July 4, 2009
Theology of the Body course sparks discussion among parishioners
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Monica Crumley, center, a member of the Theology of the Body Evangelization Team, makes a point at a recent gathering of the team at the home of Eric and Jessica Lendewig. Cathy Joyce/Herald photo
In parishes across the Sacramento Diocese, Catholics are gathering to talk
about sexuality.
The conversations are sparked by an eight-week DVD and discussion course on human sexuality and spirituality, called “An Introduction to the Theology of the Body: Discovering the Master Plan for Your Life.” The course’s author, Christopher West, is an internationally-known Catholic author and speaker who teaches Pope John Paul II’s lectures on the Theology of the Body.
“West’s target audience is young adults, so his style is hip, flip and relevant,” notes Jesuit Father Art Wehr, “but he does a good job of bringing people to a profound understanding of sexuality and its ultimate purpose.”
Father Wehr, a parochial vicar of St. Ignatius Parish in Sacramento, attended a couple of the course discussion sessions at Presentation Parish in Sacramento and hopes to bring the course soon to the St. Ignatius Parish community.
Having Catholics attend the Theology of the Body course wherever it’s scheduled and then become so inspired that they bring the course to their own parishes is exactly the grassroots distribution method envisioned by Loree Lippsmeyer, a parishioner at Saints Peter and Paul Parish in Rocklin and a member of the diocesan Natural Family Planning advisory board.
“Our goal is to bring the series to at least 40 parishes, in honor of the 40th anniversary of ‘Humane Vitae’ (Pope Paul VI’s 1968 papal encyclical on contraception),” Lippsmeyer said. “This seemed the best way to do it.”
Lippsmeyer is the leader of the Theology of the Body Evangelization Team, or TOBET, a group of laypeople working with the diocese’s Office of Evangelization and Catechesis to bring Pope John Paul II’s ideas to parishes. TOBET members help parishioners present the course materials, and then follow through on helping others bring the course back to their own parishes. “We’re a networking team, really,” Lippsmeyer said.
Lippsmeyer, who holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in social work and has been teaching classes in fertility care since 1993, explained that she heard Christopher West speak at a conference of the California Association of Natural Family Planning in 2002. “I loved his message and wanted to spread the word,” she said, “because I knew it would foster God’s love in people.”
TOBET members hosted the pilot program of West’s course at Holy Family Parish in Citrus Heights in the summer of 2008, with Holy Family parishioners Tim and Julie Desrochers presenting the material, then titled “Created and Redeemed.” The response was “overwhelmingly positive,” Lippsmeyer said, and several people offered to bring the material to their home parishes.
Course presentations followed at St. Mel Parish in Fair Oaks, St. Rose of Lima Parish in Roseville, Presentation Parish in Sacramento, and St. Joseph Parish and St. Boniface Mission in Lincoln. The course is currently underway at Holy Rosary Parish in Woodland. Introduction to Theology of the Body courses are tentatively scheduled in at least seven other parishes.
The course draws people from a large, diverse crowd, Lippsmeyer notes: widowed seniors, vowed religious, older couples, younger couples, single people. In course evaluations, she reports, people have written that they loved “learning about the sanctity of the body,” and “talking about sex in a sacred way.” One wrote that he had “more appreciation of God’s design.” A widow wrote that she wished she’d known these ideas earlier in life, but that she was glad to be able to tell her adult children about them.
The Theology of the Body course describes human sexuality “not as a pleasure to be had but as a gift to be shared,” Lippsmeyer said, “when we live our lives trying to love authentically, to sincerely and authentically love others for who they are.”
The prevailing cultural notion of sexuality is the opposite of authenticity, she observed, because it objectifies people and sexuality itself, separating who people are from the pleasures available from their bodies.
In its emphasis on authentic relationships rather than on seeing others as sex objects, the Theology of the Body is definitely countercultural, notes Michael Miller, a single adult member of St. Philomene Parish in Sacramento. Miller had been invited to the course by a friend, he said, and by the second week, he could see that the ideas were revolutionary.
“Theology of the Body is one of those life-changing, earth-changing movements,” he said, adding that this theology could be “the beginnings of the rewriting of what’s gone wrong in the secular world.”
“It’s a great, ticking time-bomb of love,” he said.
Miller, a graduate of St. Philomene School, Jesuit High School, and the University of Notre Dame, said that he appreciates the quality of the theology and philosophy in the course as it describes men and women and how they relate. “God had a great plan and God’s servant John Paul II articulates that plan so that we can understand it. The course is a great gift,” he said.
Another course graduate, Christi Banks of St. Rose of Lima Parish in Roseville, said that the course was particularly helpful to her as a single person “because our secular culture has taken our sexuality out of context and exploited it in consumerism.”
“Being human, we’re all sexual beings,” Banks explained, “but the actual context for human sexuality is spirituality.” When people don’t realize that spirituality and sexuality are “two sides of the same coin,” she said, they try to satisfy spiritual hunger with sex alone.
“God wants to love us and have a relationship with us,” Banks said. That relationship can be lived out in marriage, in single life, or in vowed religious life, she noted, but people have to be aware of their relationship with God before they can discern the life that God wants for them.
In the secular world, people don’t think about their relationship with God before they make choices about who to marry or even whether to marry, she contended. Not recognizing spiritual hunger, they misinterpret their own longings.
A person’s relationship with God can be lived through the sacrament of marriage, she added, and that love expressed in the self-gift of sexual love.
In his DVD course, West says that the intimacy and pleasure of sexual love in a sacramental marriage gives people a glimpse into the ecstatic union with God in the life to come. Quoting Pope John Paul II, West explains that marriage mirrors the relationship between Christ and the church.
Monica Crumley, a member of St. Mel Parish, said she also emphasized Christ as bridegroom when she and her husband Doug presented the Theology of the Body course at her parish last autumn.
“Sex in marriage is a gift of the self, and like Christ’s gift of himself to us, it must be free, total, faithful and fruitful,” she said. The gift of self is life-giving, she said, most obviously in creating children but also in the life-giving love that sustains the spouse.
A married couple may make a prayerful decision to abstain for a time from intercourse when the woman is fertile, Crumley noted, but they make that decision together, for serious reasons, in the context of their totally committed relationship.
“Out of eight hours of talk (in the course), maybe one hour or even just 45 minutes is devoted to contraception,” she said, “and that discussion takes place in the context of the relationship of marriage.”
Crumley said that during the eight-week course, the small group discussions became more frank as people became comfortable with one another. “It’s not easy for most people to talk about sex, but it’s important to be able to talk about these ideas and learn from others.”
She noted that people’s responses to the course have been extremely positive, quoting one parishioner who wrote: “What I found most important about the course was relating sex and love to the relationship we were supposed to be having with God.”
The Theology of The Body course is available to parishes throughout the diocese. People interested in the course, “An Introduction to the Theology of the Body: Discovering the Master Plan for Your Life,” can call Loree Lippsmeyer at (916) 771-4130.
