Olivia Newton--John Paul II on the theology of "Let's Get Physical"

It has been about a year since my wife put the idea out there to consider getting the "Total Gym" workout machine. After a chance infomercial with Chuck Norris a few months ago, the craigslist search began, and lo and behold, not only did we get a deal, but I found myself actually using it! During one of the first sessions of trying it out, I thought I'd turn on the "Music Source" channel on the television. Rather than "sweatin to the oldies", I thought I'd reminisce with some of the songs of my era--the 80s. (Generally speaking....bad idea). Second song in, and Olivia Newton John's "Let's Get Physical" comes across the soundwaves. Great song for a workout right? After all, wasn't it about exercising in the gym? Not. In 1981, I was just approaching the age of double digits when this song topped the charts, so it is fair to say that it's message went "over my head." Unfortunately, however, music videos were now on their way, and vague memories of this video in my teen years flashed before my eyes. (This is one of those times to thank God for such "vagueness" or "loss" of memory).

I also had just listened to a talk by Fulton Sheen who spoke about what he called the "Apostolate of Beauty." He gave advice to a beautiful young woman (he said matter of factly that celibacy doesn't make priests blind) to use God's gift of beauty in service to others. She did, and took his suggestion to work at a place where few people get to see beauty, a leper colony in Vietnam.

Now take the person of Olivia Newton John and her use of beauty. It was obviously more than the beat that made "Let's Get Physical" the number one song for 10 weeks in a row and the most successul song on the Hot 100 during the entire decade of the 1980s. Her song, like so many after her, have become an unchained melody of lust generators of which it's hard to see an end in our own day. But just as all error is the absence of truth, (as darkness is the absence of light), there is some light at the end of this tunnel to help us "renew our minds" (as the great passage in Romans 12:2 states). For just as "Let's Get Physical" was breaking the hit charts in the early 80s, chanting "let me hear your body talk, your body talk," light was being shed upon true body talk, from a man in Rome. Through a series of lectures about what "being physical" really means, and how ideed, "the body talks" -- that it has a language too, Pope John Paul II was giving to the world the first major teachings of his pontificate. In what has now become known as the "theology of the body", the world has been given a teaching for our times, what George Weigel has described as a "kind of theological time bomb set to go off with dramatic consequences, sometime in the third millennium of the Church." Well, I hope it "explodes" sooner. Why? Because the Lord himself said that one of the conditions to "see God" is to be pure in heart (Matthew 5:8). And with the level of impurity around us, both inside and out, is it a surprise that we are in a period of great agnosticism and even outright atheism? Is it that hard to make a link between those who boldly say they "don't believe" (and all that such an expression entails) with those who are in the midst of impure "body talk"? I don't think it's a stretch. Judge lightly here, but take an inventory of the lives of those who claim to disbelieve or ignore the teachings of the Church (or look back at the times in our own lives when we've "doubted") and see if this might not be at the root. Impurity puts cataracts in our spiritual vision. (As a test, see how clear minded you seem to be after a sincere Confession). It causes us to "lie down" (an ironic play on words) and settle for less-than-human intimacy, or, as Newton John puts it later in her song, to get "animal". Well, God has laid out the surgical tools through the teaching of Pope John Paul II. We but have to undergo the surgery necessary to "renew our mind" through prayer and study. (One such teaser, "Have you ever once thought of the marital act as imaging the self-donating love of the Trinity?" Yet that is what it is.) Such reflections may be the beginning of a "total gym workout" we didn't expect, but it promises both a temporal and eternal fitness that is sure to "get results." Here are some links to sites from trainers much more "fit" than I to help get started.
www.ourfatherswillcommunications.com
http://www.theologyofthebody.net/
http://www.theologyofthebody.com/
http://www.christopherwest.com/