April 18, 2021

Talk I gave to the Catholic Mavs Sisterhood. The chalice veil hides the beauty of the chalice until it is ready to receive the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ, the Bridegroom of the Church. So too a woman's body is so beautiful, so good, that it is proper to veil it until she is ready to receive the body of her husband. The world tells women that there are two ways to think of their bodies. Either the body is bad and to be ashamed of it because it is too fat, too skinny, too this, too that. Or the body is so good that we should flaunt it for all the world to see. Both views objectify the body and divorce the body from the person. As Catholics, we don't believe that we are pure body or a soul trapped in a body. Rather, we believe that we are fully human as body AND soul. Thus we hide the beauty of our bodies from fallen people who might treat our bodies as an object for their own pleasure (lust) and wait to reveal the beauty of our bodies until someone has fallen in love with all that we are, body and soul, and are thus capable, to look upon our bodies and see a person to be loved. This is how Adam and Eve looked at each other, looked at each other's naked bodies before the Fall. It is what ideally happens in the marriage bedroom; that they see in the naked body of their spouse a person to love and not a body to use.