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Our Bodies Tell God’s Story | Christopher West #609

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On the Regular Version …

There are many times in life where we may wonder what’s the meaning or story behind the things in our lives. What if there is something else going on?

Christopher West joins me today as we discuss how our desires and our bodies tell a story. Specifically, they tell God’s story.

Learn more about Christopher here –
https://tobinstitute.org/
https://askchristopherwest.com/

On the Extended Version …

Christopher dives into how the writings of Pope John Paul II shaped his learning and path with this message. 

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Corey Allan: Coming up next on the Passionately Married Podcast.

Christopher West: The first two words of Jesus in the Gospel of John, which frame the whole thing for me in the right way, I think approaching the Bible for rules is to misread the Bible. What's the vision? What's the vision of scripture? We have lost that vision. Here's the very first thing Jesus says in the Gospel of John, it's not follow all these rules or you're going to hell.

Corey Allan: Right.

Christopher West: The very first thing Jesus says in the Gospel of John is, "What do you want?"

Corey Allan: Welcome to the show. I'm Dr. Corey Allan. Alongside my wife, Pam, each and every week we want to dive into what are some of the topics and issues and struggles and frameworks that most every married couple faces.

Pam Allan: Hey.

Corey Allan: Let's talk about conversations and actions that you can take that can propel your marriage and life forward. If you're new to the show and looking for a handy way to tell your friends about Passionately Married, we highly suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic, and they help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Go to passionatelymarried.net/starter. Also, if you're new to the show, or even if you've been around for a long time with the show, there are video versions of the show going out now when we have guests. Today's episode is an example, last week's episode is another example. On YouTube, you can find the version of the show that's the video of the conversation that takes place.

Pam Allan: Very fun. But it's just with the guests, it's not when it's just you and I.

Corey Allan: At this point that that is correct.

Pam Allan: Yep, for clarity.

Corey Allan: Check us out. If you also want to find out a little bit more about how you can get even more depth, content, connection, we highly suggest joining the academy. Go to passionatelymarried.net/academy and you can join at the extended content only level, the all-the-way-in level, which gets you the access to the academy with the coaching calls on a monthly basis, even a more detailed in-depth conversations that take place on the platform. Then there's the masterclass level, which also adds to it the ability to access every video course we have while your subscription is active. Passionatelymarried.net/academy and join the level you choose.
Coming up on today's regular version of the Passionately Married podcast is a conversation with Christopher West. He has a book out there called Our Bodies Tell God's Story. It is a fantastic re-look at what do we do with the way we were designed in our sexuality and desire, because it seems like, in a lot of ways, religion has gone counter to the message he's providing.

Pam Allan: Well, he is so much fun to listen to. When you talk about passion and being passionately married, to be passionate about a topic.

Corey Allan: This is one of those conversations I had trouble getting involved.

Pam Allan: Because he's so excited and passionate about it. I loved listening to it and being a part of hearing that, getting the opportunity for that. I love his point about desire, and you guys will hear this as you're listening to it, but repressing desire versus redeeming desire. Maybe that's a tickler for you to listen a little bit farther on, it's pretty sweet.

Corey Allan: That's very good. On the extended content today, which is deeper, longer and there are no ads, you can subscribe at passionatelymarried.net/academy, we go into a deeper dive of how he landed on the framework he's got, because there's some writings from Pope John Paul II that he was introduced to after he was already starting to formulate this framework that just helped him go even deeper when you add the two together.

Pam Allan: Interesting.

Corey Allan: It's a conversation of what he has been preaching for a long while now, where did all that come from. All that's coming up on today's show.
I came across a book, Our Bodies Tell God's Story by Christopher West, from an old colleague friend of mine that was texting me, saying, "Dude, have you seen this book?" Then before I could even have a chance to reply, he was like, "You've totally got to read this book." Then before I had a chance to reply to that, it was even, "You've even got to have him on the show." This is the culmination of some interactions that have gone on for a little while, Christopher, but Christopher West is joining me today and I'm so excited to have this conversation with you.

Christopher West: Corey, I'm so glad to be with you and your audience.

Corey Allan: I want to just jump right in because one of the things that you seem to go after in this book is the idea of how the world has taken the view in the realm of sex and sexuality, and even our gender, our identity, our maleness, our femaleness, all of it, our bodies, and just gone astray, which is not a shocking statement to most people listening, I'm sure, but you come at it from a different slant. I want you just to start unpacking it and then we're just going to go from there.

