Posted on 01/23/2003 10:51:43 PM PST by Askel5
I think you'll enjoy this also.
Great post, Askel5. Thanks so much for the ping.
I was amused to read the above hoary motto on my drive into work this morning. It was 15 degrees below zero with the wind chill factored in; and yet here were these caitiff peaceniks out there shivering with their stupid, "moldy-oldie" signs at a busy intersection in toney Lincoln, Mass. Their presence seems to grow larger daily. It absolutely enrages my husband to see these "protesters"; me, I kind of feel sorry for them, these hapless people with "braces on their brains." The braces, of course, are the strictures of crackpot cultural Marxism, of which Hitlery Rodham Clinton is High Priestess and Pythia. Gramsci's dreams are coming true, thanks to people like her and her hideous husband, and their legions of brain-dead, lock-step epigones... a vision straight out of The Night of the Living Dead.
God help us all!
Siobhan, thanks for the heads up!
The differences between the genders, not sexes, had to be minimized.
Here I am either missing something, or else the author himself has fallen into a Gramscian trap. To employ "gender" as anything other than a grammatical category is to admit the idea that man is somehow self-constructed. If the author wants to point to a willful and destructive blurring of the cultural boundary between male and female behavior, there are ways to say so without conceding the adversary's rhetorical abuses.
Just as forgiveness and compassion are more commonly perceived as feminine, there's a parallel and not inferior morality in courage, endurance, and self-discipline. It's useless to speak of either sex's moral superiority. As neither sex exists independent of the other, to speak of one without reference to the other's contribution to its formation and completion is to overlook John Paul II's penetrating insight in Mulieris Dignitatem ("Womanly Dignity"), that man and woman are completed and realised in each other.
...he refers, I believe, to the fact women are -- generally speaking -- more forgiving, more tolerant, more compassionate, more Christ-like than men.
Let's not forget that there's no one more Christ-like than Christ -- indisputably male, and self-giving ("emptying himself" is how Paul puts it -- a bloody image, but also a spousal one), whose maleness is definitively revealed in a stripped crucifixion that's not about wrath-appeasement but self-revelation.
... that it's when men fall in love with Christ the Bridegroom -- Real Men ... men like St. John of the Cross, for example -- they come close to what is more natural to a woman.
Additionally, having never actually been a woman, I don't think you have any notion of the day-in, day-out selflessness and struggle for worth when posited perpetually somewhere between the Virgin and the whore and excluded from the sanctuary.
Just as menarche imposes maturity on women, all sorts of realities on this earth impose a cross on women that is a sort of shortcut to understanding.
This could possibly be due to the original natural superiority of men that was having to be wheedled by Eve to partake ALSO of the fruit of which she chose to eat. A guilty conscience usually goes a long way in instilling the regret and wisdom from which spring real empathy, sympathy, compassion and forgiveness.
Perhaps Woman has one of these as a matter of course.
I read the "not sexes" interjection as a pointed reminder that the Gender business is bogus. I think he was being sarcastic.
Also, I do not agree that male and female must needs find their fulfillment in each other even if mankind be made male and female. In fact, I don't believe that most men and women who look first to their partner in life for ultimate fulfillment end up fulfilled. God must come first and, for some, He's enough.
It pays to ping you ... I learn a new word or two every time you respond. =)
Trust all is well with you and yours, Miss B.
Have you ever delivered a child?
There are certain procedures involved beforehand designed specifically around the fact that indeed the woman empties herself ... in great pain, to boot.
Women have a mild -- for most -- rehearsal of this emptying of the self as regularly as the full moon from the moment they become fertile to the moment they wither on the vine.
I do not agree that male and female must needs find their fulfillment in each other
Me neither. I said "man and woman", not "men and women".
Please do not suppose that I'm promoting -- in the manner of Plato's Symposium -- the weird theory of Aristophanes (who wrote The Frogs, btw), of man and woman as the Zeus-severed components of a primeval Whole Human, perpetually striving to re-unite, to recover their original integrity. Man -- the sex, I mean -- does not exist without woman, nor woman without man. It seems a commonplace, scarcely worthy of comment, to say that humanity can't not exist without a coming-together of the sexes. But this is not at all the same as insisting that every single person is humanly incomplete if not paired off with a sexual complement.
