Pope St. John Paul II is remembered for his many contributions on the distinction and relationship between men and women, particularly in the “Theology of the Body” that he laid out in a series of weekly Wednesday audiences from 1979 to 1984. In various ways he expanded on these themes, from his 1998 apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem “on the dignity and vocation of women”; to his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis on the male-only nature of the ordained priesthood; to his 1995 Letter to Women, with its description of “feminine genius.” But one of the most remarkable things he had to say on the relationship between men and women remains largely unknown to Catholics: a short work, composed in Polish, titled “A Meditation on Givenness” (Medytacja na temat ‘bezinteresownego daru). (Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from John Paul II are from this document.)
The meditation is remarkable in no small part because of how personal it is. John Paul II is musing on the contexts in which one person can say to another, “God has given you to me.” And he explains the event that sparked this inquiry: that “as a young priest, I once heard my spiritual director say to me: ‘Perhaps God wills to give that person to you.’”
So, what does it mean to be “given” to another person? In particular, what does it look like if it’s a man and woman being “given” to another, and the man is a celibate priest?
The provocativeness of this meditation may explain why it remained unpublished for many years. Although signed six days after he released his 1994 Letter to Families (which can be thought of as a companion to this meditation), the “Meditation on Givenness” wasn’t released until August 2006, after John Paul II’s death.
Givenness and entrustment
Perhaps a good place to start is to ask, what does it mean to say that God has “given” someone to us? The pope suggests we need to think of givenness as a sort of divine entrustment that reveals to us something about the mystery of the Trinity:
The word “entrustment” is especially important here. “God wants to give another person to you” means that God wants to entrust that other person to you. And to entrust means that God believes in you, trusts that you are capable of receiving the gift, that you are capable of embracing it with your heart, that you have the capacity to respond to it with a gift of yourself.
This is something broader than romantic love, although there’s certainly a special form of givenness in marriage. But John Paul II suggests that there are “manifold relationships” in which we live “not only alongside one another,” but “live for each other; relating to one another, they are brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, friends, teachers, students,” etc.
The first of these is the relationship of a child to his parents. “God does indeed give people to us; he gives us brothers and sisters in our humanity, beginning with our parents.” John Paul II describes this entrustment from the perspective of the parents:
Fatherhood and motherhood are themselves a particular proof of love; they make it possible to discover love’s extension and original depth. But this does not take place automatically. Rather, it is a task entrusted to both husband and wife (Letter to Families, 7).
Understanding the starting point of the parent-child child relationship is critical for understanding the whole point of the meditation. A child’s mother and father are “given” to that child. Our first experience of “givenness” is that God has placed people in our lives—our mother and father, perhaps brothers and sisters—for us to love.
There’s an important male-female element at play even here. This is the critical point upon which the Church has lately fought secular culture: that it matters that a child (ideally) be brought up by her father and mother, and not by two mothers or by two fathers or by some other arrangement. In the Holy Father’s words, “Womanhood denotes motherhood, and motherhood is the first form of entrustment of one man to another.”
It’s clear that there can be a relationship of entrustment in which God places someone in your life, and for it to be a male-female relationship, and for your respective masculinity and femininity to come into play, and yet the relationship is still chaste. Such is the case for any normal childhood: your mother isn’t your father, and raising boys isn’t the same as raising girls. This is the first piece of the puzzle.
Masculine and feminine giftedness
To explore the role of masculinity and femininity in the gift, John Paul II returns to a favorite theme: the creation of man and woman in Genesis 1-3. He points out that “in creating woman, in bringing her to man, God opened man’s heart to an awareness of gift, givenness.” In Genesis 3:20, “the man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.” But before she’s a mother, she’s a woman. While Adam and Eve are in paradise, she’s not yet known as Eve: her name is simply Woman (just as Adam means simply “Man”).
And so Man encounters Woman for the first time and proclaims, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man” (Gen. 2:23). It is as if, John Paul II says, he had said, “She is from me and she is for me; through her I can become a gift because she herself is a gift for me.” There is at once a celebration of what makes Man and Woman one and what makes them distinct. Here, the obvious sense of givenness is romantic and sexual, which is why the next verse in Genesis tells us that “a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh” (2:24).
But the creation of man and woman reveals more than the nature of marriage. It tells us something about the nature of givenness and communion and even a hint about the trinitarian life of God. That’s because “in creating man as man and woman, God imprints on humanity the mystery of that communion which is the essence of his interior life. Man is drawn up into the mystery of God by the fact that his freedom is subjected to the law of love, and love creates interpersonal communion.”
After all, God “is not only the omnipotent Lord of all that exists but is also a God of communion,” and it’s through communion that the “special likeness between man and God is played out.” There’s a sense in which we have a kind of “communion” with nature (here, John Paul II reminds us of St. Francis of Assisi), but “the right and fitting place for communion” remains “first and foremost man—man and woman whom God has called from the beginning to be a sincere gift of self for one another.”
Complacent love and the beauty of creation
If we find that God has given us someone, what is the proper response? John Paul II suggests that while “love has many facets,” “the first of these is a disinterested predilection, partiality, or liking: amor complacentiae.” Translating complacent love literally might sound insulting to English speakers, but the idea is simple. It’s the love of appreciation, without an agenda. You’re not loving the person in the sense of drawing toward her, or loving him so that he’ll change, or loving who she will become. None of those facets of love are bad, but the “first” aspect of love is simply loving the person.
Fr. Frederick E. Crowe, S.J., points out that this is the love of the beatific vision, when “love no longer needs to pursue the good or to be a principle of its pursuit; its function is to rest in the good now possessed by understanding.” Even now, we can enjoy glimpses of this manner of love “in the imperfect beatitude that it is possible to enjoy on earth” (“Complacency and Concern in the Thought of St. Thomas”).
