Our Bodies Tell God's Story Quotes

“But the devil is a creature, not a creator. And this means the devil does not have his own clay. All he can do is take God’s clay (which is always very good) and twist it, distort it. That’s what evil is: the twisting or distortion of good. Redemption, therefore, involves the untwisting of what sin and evil have twisted so we can recover the true good.”
― Christopher West, Our Bodies Tell God's Story: Discovering the Divine Plan for Love, Sex, and Gender

“Traditionally, theologians have said we image God as individuals through our rational soul. That’s certainly true. However, the function of man and woman being made in the image of God is that of mirroring the one who is the model (God), and God is not an eternal “solitude.”
― Christopher West, Our Bodies Tell God's Story: Discovering the Divine Plan for Love, Sex, and Gender

“remember when my oldest son was five years old and asked me for a cookie. Before I could even get the cookie out of the box to present it to him as a gift, what did he do? He grasped at it. So, taking advantage of this teaching moment, I said to him, “Hold on, you’re denying the gift. Your Papa loves you. I want to give this cookie to you as a gift. If you believed in the gift, all you would need to do is hold your hands out in confidence and receive the cookie as a gift.” This is the problem with us all. We do not trust enough in our Father’s love, so we grasp at the “cookie.”
― Christopher West, Our Bodies Tell God's Story: Discovering the Divine Plan for Love, Sex, and Gender

“We are living in dark times indeed, but let us never forget that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). We are people of hope, and the Bridegroom is preparing a great springtime for his bride (see Song 2:11–13). How do we pass over from this winter to the promised springtime? If we can recognize in the above the diagnosis of what ails the modern world, we can also recognize the cure. Here it is: We must recover a sense of primordial wonder at the divinely inspired beauty of the human body. We must come to recognize in the human body the revelation of the human person whose dignity demands that he or she never be used, exploited, manipulated, or discarded. We must rediscover the treasure of human sexuality and gender as a stupendous sign of the divine image in our humanity and as an invitation to use our freedom to live this divine image through the sincere gift of one’s life in marriage or in celibacy for the kingdom. And we can do all of the above precisely by pondering the profound understanding of masculinity and femininity found in the Bible, found in God’s Word made flesh in Jesus, the Christ.”
― Christopher West, Our Bodies Tell God's Story: Discovering the Divine Plan for Love, Sex, and Gender

“When we fail to appreciate the profound unity of body and soul, we no longer see the human body in light of our creation in the image and likeness of God. Rather, we reduce it to a thing to be used, exploited, manipulated, and even discarded at will, forgetting that that body is not just a body but some-body. Within this milieu, as John Paul II observed, the human being “ceases to live as a person and a subject. Regardless of all intentions and declarations to the contrary, he becomes merely an object.”
― Christopher West, Our Bodies Tell God's Story: Discovering the Divine Plan for Love, Sex, and Gender