Monica Ashour is president and founder of Theology of the Body Evangelization Team, an international Catholic speaker, and author of more than 20 books. Courtesy | CatholicLink
The body has spiritual significance, guest speaker Monica Ashour said in a talk hosted by Hillsdale College’s Career Services and the Student Ministry Board Jan. 28.
In her speech titled “The Body as Enemy to Freedom or as a Gospel,” Ashour said the body teaches us about the nature of God and our purpose by revealing supernatural realities through natural ends.
President and founder of Theology of the Body Evangelization Team, Ashour is an international Catholic speaker and author of more than 20 books, according to the organization’s website. Before founding TOBET, Ashour spent 25 years teaching middle school and high school theology and literature. She is currently working on a video-based program called “My Body, My Identity: Discovering God’s Design.”
Ashour emphasized the urgency of understanding the meaning of our bodies in our current culture.
“In this day and age, we have to focus on the fact that the body does matter,” Ashour said. “It matters so much, and my generation has told your generation that it doesn’t matter.”
The mission of restoring the incarnational view of the body is derived from Pope John Paul II’s compiled series of lectures on the theology of the body, Ashour noted.
“In the ‘Theology of the Body,’ he used the word ‘detachment’ as the problem of our culture, that we forgot that the body has deep meaning,” Ashour said. “This is his thesis: the body, and only the body, is capable of making visible the invisible realities, the spiritual and the divine.”
According to Ashour, sexual differences and marriage have supernatural ends.
“The male body says give to self by giving, the female body says give to self by receiving,” Ashour said. “Our bodies are directed toward each other.”
This reciprocal relationship tangibly demonstrates what love is, Ashour said. Accordingly, marriage serves as a picture of the Christian life and who God is by exemplifying love in relationship.
“We can say that this blueprint of the entire universe is giving, receiving, and being open to others, and therefore all of us are created in God’s image and likeness,” Ashour said, referring to marriage. “We’re more made in God’s image and likeness when we’re in a community of persons.”
Ashour compared this view with that of modern culture.
“Things like abortion, in vitro fertilization, sterilization, contraception, etc. — each of these says that there are no teleological ends, as opposed to what we might call an incarnational view of the body, that there’s meaning behind bodily actions,” Ashour said.
The Christian view of the incarnational body should be seen as a gospel, centered on the risen body of Christ, Ashour said.
“Pope John Paul II says that the theology of the body is not merely a theory, but rather a specific evangelical pedagogy of the body,” Ashour said. “The answer is the body, and especially Jesus Christ’s risen body.”
Junior Tully Mitchell said the talk brought a meaningful theological perspective to many topics that concerned her and left her with a lot to think about.
“All of these hot-button cultural issues that entail the body — those are the things that I’ve been really fascinated with from a Christian perspective,” Mitchell said. “I think the one that I’ll be thinking about the most going home is the further implications of what it means to view the body sacramentally.”
Senior Colin Joyce said it was interesting to view the purpose of the human body in terms of the love of Christ, an idea he said was further enhanced by his knowledge of biochemistry.
“It just goes to show that we’re beautifully and wonderfully made,” he said.