The body as sacrament Sample Clauses

The body as sacrament. John Paul’s phrase, ‘language of the body,’ refers to actual utterances because ‘language’ is not to be construed as an abstraction detachable from the person who generates it. Communication, whether as word, or deed, exists in the expression which should be an authentic exteriorisation of interior dispositions and thoughts. Such communication extends to every action of the person including, inter alia, eyes that encounter another’s, tears, and taking breath.213 It is owing to their particular embodiment, psychical and physical, that humans have the need and capacity for language. Denys Turner neatly summarises the Thomist anthropology informing John Paul’s thinking: ‘For our bodies are how we are present to one another. Our bodies are how we speak to one another. We might say, the human body is the human person’s extension into language.’214 John Paul’s usage of the term, ‘language of the body,’ is not always obviously consistent throughout his Theology of the Body. While he does tend to mean that the language of the body is an act of the acting person, he also suggests that the body itself participates in the world of signs and signals. That is to say that the body not only participates in socially-constructed verbal and gestural language systems, but that the body itself is a sign-system or language. This innate somatic expressiveness is owing to the a priori inscription by God of each person’s meaning: being willed for her own sake to live in communion with God and others. This forms the ground of the ‘deep order of the gift and of reciprocal self-giving’ (TOB 61:3) by which the body is constituted. The body itself is 212 Ibid. 213 In his poem, "Deaf Language," Les Murray speaks of the triple modality of language: the spoken-audible, (negatively intimated in deaf); the written-visible, (present in his poem’s published text), and the gestural-felt (where felt can refer to interpreting the meaning of another’s gesture). The gestural language of the deaf women in his poem is likened to an occidental language, differently conceived of, which indicates the richness and diversity of the body’s capacity for language. Expressive constraints can induce alternative, imaginative inventiveness. Les A. Murray, Subhuman Redneck Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1996), 80. 214 Turner, 248. a dense sign along the lines of a symbol, icon or sacrament. The body visibly signifies and makes present the dignity of the person and points beyond itself. It is both reasonable...