Christopher West: Yeah, well, let's start with the title of the book, Our Bodies Tell God's Story. What the heck does that even mean? What is God's story?

Corey Allan: Right.

Christopher West: Well, most people of faith, at least Christian faith, would turn to the scriptures to say, "Okay, what is God's story?" We don't tend to think in these terms, but once it's pointed out it becomes quite obvious. The Bible begins with a marriage in an earthly paradise. Throughout the Old Testament, God speaks of his love for his people as the love of a husband for his bride. In the New Testament, the love of the eternal bridegroom is literally embodied when the word is made flesh. Skip to the end of the story, the Book of Revelation describes heaven as an eternal marriage in a heavenly paradise.
Look at those two bookends of the Bible. It begins with the marriage of a man and a woman in an earthly paradise, it ends with the marriage of God and humanity in the heavenly paradise. When you look at these two bookends, you have the key now that unlocks God's story. I like to say we can summarize the whole Bible with five words. God wants to marry us and he wanted this eternal marital plan to be so plain to us, so obvious to us, that he chiseled an image of it right in our bodies by making us male and female and calling the two to that intimate sexual embrace, the two become one flesh.
Paul summarizes the whole Bible in Ephesians 5 when he says, "The union of man and woman in one flesh is a profound mystery and it refers to Christ and the Church." Our bodies tell that story. Our bodies tell the story not only that God loves us, not only that he wants to marry us, but there's more. What did we learn in second grade, Corey? We learned first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage, but what we didn't realize in second grade is we are actually reciting some profound theology. God loves us, wants to marry us, and he wants his bride to conceive eternal life within her.
I'll also point out that this is not just a metaphor, that there was a woman representing all of Israel and representing the Church in the New Testament who gave her yes to God's marriage proposal with such fidelity and totality that she literally conceived eternal life in her womb. That woman is Mary and that child is Christ. Our bodies tell that story.

Corey Allan: All right, so then there's several things that come to my mind, because I'm trying to be the audience here too in the way I'm listening and interacting with you. In some regards, there's this element of, okay, if this is the story, what is it that's made it to where, one, we just miss it as humans? My experience with scriptures growing up, and even to this day I can fall back into this, of I go to scriptures for rules, I go to scriptures for thou shalts, I go to how do I feel even more condemnation, guilt or shame on myself, rather than you're coming at it from a completely different framework, which is very freeing and enlightening and empowering.

Christopher West: Yeah. I want to point out the first two words of Jesus in the Gospel of John, which frame the whole thing for me in the right way. I think approaching the Bible for rules is to misread the Bible. What's the vision? What's the vision of scripture? We have lost that vision. The very first thing Jesus says in the Gospel of John is not, "Follow all these rules or you're going to hell." The very first thing Jesus says in the Gospel of John is, "What do you want? What are you looking for? What is it that you really desire?" Jesus probes the heart with a question. That's the first thing that John gives us from the mouth of Jesus, "What are you looking for? What are you after? What are you seeking?"
I don't know about you, Corey, but I'm a hungry dude. I have had this hunger in my bones for as long as I can remember. I remember back in the '70s, I'm a little kid, I'm listening to the radio one night and I hear Bruce Springsteen come on the radio singing his '70s anthem, Born to Run. I don't know how to say it, it awakened a yearning in me for something that nothing in this world can really satisfy. At the end of this song, you know the song Born to Run by Springsteen?

Corey Allan: Oh yeah. I grew up with this one too, so we're good.

Christopher West: We're on the same page here, all right.

Corey Allan: Yep.

Christopher West: The whole song, he's running to find this thing he's looking for. At the end of the song, he cracks open his ribcage and he lets this cosmic cry come out of his heart, this wail, this groan, I would even call it a noisy prayer. Springsteen uses that expression himself, that his music is like a noisy prayer. This yearning of his soul came out and I'm lying in my bed, and it awakened something in me. It awakened a yearning. I felt the same thing, I was in third grade at the time, I felt the same thing when the classroom finally got rearranged and Stacey Reed was sitting next to me, this yearning got awakened in my-

Corey Allan: Oh, I see what you're talking about here. Now we're getting into some of the other aspects of desire and things that get awoken in our body. Absolutely.

Christopher West: Yes, desire, yearning, hunger. But I was raised on what you might call the starvation diet gospel.

Corey Allan: Right, I think there was a huge generation of people that have been raised in this.

