Commentary: Of Jesus, Mary and a gender peace for postmodernity
United Press International - December 08, 2000 16:08
Jump to first matched term
BY SARAH HINLICKY
(Editor's note: This is the second installment of the UPI series, "Christ and postmodernity, where authors propose theological solutions for this era's most daunting problem: the profusion of subjective "truths." One of postmodernity's properties is the war between the sexes. This week Sarah Hinlicky, 24, a second-year student at Princeton Theological Seminary, points to Christ as the Peacemaker.)
PRINCETON, N.J., DEC. 8 (UPI) -- Men are inherently offensive to women. It starts before kindergarten when we first notice their passion for belching and public nose-picking. The offense swells as we grow up together.
They drop out of our games of peace, from the domestic peace of dolls and dress-up to the creative peace of threads, beads, and paints; peaceful projects that construct a lovelier world.
But they, we note with not a little disdain, turn to trucks and guns and "action figures" (decidedly not dolls). They slam each other into the mud during their impromptu games of football, bearing their scabs from failed skateboarding stunts like their own personal purple hearts.
They are noisy, violent, grabby, gross. The offense hardly lessens when, with adulthood, they turn to work, ideas, and projects, and all too many times prefer them to us.
Some of us claim that women have had little opportunity to exercise the vice of pride in our lives. We have, it is said, been too downtrodden to think so well of ourselves.
But the claim righteously made against our suppression conceals a dirty secret: that our creeping sense of spiritual superiority has exacerbated the war between us and them.
Funny how we have exploited the achievements of the past hundred years in negotiating a peace treaty, to trespass the bounds of justice into the tastier realm of vengeance. How we love to punish men for being men.
We are crafty -- craftier than they have given us credit for in recent memory. We have wrested away their unthinking masculinity to redefine it by our own vicious formula: Men (real men, unreformed men, natural men) are cruel, men are promiscuous, men are authoritarian. How earnestly we desire to remake men in our own image.
As women we always suspect that we really deserve something better. Men who do not want to possess and protect, but rather to listen and sympathize; men who do not (alas the frustrating contradiction) command with one breath and lay down their lives with the next.
Men in their crassness and silly toughness ought never to insinuate, however unconsciously, however innocently, that we in ourselves are not the complete picture of humanity.
It implicates our abstinence of the soul. We teach them well that their purity can never match ours and, understandably, they cease to try. So our dignity looks down, down an infinite distance to our males below, in all their canine enthusiasms and leonine ferocities.
We pretend to ourselves through our friendships and dates and affairs and marriages and divorces that we really are engaging the male, but for all our engagement we quietly refuse to grant men their humanity. We the peacemakers have learned the subtle art of making war.
Into this life of calm and gentle judgment strides the God who became Man. And not just Man, in the grandly generic, and therefore safe, sense, but man, a man, not a woman. This God-man cannot save women, some of us have said. The God that does not look like me cannot uplift me.
The God that does not suffer like me cannot redeem me. And do we therefore ignore His helpless cries from the manger? Do the baby's tears go uncomforted because the baby is a boy?
Is this God too lowly for us, too ridiculous for having invaded the world by way of a womb? It is a possibility. We can reject motherhood because the God-man has tainted it.
There is plenty else we must reject to be consistently free of the God-man's interference. We must do away with the hospitality practiced by Martha, away with the contemplative discipleship of her sister Mary.
We must not learn to worship in spirit and truth like the woman at the well. We must not love so much, and thereby abase ourselves, so much as to cleanse and kiss and perfume the feet of another.
We must never prophesy, never pray, never labor like Phoebe the deacon nor evangelize like Priscilla. Silence, fortitude, autonomy, perfect self-belonging must be ours if we are to escape the reaching, shaping hands of the man who is God, who presumes to desire us in service with those men whose potential for godliness we are compelled respectfully to doubt.
Can it be that the God-man in fact redeems unredeemable men? He claims to make men who love us as much as He loves the church. He supposes He can teach men to nourish and care as tenderly for us as for their own bodies.
He will lead them (so He says) to sacrifice everything for us. He insists upon redefining masculinity against our own redefinition -- and then reserving its practice for men alone. Dare we contemplate something so unjust?
Here we find ourselves faced with the unthinkable. The God-man trumpets into our pure, boxed-in lives that there is something liberating about allowing men to be with us and not beneath us. He proclaims that there is joy in discovering a man to whom obedience is freedom.
He declares that there is something essentially blessed about men being men. Is our femininity strong enough to face it, or have we been hiding something faulty in ourselves? Can it be (scandalous thought) that we are as helpless without them as they are without us?
Can it be that the God-man both exposes and heals our failure to love men as men and, finally, creates the peace that we have craved from the start? Can it be that our femininity itself is in need of redemption?
The Mother of God sings in the Magnificat, perhaps the most beautiful and radical ode in Scripture: "My soul magnifies the Lord for He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts and exalted those of low degree." (Luke 1:45-53).
The God-man comes to a woman and through her to the world. By her He wants to extend His reign of peace. But where is the imagination of her heart? And will she cling to her seat on the throne?
datek.newsalert.com |
