On a spring semester Saturday, students at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, chose to spend the day learning about God’s plan for love and marriage. Father José Noriega, of the religious congregation the Disciples of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, led a Theology of the Body retreat for the students titled “Love and Our Fulfillment.”
Fr. Noriega is a Professor of Moral Theology specializing in the Sacrament of Marriage and is a vice president at the John Paul II Pontifical Institute on Marriage and Family in Rome, Italy. In addition to his other duties, over the last three years he has collaborated extensively with Benedictine College’s Center for Family Life to bring his intimate knowledge of John Paul II’s great catechesis to students and families at Benedictine College.
Following are five quotes from Father José’s retreat:
1. Do We Know What Love Is? Do We Know What It Means to Love?
What is love? It is a passive experience— the gift of presence (of the beloved) in our hearts that enriches me and gives me a meaning, a purpose, a fulfillment in life. I understand now my life in a new way. I see the heart of the beloved.”
But what does it mean ‘to love’? Thomas Aquinas gives a definition according to Aristotle: ‘to will a good for the beloved’… now, I take the reins of life, whereas before, I was passive. When I love, I will a good, one specific, concrete good, for the beloved. With specific actions, you are helping your beloved fulfill their lives— going on walk together, having a conversation, giving her flowers, taking out the trash. This is to love! Without these actions, your beloved will not be fulfilled in life… It is not abstract. The measure of loving is action.
2. Waves of Forgiveness
Benedictine students engaged in discussion during the retreat.
Wounds are like marks we make in the sand at the shore. The waves come and wash away the mark, maybe not completely with the first or second wave, but the sand is eventually evened out, wave after wave. We can compare these waves with forgiveness, and how the effective presence of the Holy Spirit in us can smooth our wounds in a way that makes our hearts able to receive the presence of someone.
3. What is Happiness? Where Do We Find Fulfillment?
Happiness is not satisfaction— it is the greatness of what we are living. For example, happiness is not when we receive our degree, but rather, it is a way of studying. Happiness is not when your beloved is loving you, but rather, happiness is a way of loving your children and spouse, of loving your friends. Happiness is a way of living!
So, happiness is related with fulfillment in life, but fulfillment in life is not when we end our studies. Fulfillment is today. We are fulfilling our lives now, by the ways in which we are currently living, in which we are acting, in which we are loving.
Here we depend on the creativity of our actions, and to fulfill our beloved’s life, we need a lot of actions, and these actions must change according to the situations of our lives. Where is fulfillment, then? Where is happiness? Fulfillment is a way of giving love: a way of taking a walk together, a way of running the dishwasher, a way of kissing, a way of embracing, a way of having a discussion. Fulfillment is in our actions, not in the future. Fulfillment is here, TODAY, in what we are doing for our beloved.
4. Food, Drink, and Sex
I was so curious as to why our Lord has given us these two desires rooted in our bodies— the desire for sex and the desire for eating & drinking. Why these two desires? What is the place of these desires in our deification?
Fr. Jose Noriega, DCJM, leading the retreat.
The Lord has given us a desire for a food that could fulfill us. He puts in our hearts, our bodies, this desire of this food and this drink because he wants to fulfill us with His Body and His Blood. If we do not have a desire to eat and drink, the eucharist will not signify anything for us. The greatness of eating is not only to put calories in our bodies, as with gas in a car. Rather, eating is transforming— eating together, celebrating together… there is a way of eating that fulfills our lives. We know how wonderful it is when families eat in a wonderful way, with feasts and banquets… this helps us to understand the whole eucharist and how the eucharist now has an influence on the way we eat! The Lord has given us bodies that hunger!
With sex, the Lord has given us this desire that is rooted in all our being in an incredible way—it is the desire of communion. The desire of fruitfulness. Every one of us has this desire in our heart as the most important thing in our life, because we understand that we are not fulfilled in loneliness. So, what is happening in the sacrament in marriage is that the Holy Spirit is present, uniting the couple to Jesus Christ. This new couple becomes the domestic church, where God is present. The spouses find God in their common love.
5. Participation in the Cosmic Liturgy
The way of a man toward a woman— where does this way end? In God. If marriage is the original sacrament, as St. John Paul II says, the relationship between man and woman is the place where Adam and Eve could live their communion with God, and now we understand that the erotic tension, the way from a man toward a woman and the woman toward the man, is rooted in God’s wisdom, in God’s will. God has put this tension in our hearts and bodies in a way that He can draw us toward Him!
The fathers of the Church talk about a cosmic liturgy. The whole of creation, the whole of the cosmos, is singing a liturgy to the Creator, because, Maxim the Confessor says, in the movement of all creation, there is a sound, and this sound is speaking an incredible liturgy… the sound of the waves on a beach, the wind on trees, animals walking in a meadow, rivers flowing. If you have the spirit in which the Creator has created, now you can decode all these sounds. Listen in a good way— creation tells us, ‘We come from God, and we are going toward God.’ When we receive the whole of creation as a gift of God for everyone, we see that the whole of creation through us is going back to God… sex is coming from God and is bringing you toward God… This erotic tension is inside God’s project, and the Lord is wanting to tell us something important about ourselves and about Him.
Featured image: Pexels
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