Christopher West: Yes. By that I mean Christianity, as it was presented to me growing up, was basically your desires are bad, you need to repress all that, but follow all these rules and you'll be a good upstanding Christian citizen. Well, I'm a hungry dude, as I've been saying, and that's why in my teenage years I became a quick convert to what I call the fast food gospel, which is the secular culture's promise of immediate gratification for the hunger. Now, if those are your only two choices, starve or eat the chicken nuggets, I'm going for the chicken nuggets. I don't want anybody to lie to me, those chicken nuggets taste really good going down, especially when you're hungry.
But let's go with that metaphor. If fast food becomes your steady diet, after a while you're not going to feel so good. The grease and the sodium is going to catch up with you. That's a picture of me in my college years. The grease and the sodium had caught up with me and it put me on my knees in a college dorm in 1988 saying, "God in heaven, if you exist, you'd better show me why you gave me all these desires, because they're getting me and everybody I know into a hell of a lot of trouble. What is your plan? Do you have a plan?"
To make a long story short, I started studying the scriptures and I started seeing this biblical vision, this story that our bodies tell, that God made us male and female not to lead us to starve, he gave us all these desires not to starve us, but to lead us to a banquet, what the scripture calls the marriage feast of the Lamb, that the real goal of Christianity is that our hunger would lead us to this ultimate feast of love.
But this brings us to the second keyword of Jesus. The first one is get in touch with that yearning, what do you want, but the second word of Jesus in the Gospel of John is an invitation out of our blindness. He says, "Come and become one who sees." This comes back to your question, Corey, why don't we see this, that our bodies tell this divine story? Well, with the fall of man, a blindness entered, you might even call it an eclipse of the body. In the beginning, before sin messed it all up, we read that the man and his wife were both naked and felt no shame. Why were they naked without shame? I would propose the answer is because they saw the message of God's story, they saw God's story revealed through their bodies. That's what enabled them to be naked without shame. They experienced erotic desire as nothing but the desire to love divinely.
But see, there's an enemy who doesn't want us to love divinely. That's symbolized by that serpent that comes the scene. I would put it this way, God gave us erotic desire to be like the fuel of a rocket that has the power to launch us to the stars. To infinity ...

Corey Allan: And beyond, of course.

Christopher West: And beyond, right.

Corey Allan: Here we go, yeah, nice setup.

Christopher West: But see, the enemy doesn't want us to launch to the stars. His goal is to invert those rocket engines so they're no longer aimed at the stars, so that our lives literally become a disaster. Do you know what the word disaster actually means, Corey?

Corey Allan: Tell me.

Christopher West: It means to aim away from the stars, disaster.

Corey Allan: Okay. Okay, I see it.

Christopher West: Aster is Latin for the stars. A disaster is a life that's aimed away from the stars. What the gospel really proclaims is not the condemnation of our rocket engines, not the condemnation of erotic desire. No, Christ came into the world, I would say, to redirect our rocket engines to the stars. If our rocket engines are not aimed at the stars, erotic desire is all about me, it's all about me and my pleasure and then other people become objects for my pleasure. I'm no longer learning to love and honor and sacrifice myself for others, I'm rather learning to use others and sacrifice others to please myself. That's a recipe for disaster.

Corey Allan: Absolutely. That's also a pretty good depiction of how a lot of this whole concept and topics have evolved over the years, because the thing that jumped out to me, where you were speaking a lot of my language just in the very opening of the book, is just that idea of desire. Well, I was in the world similarly, of squash it in the name of sanctification, as if that's possible.

Christopher West: Yeah, as if that's possible, right.

Corey Allan: As a therapist, it's like if I was just saying, "Well, just don't be mad." Yeah, right. When all that just happened, that anger's going to come out in some way, shape, or form. Any motion we have will eventually come out and it's just a question of how do we, in some regards, harness and steer it better, how do we direct it better rather than go trying to weed out that root, which would be part of weeding out ourselves. Because you're describing this idea of a desire that's inherently in us that propels us towards something bigger than ourselves, which is the story of relationships in and of themselves.

Christopher West: Correct. Corey, you're putting your finger right on it. The point is not the repression of desire, the point is the redemption of desire, but a lot of people read the scriptures and don't catch this vision. We end up thinking the only two options are indulge and repress. If those are the only two options, indulge or repress, which one appears to be more holy? Repress looks more holy.

Corey Allan: Well, yeah. It makes me come across as if, yeah, absolutely.

