Five Questions With… Christopher West

1. Made for More… how did this get started and how did you get involved?
Cor Project co-founders Mike Mangione, Jason Clark and myself conceived of this event a year ago and launched it last fall.  We named the event Made for More because we know we are made for more than what the culture is holding out to us. But we’ve often confused Christianity with the ‘starvation diet’ approach to human sexuality, that your desires are bad and you need to repress all of that and follow all these rules. That is not Christianity. If the only two choices for our hunger are the starvation approach or an indulging fast-food approach, I’m going to go for the chicken nuggets because I’m hungry! But if you eat fast food as your diet, you’ll soon get sick. And if you starve yourself, you’ll also get sick. Made for More is a proclamation of Christianity’s invitation to the wedding feast. We are made for an infinite banquet of live-giving love, but so few people tragically have even heard this invitation.
 
2. Made for More will be offered Thursday, March 22 at St. Mary’s Cathedral. What can people expect and how do you want them to be affected when they leave?
This event uses my presentation, movie clips, the live music of Mike Mangione — which is so powerful and beautiful—and art, to demonstrate how beautiful is the calling to this wedding feast. We are made for more than what this culture holds out to us.
 
The subtitle for this event is Visions of the Promised Land. We want to paint a vision for people. We want people to see how the sacraments lead us and orient our hearts toward this wedding feast. We want to show people that the Eucharist is this wedding feast, and we really can open all the hungers and yearnings of our hearts to this feast that is given us in the Eucharist.
 
So the event itself is an invitation through beauty, art, music and live presentation to come to this feast.
 
3. What got you interested and involved in Theology of the Body?
In college in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I became very disillusioned with what the culture had to offer in terms of satisfaction and fulfillment for this deep yearning in our hearts for love. I ate from that ‘fast food gospel,’ and it eventually led me to fall on my knees and ask: ‘Why have you given me these desires, because they’re getting me and everyone I know in a heck of a lot of trouble!’ That burning for the truth set me on course to discover the Theology of the Body in 1993. When I found it, I felt like I was holding in my hands the answer to the crisis of our day. John Paul II was prescient. He had a sense of where the culture was going. What has happened in the last 25 years in regards to our understanding of marriage, gender and sexuality… it has just become more and more confusing. John Paul II saw this culture coming in advance and gave us this antidote. I really felt in 1993 that this was the answer to the crisis of our times, and I knew then I’d spend the rest of my life studying it and sharing it with the world. The Lord has allowed those doors to open and I’ve traveled the globe over 20 years sharing this vision. I’ve got the greatest job in the world: I get to lead hungry people to a banquet.
 
4. We live today in a culture of narcissm and darkness. What do we need to do to overcome this blight and make sure that our light is overtaking the darkness of this place and time?
Human love and sexuality can be a constructive force if it is aimed at the stars; it will help us discover who we are and why we were created. But what happens if you set a rocket off with inverted engines? It becomes very destructive. This is why so many of us go out into the world seeking love, happiness and fulfillment and it backfires on us. What I learned from John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is that Christ came into the world, not to condemn those with inverted rocket engines, but to redirect those rocket engines to the stars. This is life-changing. This is good news. And we are in need of this good news now more than ever.
 
We live in a time of deconstructing philosophies that tell us we need only think in order to be. That leads to a body-soul split, and what have we historically called that split of the body and soul? Death. There is a disconnect today between body and soul where the body is meaningless—it’s seen as a prison or a ‘meat-coated skeleton,’ as I’ve heard it called. This is also a heresy called “manicheism”, where one thinks “spirit good, body bad.” When your body has no meaning, then you are no longer some-body—you are identifying as no-body. Then, for example, you can jump to the “idea” of gender as just a societal construct.
 
But our bodies are not just biological, they are theological. We live in a culture that says our bodies are meaningless, whereas we have a Faith that says our bodies reveal ultimate meaning. Our bodies are meant to tell the meaning of divine love, and that’s the ultimate meaning of everything because God is love. It’s not an imposition on the human heart. What the church is saying in her teaching is, be Faithful to your own heart, be Faithful to the love you are made for, be Faithful to the deepest desires of your heart. Don’t settle for the cheap imitation. We’re all invited to a banquet of infinite life and love. Everything the Church teaches is meant to point us to that banquet.
 
5. Tell us about the Cor Project…where would you like to see this growing in the next five to 10 years?
We’ve got great plans for this global outreach, including the creation of online courses, huge video series projects and greater collaboration with the Theology of the Body Institute. We want to help form the TOB leaders of tomorrow who can go into parishes, schools, families and the streets to share this astoundingly glorious news. Made for More is going to be our anchor event. This is an event that you will not want to miss. It will inspire you and bring your Faith alive in brilliant new ways.
I encourage your readers to stay in touch and receive free formation through our mailing list at corproject.com. In signing up, they also get my Theology of the Body at the Movies free ebook, which looks at recent and classic movies through the lens of the Theology of the Body. I also have a new short film at the website called The Cry of the Heart. In the film I share much more of my own life journey. I encourage everyone to watch it.