Gift and Sexuality
one
Love, Sexuality, and Gift
Our culture has completely lost track of our sexuality. It’s easily one of the most obvious areas where the world has turned its back on God, and on the truth Christ proclaims through the Scriptures and the Church. Yet, the world still recognizes that, at the end of the day, sexuality is supposed to be about love.
Hollywood keeps churning out love stories. They may be stories involving divorce or fornication or homosexuality or who-knows-what, but they are supposed to be love stories because we can’t erase that our sexuality is meant to be a vehicle for love and love always seeks to express itself through a sincere gift of self.
This in itself testifies to the fact that our sexuality comes from God. Human sexuality is designed to be an expression of love, and a gift of self to another. And that’s why it reflects God Himself. Because God is Love. God is a gift of self. And that’s why He made us male and female. So that we could be like Him.
two
God as Love. God as Self-Gift
As St. John tells us, “God is love.” The Catechism explains this by saying, “God Himself is an eternal exchange of love – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”
So love and self-gift are at the core of what the Trinity is.
Remember, each of the members of the Trinity are the same God. They aren’t three Gods.
What makes it so that there are Three Persons yet only One God is that the Father gives everything He has – He gives every perfection, every resource, every aspect of His power, all His knowledge – in fact, He gives everything He is to the Son. The Father holds nothing back, and the Son receives everything. So that there’s absolutely nothing they don’t have in common. The only difference between them is that the Father has given all of it, and the Son has received all of it. And the Father and the Son give the whole of what they share together to the Holy Spirit – so that He is the same God, with the same mind and will and knowledge and power.
That’s what it means to be infinite love. It means you give infinitely. And you receive infinitely.
That’s what God is. That’s why God is infinitely happy. And He has made us so that we can give and receive, and be like Him, and be happy like Him.
three
Creation as a Gift of Love
God could have been happy just with Himself – He has, just by being God, infinite perfect companionship, infinite, perfect sharing and receiving and enjoying of His infinite goodness. But He chose to confer existence on small, finite things. He chose to create.
As St. Alphonsus Liguori says, think of God’s love just in making you. He didn’t have to make you. And He could have made someone else instead of you. But He made you.
“Through pure love, He has selected you from among so many whom He could have created in place of you; but He has left them in their nothingness, and brought you into existence, and placed you in the world.”
God showed His love for you first of all in making you, in giving you existence. And He brought you into existence to be in His own image. Which means God, who is love and self-gift, made you so that you could love, and could become a self-gift.
four
Human Person as made for Self-Gift
Vatican II states clearly that God the Trinity is, by nature, an infinite self-gift; and because we are in His image, we are called to become gifts of self. Listen to what it says: It says there is “a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the union of God’s sons in truth and love. This likeness shows that man, who is the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of self.” (GS #24).
It is in our nature to love, because it’s in God’s nature. It is in our nature to find happiness through a gift of self to another, because it’s in God’s nature to be happy through a gift of self to another. We have been made in God’s image, and so we have been designed for love, and for self-gift. And nowhere is that design more apparent than in the fact that we have been made men and women.
five
Man and Woman as Gift-for-Another
In the very first book of the Bible, in the very first chapter, it says that God made man in His own image. Then, immediately afterwards, as though to highlight that we’re in God’s image, it said, “male and female He created them.”
We exist, we have been put on this earth, so that we can learn to love with every dimension of who we are. But the sexual dimension is where that mission is most vivid. Because the very structure of our bodies shows that men have been designed to give themselves in a very particular way that women can receive, and that women can give themselves to men in a very particular way that men can celebrate and be grateful for. We are designed to love because we are God’s children. Our sexuality isn’t the exception to that design. It’s literally the embodiment of that design.
So if we would live our sexuality rightly, we must be committed to loving in a godly way. And if we would love in a godly way, we must be committed to living our sexuality rightly. Like every other form of love and right living, this is going to be a challenge. There will always be the threat of selfishness and or rationalizing our selfish behavior and use.
So we pray to God that the world will turn to Him, the standard and source of all human love, especially in the realm of sexuality so that we may live and love as reflections of the Most Blessed Trinity.