Christopher West: That's why I think so many people of faith have deep seated sexual problems, because we've confused the life of faith with a life of sexual repression. No, no, no, this is not what Christianity offers. Christ comes to redeem our bodies, he comes in the flesh to redeem our flesh. Paul calls him the savior of the body and in Romans 8 he talks about the redemption of our bodies. He says, "All of creation is groaning as in labor pains, a woman in labor pains, waiting for us to say yes to the redemption of our bodies." That means Christianity is not about repressing our sexuality, it's about redeeming our sexuality. That's a restoration in our hearts to that original glorious intention of our maker, that we would know in and through our bodies the truth of divine love because our bodies are meant to tell God's story.
Maybe another angle here would be to look at this biblical idea of running out of wine. The very first miracle of Jesus, the very first miracle, this is really, really significant, the very first miracle of Jesus is to restore the wine at a wedding feast. What is going on here? There's just the practical reality that, okay, there's this wedding feast and the couple runs out of wine and Jesus restores the wine, but there's a much, much deeper meaning here. If we look at the symbolism of wine in the scriptures, wine is a symbol of the joy of divine love. Jesus says, "Love one another as I have loved you. I tell you this so that my joy might be in you and your joy might be complete." We're talking here about infinite joy, we're talking about the ecstasy of God. That's what we're talking about.

Corey Allan: Right. Quick aside, because if I'm tracking you right this is also where in my mind I'm hearing this is what separates the concept of joy from the concept of happiness.

Christopher West: Yeah, yeah. inaudible.

Corey Allan: Particularly in the way the world describes it, there's a depth to joy that there is that's different than happiness in the way I think about it.

Christopher West: Happiness can be fleeting. In fact, the very word happiness comes from happenstance.

Corey Allan: There you go.

Christopher West: The things that happen to you.

Corey Allan: There you go.

Christopher West: Joy is abiding because it has to do with the abidingness of God in us. That joy cannot be robbed from us, Jesus says, and that joy comes from drinking deeply of God's love. That's what wine is a symbol of, drinking deeply of God's love we receive divine joy. We could say that in the beginning they were naked without shame precisely because they were drinking deeply of this divine joy, they were drinking deeply of this divine love.
In the book, I use the Greek words, eros and agape. Eros means human sexual love, agape means divine sacrificial love. In the beginning, they were naked without shame because eros, erotic love, expressed agape, divine love. Eros was filled with the wine of agape and they rejoiced in this freely, naked without shame, there was no shame in this union, in this love and this joy. But with original sin, we could put it this way, the man and woman ran out of wine.

Corey Allan: Okay.

Christopher West: Eros, erotic love, got cut off from agape. When eros runs out of wine, it gets inverted. Adam is now looking at Eve not as a woman made in the image and lightness of God who's worthy of reverence and honor, he's looking at her body now as a thing for his own selfish pleasure. She covers herself not because her body is bad, that's heretical, the body's not bad, God looked at everything he made and said, "Behold, it's very good," but she covers her body as if to say, "Don't look at me that way. You're treating me as a thing. I'm meant for more, I'm made for more." We could quote Jesus here and say that Adam was looking but not seeing, he looked at her but did not see her.
Corey, I've asked hundreds of thousands of women, I've traveled the world for the last nearly 30 years presenting this vision to audiences around the world, and I've asked hundreds of thousands of women this question. "Ladies," I'll say, "What's the difference between when a guy looks at you and when a guy sees you?" Then I'll say, "Raise your hand if you prefer to be looked at." Guess how many hands have gone up over the years?

Corey Allan: My hope would be none.

Christopher West: None.

Corey Allan: Right.

Christopher West: None.

Corey Allan: Okay.

Christopher West: Women intuit this right away. They want to be seen, not just looked at. The reason they were naked without shame in the beginning is because eros expressed agape, and in erotic love expressing divine love they saw the true mystery of the person made in the image of God and they desired to honor that. That was the experience of erotic desire. But running out of wine, they went blind. They looked at each other now, but they did not see the glory of God revealed through their bodies.
This brings us back to the significance of the first miracle of Jesus. What does Jesus do to inaugurate redemption? What does he do? He goes to a wedding where a husband and a wife have run out of wine, and what does he do? He doesn't condemn them for running out of wine, he restores the wine in super abundance. What are we learning here? Jesus comes into the world and the first thing he does is he restores agape to eros. Where do we get this idea that Jesus is a party pooper?

Corey Allan: I don't know, but it's rampant in a lot of circles.

