After reading “Love and Responsibility”, our Lord piqued my interest again in learning more of the theology of the body (TOB). So, I got on the internet and ordered a copy of it and have begun reading it!
 
I first learned about the TOB about 2.5 years ago when I went to a Theology on Tap event that the diocese holds every Fall and a woman, who used to be a campus minister at the university parish while I was going to Texas A&M, gave an introductory talk about it.
 
Shortly thereafter, I began dating my first Catholic girlfriend, and so our Lord really inspired me to learn about the TOB because I wanted to grow in the virtue of purity and be able to love my girlfriend as fully as God wanted me to, especially since I felt he was leading us to engagement and marriage.

So, I bought Christopher West’s “The Good News About Sex and Marriage”, watched some tapes of him, talked with my girlfriend a lot about it, and also bought one of the TOB summary books that people have written to condense John Paul’s lengthy work. By the grace of God, I learned much and felt satisfied with the amount of understanding and appreciation that I now had for who we are as male and female human beings, the nature of marriage, and the other amazing topics that the TOB includes.
 
Nonetheless, in reading “Love and Responsibility” and in courting Katie, who understands and appreciates the TOB much more than I do, our Lord has shown me that I need to grow much more! I have therefore bought “The Theology of the Body” by John Paul II and am reading it. I will be posting quotes from it and the reflections that the Holy Spirit teaches me through it.
 
I see now that I was complacent in thinking I understood enough about the TOB to stop actively learning it two years ago. I now look at it like I do the Bible or the saints or the teachings of the Church: I need to continuously be seeking God in them and asking him to teach me more, and more deeply. Even though I have read the Bible from beginning to end, I can hardly say that I have mastered it or “know enough about it”, and the same is true of the Catechism and my understanding of the Church’s unfathomably deep teachings and of the saints and my own practice of virtue.
 
I am thrilled to get to learn more from our Lord and to get to drink from the pure source of his teachings in the TOB, as well as to share it all with Katie and learn from her wisdom.