Far better to say -- drawing from the same well of Eastern Christianity that I perceive in Mulieris Dignitatem -- that there's no such thing as a single "person", because personhood implies life-in-communion, knowing and being known:
"In the Book of Genesis we find another description of the creation of man - man and woman (cf. 2:18-25) - to which we shall refer shortly. At this point, however, we can say that the biblical account puts forth the truth about the personal character of the human being. Man is a person, man and woman equally so, since both were created in the image and likeness of the personal God. What makes man like God is the fact that - unlike the whole world of other living creatures, including those endowed with senses (animalia) - man is also a rational being (animal rationale)...By reflecting on the whole account found in Gen 2:18-25, and by interpreting it in light of the truth about the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen 1:26-27), we can understand even more fully what constitutes the personal character of the human being, thanks to which both man and woman are like God. For every individual is made in the image of God, insofar as he or she is a rational and free creature capable of knowing God and loving him. Moreover, we read that man cannot exist "alone" (cf. Gen 2:18); he can exist only as a "unity of the two", and therefore in relation to another human person. It is a question here of a mutual relationship: man to woman and woman to man. Being a person in the image and likeness of God thus also involves existing in a relationship, in relation to the other "I". This is a prelude to the definitive self-revelation of the Triune God: a living unity in the communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit."
The life-in-communion of which JPII speaks here is the very antithesis of alienated individualism, which amounts to metaphysical suicide.
... that it's when men fall in love with Christ the Bridegroom ...
JPII again: "From a linguistic viewpoint we can say that the analogy of spousal love found in the Letter to the Ephesians links what is "masculine" to what is "feminine", since, as members of the Church, men too are included in the concept of 'Bride'."
Additionally, having never actually been a woman, I don't think you have any notion...
Dear lady, I'm sure you're right. Nor do I need to, if I pray in Christ for well-loved friends and complete strangers, asking to have my prayer made pure, self-giving and cleansed of needy human self-regard. I have never been anyone except who I am. Similarly for you. Charity and humility and forgiveness derive not from gifts peculiar to one sex, nor from life experience, but because -- speaking of the crosses of this world -- we're crucified in Christ. Though every human person, man and woman, suffers privately and ineffably (the best of them striving to resist self-pity), it's Christ who gives it all the meaning it needs.
a cross on women that is a sort of shortcut to understanding.
Only when it's an occasion for grace, and that's a gift. Notwithstanding the unique case of the Mother of God, it seems a bold thing to say, that men's spiritual perfection lies in attaining "what is more natural to" the daughters of Eve, bless their hearts.
Of course, Adam was every bit as guilty.
The objective is the same -- man or woman. Women would do well to take a page from male discipline and rationality, men would do well to practice a little natural subservience and absolute trust in the notion they will cared for by whom it is they obey.
As it is, the sexes seem to be exchanging only the bad qualities natural to each.
The ultimate example being the homosexuality whereby women end up just as abusive as men (or more, given their sacramental homocide in the womb) and men end up meddlesome, calculating, shrewish and insulting whiners. Both are at the vanguard of the distorting of human being.
I'm hangin' in there, Askel5! I hope all goes well with you.
WRT the "new vocab" issue here: I apologize!!! Sometimes I am just so besotted by the richness and beauty of my native tongue that I just get carried away! :^)
The "make love not war" anecdote I gave really obscured the larger point in this essay: That women have been designated by the Cultural Marxists as the main schock troops, the myrmidons of cultural change.
That observation, IMHO, is right on the money. Women on a wide scale have been encouraged to repudiate nature and biology, and have largely succumbed to this appeal, with little or no protest -- probably thinking they were being "liberated" from nature by so doing. (As if one can be "liberated" from one's own nature. To me, that's the very form the death wish takes.)
It's all an enormous embarrassment to me, speaking as a woman. But then, maybe it really is true that women are more "tractible" than men. I suppose Evil is always happy to make an "easy score."
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