Christopher West: It's blasphemous.

Corey Allan: Yes.

Christopher West: Do you know how much wine Jesus brought to this party? Do the math. Six stone jars each containing an average of 25 gallons. Do the math on that. That's at least 150 gallons of wine, that's over 700 bottles. Jesus pops the cork and says, "Drink up, folks. I have come. I have come so that you might have life and have it to the full. I've come to restore agape to eros. I've come to lead you to the banquet of life and love that truly corresponds to the hunger."

Corey Allan: Right, yeah. The one thing that came out from just listening to this is I've had this thought and talk about at times on the example with asking the women, do you want to be looked at or be seen, the corollary I use with wives, and I think this works with husbands too, but the better example I think is when the wife is the one asked the question of, women have an innate ability to tell the difference between the times when their husband just wants to have sex or wants to have sex with her?

Christopher West: Yes, yes. Yeah, well, there you go.

Corey Allan: There's a huge difference of when-

Christopher West: Absolutely.

Corey Allan: ... I'm using you or I'm joining and going alongside you for the betterment of both of us.

Christopher West: Boom.

Corey Allan: There's a difference in this. That's how it starts to play out on both sides, of how am I aware of where have I lost, where I've gone blind, where I'm not seeing what is in front of me. Then I can start maybe realizing, what's this exposing in me, what do I need to restore, to redeem, to bring to light, to challenge, to grow, to bring a betterment for both of us, as well as myself.

Christopher West: Yes. That reminds me, Corey, of Jesus's words in the Sermon on the Mount, if you even look lustfully at a woman, you've already committed adultery in your hearts. Now, sometimes we can think, "Oh, it's okay to lust after my wife. She's my wife." Well, hold on. What do we mean by lust? What does Jesus mean by lust?

Corey Allan: This is where the argument goes haywire a lot of times, because this can be weaponized or you can go deeper, which I think a lot of people aren't willing to go deeper into this. Let's keep going.

Christopher West: Yes, yes. I want to propose that the call to love as Jesus loves, this is the fulfillment of the gospel, "Love one another as I have loved you," I think what we learned in a proper biblical reading is that that call to love as Jesus loves was chiseled by God right in our bodies when he made us male and female in the image and likeness of God. Paul will say, "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church." Christ's love is a sacrificial love. It is not a using of the Church for his own selfish pleasure. Marriage does not give you a free pass to treat your spouse as a piece of meat. Marriage is the invitation to love divinely.
When Jesus says, "If you even look lustfully at a woman, you've already committed adultery in your heart," he does not say at a woman who's not your wife, he says at a woman. Guess what? Your wife is a woman. If you look lustfully at any woman, including your wife, meaning if you treat her as a thing for your selfish pleasure, you're not loving her, you're using her. The invitation of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount is there's another way to see, there's another way to think, there's another way to experience sexual desire other than lust.
If we think lust is the only manifestation of sexual desire, then we think Jesus is condemning sexual desire itself, but he's not. Christ came into the world to restore creation to the purity of its origins. That's what that new wine of Cana is all about. Remember, what does Jesus say to the Pharisees when they question him about divorce? Jesus points them back to the beginning, "Haven't you read that in the beginning God made the male and female and called the two to become one flesh? Moses allowed you to divorce because of the hardness of your heart, but from the beginning it was not so."
The good news is Christ is here to restore that original order in our hearts if we will let him in. That's a big if. We've got to let him into those lustful desires, we've got to let him rearrange the furniture in our hearts. I don't think there's a better image of this than what C.S. Lewis gives us at the end of The Great Divorce. Are you familiar with that work, Corey?

Corey Allan: I'm not familiar with that one, I'm familiar with C.S. Lewis, so enlighten me.

