When I sat down to write my spiritual ponderings for May, little did I know how hard it would be for me to find four songs that I wanted to write about. Maybe next year, it will be a little easier. Before we get to our final song let us get one more quote about music. This one is from an author named Sarah Dessen: “Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common.”


“If I Were A Boy” by Beyonce or Reba McEntire
Sometimes when I am cleaning my room, I will turn the television on to a channel that plays music videos so that I can listen to music as I clean my room. A few months ago, I was cleaning my room when I heard this song by Reba McEntire.
I later found out that Beyonce was the first person to sing this song. I still have not heard her version of the song.

This song made me think of Christopher West’s conversion story. Christopher West is one of the primary teachers in our Church on the John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and John Paul II’s teaching on sexuality is the best explanation of the Church’s teaching on sexuality. The following is what Christopher West has to say about his conversion experience:

As a freshman in college, I found myself deeply and painfully confused about my own identity as a man. I couldn’t deny the fact that I’d brought much of this pain and confusion upon myself through my sexual attitudes and behaviors. The rampant promiscuity of college dorm life only served to magnify the meaninglessness of it all.
The stories of “sexual conquests” that we all shared (and no doubt exaggerated) as freshman guys made me think more and more about the ugliness of which men are capable. For every “conquest” there was a woman on the other end used and discarded. But no one seemed to care.
It all came to a head for me the night I witnessed a date rape in one of the dorms. (This was a Catholic College, by the way.) The experience haunted me: How could a man treat a woman as nothing but a “thing” for his sexual kicks? But the more I asked myself this question in reference to what I witnessed, the more I knew I had to direct that same question toward myself.
I’ve never raped anybody, I thought. But am I much different from that guy in the way I’ve treated women in my own thoughts and attitudes? Don’t I also use my girlfriend for my sexual kicks? When I was finally honest with myself, I had to conclude that I wasn’t much better than the rapist.
In this time of deep soul searching, I became angry with God. “You gave men these hormones!” I insisted. “They seem to be getting me any everybody else I know in a heck of a lot of trouble. What am I suppose to do with them. I want to know the truth! What’s this sex thing all about? What does it mean to be a man?”
What I ultimately found were the writings of Pope John Paul II. Here is a man who has rethought and re-presented the teachings of the Catholic Church on sex and marriage with profound insight and great originality. His work sets the stage for a new “sexual revolution” that promises to deliver what its precursor couldn’t: the true satisfaction of the desire that drives us all—to love and be loved.
He was able to explain the whys behind the whats of Catholic teaching in a way that showed the profound beauty of God’s reason for creating us male and female in the first place. He radically altered the way I saw myself as a man, the way I looked upon women, the way I understood the Church and God. In short he changed my view of, well, everything.
Inevitably, as I draw from my own experience and what I’ve learned from John Paul II to explain the Church’s teaching, people respond: “I went to Catholic schools my whole life and never heard this. Why not?” Others respond in tears: “If I had only known this earlier in my life, perhaps I would have been spared the pain of so many mistakes.”

My heart goes out in a special way to women who desire to be in a relationship so much, who buy into society’s idea of how women should act sexually, or who just do not know better and give themselves to a man in an effort to keep the boy that they are dating and in the end it does not end up being enough to keep him. He walks away anyway. Here they have given the boy a piece of themselves and it was not enough to keep him. I pray that these women realize that two things. There is nothing wrong with them. They are still God’s precious daughters (there is a need for reconciliation but they are still God’s precious daughters) and secondly that the issue is more with the boy than with them. My heart goes out to the boys in those situations and I pray that they may come to see a woman’s true beauty because they are tainting their lives and ideas with the poison of sin. I ultimately pray for the world that our world may realize that human sexuality is a great gift from God and needs to be used appropriately. Ultimately the Church’s teaching comes down to this treat each person as a person or in other words respect each person for who they are and not for what you can get from them. If we all looked upon each other as Christ does then we would put an end to everything that hurts the human soul.