The Entry of Sin

On April 16, 1980, John Paul II began the Second Cycle of his reflections on the human body, sex, and marriage. In it he spelled out for us how sin has distorted and “plagiarized” the original meaning that God inscribed in our embodiedness as male and female, and how it has wrecked havoc on the man-woman relationship. We have fallen far from our graced beginnings and from God’s original plan. This is the bad news.

The good news is that although we now live in the perspective of our Fall and inhe-rited inclination to sin,we have also been redeemed by Christ who came to restore creation to the purity of its origins. Our Lord has empowered us to recover, albeit with much effort, what we have lost because of sin, by cultivating “purity of heart.” The redemption he won for us is a real power that is already operative in our lives even in our sinful “historical” state. In and through Christ, we can live the meaning of the body, sex and marriage as they were intended by God in the beginning.”

The grace and the power of redemption is as real in our lives right now as the un-ceasing pull of sin. We must bear this in mind as we begin to reflect, in this second cycle of the Pope’s meditations, on the damaging consequences sin brought about in our experience of the body and human sexuality.