āIt made no sense. People would see the old womanāfrail and bent, her face lined with a thousand wrinkles. They would talk to her, look her in the eye, then walk away, invariably saying the same thing: āSheās the most beautiful woman Iāve ever seen.ā
Again, it made no sense. At least not by the standards of every major fashion magazine. The woman wasnāt long and lean. Her lips werenāt pouty and her eyelashes didnāt bat. She wasnāt hot. She wasnāt sexy. She wasnāt Gwyneth Paltrow.
But she was beautiful. And everyone who met Blessed Teresa of Calcutta believed her to be so.
Why?
Because, as John Paul II wrote in The Theology of the Body, āthe body expresses the person.ā
In other words, through Mother Teresaās body, people saw her soul, a soul alive with love and transformed by grace. In her eyes, they saw mercy. In her hands, they saw compassion. In her shoulders, stooped and bent, they saw humility.
And in her whole person, they saw God. Through herĀ mercy, compassion, and humility, they saw his mercy, compassion, and humility. Through her love, they saw his love. Through her strength, his strength.
They saw all that because, as I explain in These Beautiful Bones: An Everyday Theology of the Body, thatās what the body does. It makes visible the truths of our invisible soul, and it makes visible the truths about our invisible God. It communicates who we are to the world as it images the Creator of that world. What makes it beautiful is how well it does that, how perfectly it images the God who formed it.
Which is to say, what makes a body beautiful is how well it loves.
Thatās not pious claptrap. Itās the simple reason why people walked away from Mother Teresa fully convinced that theyād just met the most beautiful woman in the world.
Her love for God and man were written on her face. Her virtueāher compassion, her purity, her obedience, her respect for lifeāmanifested itself in her every look and action. And that didnāt just make her soul beautiful. It made her body beautiful. It caused people to see her as lovely. They liked to look upon her.
I love you. I worry about you. I wonder whether I tell you enough how I love you and want you and need you and how I am diminished ā¦ when you are not with me and how I am multiplied when you are here.
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