In other words, there are some people in your life whom you just naturally like. Your love for them is “disinterested,” in the sense that you have no agenda. But it’s not uninterested. You care for them, and you desire their good, but you’re not trying to get something out of them. And here again we see glimpses of divine love.
While the love of God embraces the whole created universe, John Paul II points out that man is “the object of his special liking.” By extension, it’s good that Jesus of Nazareth had some friends he seems to have enjoyed more than others (Matt. 11:19; John 11:1-3, 15:13-15) rather than treating everyone interchangeably.
God, he argues, “grafts this disinterested liking, this predilection” in the hearts of men and women, making them “capable of mutual love, of a liking for one another.” Returning to Adam and Eve, John Paul says that to the eyes of man, “the woman is a special synthesis of the beauty of all creation, and he too, similarly, in her eyes.” He warns of the “great error” of reading this in a chiefly “biological” way.
Rather, the creation of Eve awakens in Adam that “great aspiration for beauty which will become the subject of man’s creativity, art, and much else.” Later, he’ll connect this point to the saints: that the Church uses language of biblical love letters (such as Song of Songs 1:5) to praise the spiritual beauty of female saints who were virgins and martyrs, and it’s this beauty that endures long after sensual beauty fades.
Of course, we don’t live in Eden. But it’s for just this reason, says the pope, that givenness plays such a critical role:
The yearning of the human heart after this primordial beauty with which the Creator has endowed man is also a desire for the communion in which the sincere gift of self is manifested. This beauty and this communion are not goods that have been lost irretrievably—they are goods to be redeemed, retrieved; and in this sense every human person is given to every other—every woman is given to every man, and every man is given to every woman.
The key, he argues, is not to get distracted. Too often, we lose sight of true beauty and settle for “ersatz substitutes.” And key to this is love, since “one cannot create beauty if one does not look with the eyes through which God embraces the world he created in the beginning and beholds man whom he created within that world.”
If this is where the meditation ended, a vague appreciation of men for women and of women for men, it would be mildly interesting and uncontroversial, perhaps reminiscent of Socrates’s (or Diotima’s) “ladder of loves” in Plato’s Symposium. But then John Paul II takes the argument in a more striking direction.
John Paul II’s own celibate predilection
In the final section of the meditation, fittingly titled Totus Tuus (Latin, “totally yours,” John Paul II’s personal motto, used to expression his relationship with the Virgin Mary), John Paul II gets personal:
God has given me many people, both young and old, boys and girls, fathers and mothers, widows, the healthy and the sick. Always, when he gave them to me, he also tasked me with them, and now I see that I could easily write a separate book about each of them—and each biography would ultimately be on the disinterested gift man always is for the other. Among them were the uneducated, for instance factory workers; there were also students, university professors, doctors and lawyers, and finally priests and the consecrated religious. Of course, they included both men and women. A long road led me to discover the genius of woman, and Providence itself saw to it that the time eventually came when I really recognized it and was even, as it were, dazzled by it.
In reading this, it’s hard not to think of Pope John Paul II’s friendships with women. In 2009, Dr. Wanda Póltawska released a half-century of letters between John Paul II and her and immediately faced backlash (including from figures such as Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the pope’s personal secretary). This situation repeated itself in 2016, with the release of John Paul II’s letters to his friend Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka.
In each case, these were major secular news stories, seemingly because of the perceived scandal of a priest and a woman being friends, even if (as numerous outlets acknowledged) there was no evidence of anything untoward. In a world in which intimacy is often used as a euphemism for sexual relations, perhaps it’s unsurprising that people would look suspiciously on news that the pope had multiple intimate friendships, many of them with women. Poltawska responded to the furor by asking, “What is wrong in a priest’s friendship with a woman? Isn’t a priest a human being?”
The problem, according to John Paul II, wasn’t that he had too many close female friends but that other priests (owing to fear of disapprobation ) have too few. Priests who refuse to be friends with women are making the same error as the secular culture: of viewing male-female intimacy in exclusively romantic or sexual terms. And so the pope offers them, and all men, this striking advice:
I think that every man, whatever his station in life or his life’s vocation, must at some point hear those words which Joseph of Nazareth once heard: “Do not be afraid to take Mary to yourself” (Matt. 1:20). “Do not be afraid to take” means do everything to recognize the gift she is for you. Fear only one thing: that you try to appropriate that gift. That is what you should fear. As long as she remains a gift from God himself to you, you can safely rejoice in all that she is as that gift.
What is more, you ought even to do everything you can to recognize that gift, to show her how unique a treasure she is. . . . Perhaps God wills that it be you who is the one who tells her of her inestimable worth and special beauty. If that is the case, do not be afraid of your predilection. Loving predilection is, or at least can be, participation in that eternal predilection which God had in man whom he had created.
Isn’t that a danger for a priest’s promise of celibacy? The pope suggests that “if you have grounds to fear that your predilection might become a destructive force, don’t fear it in a prejudicial way.” Instead, he warns not to
be prejudiced about the meaning of God’s gift. Just pray in all humility that you may know how to be your sister’s keeper, so that within the orbit of your manhood she might find her way to her vocation and sanctity.
Maybe you view John Paul II’s meditation as a saint’s naïve belief that fallen men and women can be close friends in a gendered-but-not-sexual way. Or perhaps you sense in it a breath of fresh air, an antidote to a world that can’t imagine intimacy without sex. But whatever the case, the meditation is without a doubt the Holy Father’s boldest (and most revealing) argument on the way in which men and women ought to enjoy the gift of one another.