In the book Called to Love: Approaching John Paul II’s Theology of the Body by Carl Anderson and Fr. Jose Granados, the authors argue that human creatures are created to wonder. Such wonder is inseparable from love. And that love is what gives our lives meaning. Wonder can be come from reflecting on the majesty of the natural world, of course, but reaches its greatest intensity in love: “Our response to true love fulfills our experience of wonder and puts in our hands a compass to guide our quest for meaning to the goal of true happiness.”
Wonder, and the love that it produces, is powerfully expressed in our bodies, most obviously when we are making love: “The body manifests the person.” We are creatures, but creatures with souls that respond to wonder, and strive for the transcendent. A person who can’t wonder — and yes there are quite a few — is doomed to a dull life, through nobody’s fault but his own.
Do we sometimes fall short of this Christian ideal of human sexuality? Of course. I know that I do. In fact it’s easy for the left to call us hypocrites, because we all fall short. As if we should dumb down our ethics to match whatever we find it easy to do.
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