not only do we glimpse the inner life of the Trinity through Jesus’ total gift of self on the cross, but we also glimpse the fullness of meaning of the human body and our embodiment. We are given the gift (not the curse!) of our bodies because it is only through the body that we can make a total gift of self in love.

Would you humor me by reading that sentence again: It is only through the body that we can make a total gift of self in love. This is one reason why St. John Paul II repeatedly quotes a passage from the Second Vatican Council that says, “Christ…fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear” (GS 22). This quote is but another way of saying that Jesus Christ reveals not only the inner life of the Trinity, but the full truth about the human person and our embodiment.

We are not created for our souls to escape from the prison of our bodies and finally be free! This is the teaching of Plato, not Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ on the cross and in the Eucharist reveals that we are created to make a total gift of self in love through our bodies. The body is never left behind as if it were merely a temporary vessel. Even Jesus didn’t leave his body behind; it was raised from the dead and glorified for all eternity. So, too, our bodies in the shape of their masculinity and femininity and our call to “mirror in the world the communion of love that is in God” (MD, no. 7) are not temporary, but permanent. Our masculine and feminine bodies carry within them a symbolic dimension – to reveal the inscrutable mystery of the inner life of the Trinity. Or, put beautifully and bluntly: your body reveals God!

So this week, buy a Total box, put it in your living room and ponder the inscrutable mystery of Trinitarian Love and the capacity of your body to reveal a Trinitarian God through a total gift of self in love.

© Katrina J. Zeno, MTS