ORIGINAL MAN

    In the beginning, Adam and Eve experienced their communion as a real participation in God's own mystery of love. The very sentiment of sexual desire as God created it to be was to love as God loves in the sincere gift of self. Since this call to love is the summary of the Gospel, John Paul can say that if we live according to the nuptial meaning of our bodies, we "fulfill the very meaning of [our] being and existence" (Jan 16, 1980). It is for this reason that a man clings to his wife and they become "one flesh" (see Gn 2:24).

In his exegesis of the creation accounts, the Holy Father speaks of this original unity of the sexes as flowing out of the human being's experience of original solitude. Man realized in naming the animals that he alone was aware of himself and free to determine his own actions; he alone was a person called to love. It's on the basis of this solitude - an experience common to male and female - that man experiences erotic desire and his longing for union.

While among the animals there was no "helper fit for him," upon awaking from his "deep sleep" the man immediately declares: "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" (Gn 2:23). That is to say, "Finally, a person I can love." How did he know that she too was a person called to love? Her naked body revealed the mystery!

Prior to the rupture of body and soul caused by sin, the body enabled them to see and know each other "with all the peace of the interior gaze, which creates... the fullness of the intimacy of persons" (Jan 2, 1980). Living in complete accord with the nuptial meaning of their bodies, the experience of original nakedness was untainted by shame (Gn 2:25).