Christopher West: Yeah, okay. At the end of The Great Divorce, there are these human ghosts, souls, people who've died, separation of body and soul. These human ghosts are on a bus ride to heaven. Before they can go through the pearly gates, they have to deal with their sinfulness. There's this huge angel of fire guarding the gates of heaven who approaches this human ghost. The ghost has what C.S. Lewis describes as a lizard of lust sitting on his shoulder, chattering away in his ear. The angel of fire says to the ghost, "Would you like me to make that lizard quiet?" and he says, "Yeah, sure, I would." He reaches out with his flaming hands to kill the lizard and the ghost is like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. I didn't know you were going to kill it. I thought you were just going to silence it." He says, "There's no other way. May I kill it?"
The ghost makes all these excuses about why he doesn't want the lizard to be killed. Finally, finally, after all this back and forth, the ghost realizes that the lizard has lied to him his whole life, all these false promises, he has this momentary pleasure and then he's plunged into blackness and despair. He realizes it would be better to live without the lizard. He finally gives permission to the angel of fire to slay the lizard of lust. The angel of fire reaches out with his flaming hands, grabs that lizard of lust, twists its back, breaks its neck, and flings it to the ground. As soon as the lizard of lust is slain, the ghost takes on radiant flesh.
C.S. Lewis says that this resurrected flesh was shining with all the glory of God and that love was flowing out of his flesh like liquid, but that's not even the best part. The lizard is also resurrected, but this time he's transformed into a great white stallion with a tail and a mane of gold. The angel says to this resurrected man, "Mount the stallion." The gates of heaven open up and it's the stallion, resurrected erotic desire, it's the stallion that enables the resurrected man to climb what C.S. Lewis describes as the impossible steeps of life everlasting. Then C.S. Lewis says, "What is a lizard compared with a stallion? Lust is a pale, weak, whimpering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire that will be raised up in us if we but allow our lust to be slain."
That's the redemption we're called to, my brother. That's it.

Corey Allan: Right, that's the redeeming of all things. That's the making things right again.

Christopher West: That's the new creation.

Corey Allan: Absolutely.

Christopher West: That's the new man, the new woman, the new experience. This is living from that place of our deepest desire. "What do you want?" Jesus asks, and then he invites us, "Come and become one who sees. I want to open your eyes to another way of seeing the world, to another way of seeing yourself, to another way of seeing your body, to another way of seeing the body of the opposite sex. Let me open your eyes so that you can see the glory of the Lord revealed through your body."

Corey Allan: Yeah. This makes me think of we get glimpses of this and maybe tastes of this along the way as we grow in wisdom and character, and we look back and go, "Man, I was just an idiot."

Christopher West: I was in the dark. I didn't know what I was doing.

Corey Allan: In my teens, in my twenties, and maybe even thirties to a degree, where finally was like, "Oh, yeah."

Christopher West: Thirties and forties and fifties.

Corey Allan: Absolutely. Well, Christopher, I would love for anybody that wants to find more of you, how do they do that? How can they learn more?

Christopher West: Yes. I am the president of a theological school called The Theology of the Body Institute. You can learn more by just going to theologyofthebody.com. You can check out my podcast that I do with my wife, it's called The Ask Christopher West Show, hosted by Wendy West. You can get that wherever you listen to podcasts. We have a very active YouTube channel at our Theology of the Body Institute. Just go to YouTube, type in Christopher West, you'll find me. Yeah, Google me, you'll find me.

Corey Allan: Perfect. Yeah, and all that information will be in the show notes.
Christopher, I'm so grateful for the conversation thus far. I've got an idea of what we can do in the extended content that I think can be a whole lot of fun.

Christopher West: Great.

Corey Allan: Because when you were introduced to Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body, I think that's what enlightened and in some regards took some blindness away from you to a degree to start you on the path.

Christopher West: Yeah, believe it or not, it was a crazy Catholic pope who introduced me to this whole vision of the scriptures.

Corey Allan: Well, let's talk about that here in just a minute in the extended content.

Christopher West: All right.

Corey Allan: It's funny listening to it again, that you even made the comment after going through it, like, "Man, he is passionate." You even said at the very beginning.

Pam Allan: Yes.

Corey Allan: This is like a sermon almost, he is getting after it.

Pam Allan: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. When you love something so much, how many of us have something we are super excited about and we could gear up and talk for hours about it. I love being around people that are in that mode. I may not be as passionate about a certain topic that someone's talking about, this one I love, this one I'm passionate about.

Corey Allan: But their passion can be contagious even if it's not something that you're passionate about, there's an energy to it.

Pam Allan: Yes. Yeah.

Corey Allan: I remember when we finished this conversation when we recorded it late last 2022, I hung up and wrapped up everything and I was walking with a pretty good bounce because I had this energy from just the conversation.

Pam Allan: Someone else like-minded love

Corey Allan: I loved his framework and his thought of the differences when he was out speaking to all the different communities he's talked to, of the hundreds of thousands of women, would you rather be looked at or seen.

Pam Allan: Yeah, we want to be seen.

Corey Allan: Some of those contexts of just there's a deeper thing going on. I think that that applies in all kinds of circumstances and in situations. So, so good.
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