Sex, Gender, Identity

“Today’s sexual confusion is not caused because the world glorifies sexuality, but because the world fails to see its glory.” —Jason Evert

Modern culture sometimes attacks gender as if it were the problem. In other words, “the real problem is the rigid social constructs that perpetuate the myth that men and women are different. If we eliminate sexual differences, the problem will be solved.“ But it is precisely our differences that make union possible. Without difference, there can be no complimentary. 

In fact, our sex is not only decisive for our bodily individuality, but that it defines our identity. We are not separated from our bodies. Imagine if someone struck you, and you asked him, “Why did you hit me?” and he replied “I didn’t hit you. I hit your body.” We don’t just have a body. Our body is us. It expresses the person and reveals the soul.

St. John Paul II says that “the Creator has assigned the body to men as a task, the body in its masculinity and femininity.” Man has been given a task to rediscover his dignity and calling, and this call is revealed in and through the body.

Marriage, the primordial sacrament, was created to be the sign of his love for humanity and his plan for our lives. After creating man and woman, God gives mankind His first comment: “be fruitful and multiply, fill the Earth“ (Genesis 1:28). The beauty of our ability to procreate reflects God’s desire for men to be a reflection of His creative power. 

We are the only creation that was created to be a reflection of God, both body and soul, with the ability to share in the exchange of love. The Church declares that “this likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on Earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself. (Gaudium et Spes, 24).

When we are able to have a fullness of understanding the meaning of the body and how it reveals to us our call to love, this purity of heart will then enable us to see others as a gift to be received, not an object to be grasped. Unlike animals, our sexuality is not ruled by instinct but personal mastery in which we are able to have the freedom of this gift. In light of God’s original design, the sexual act points to mankind’s deepest desire, beyond making a gift of self to others, is to make a gift of self to God in infinite love.