The Experience of "Original Unity"

At the sight of the woman’s body, the man (male) exclaims: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23). Notice the focus on the body. It is as if man (Adam) is saying: “here at last is a body that expresses a person like myself! Here at last is a body that reveals a person!” Recall that in naming the animals, man (Adam) did not encounter a body that expresses a person like himself. Now, before the presence of the woman’s body, writes the Holy Father, “the man manifests for the first time joy and even exaltation, for which he had no reason before, owing to the lack of a being like himself. Joy in the other human being, in the second ‘self,’ dominates the words spoken by the man on seeing the woman.” This is why “a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Gen 2:24).

In this way, the experience of unity overcomes man’s solitude, and in this expe-rience, man realizes that woman is God’s gift for him, and he is God’s gift for her. Man and woman are God’s gifts for each other, gifts to be loved, cherished and affirmed their own sakes, and never to be used simply as objects for other purposes. Given and accepted in love, masculinity finds itself affirmed in femininity, and vice versa, for they have been given by God for each other and they somehow complete each other. Writes John Paul II: “femininity finds itself, in a sense, in the presence of masculinity, while masculinity in confirmed through femininity.”