I was wondering how to pass the time during a 14-hour drive to the south of France recently. As it turned out, a phone call to my father’s GP surgery covered a good chunk of it. The passage of French towns became punctuated with updated positions in the telephone queue. By Troyes I was caller number 32, and by Dijon I had made it into the top ten.
My 90-year-old dad is mystified by this new world he finds himself in. “We’re lost” he said, and he wasn’t talking about my driving. He struggles to recognise the world he now inhabits. A world of increasing automation and de-personalised interaction.
This sense of loss is largely due to a kind of feminism run amuck. A feminism which claims radical egalitarianism and so disdains the role of woman as mother that it would have her kill her child before it is born and press for laws to protect her right (and the right of others) to that killing. It’s an assertive, putatively powerful and apparently emancipating stance, women are told, but it is actually one which has robbed our culture of the concealed strength of woman – and its effects have been devastating.
Unfettered liberty, untethered from our creator who gave us the freedom to choose life, has resulted in a culture of sterility and death. Women have become objects to be used and discarded like the bras they threw off in the 1960s.
In her 1954 book The Eternal Woman, German novelist and essayist Gertrude von Le Fort warns that “a world in which the influence of the religious force of woman is absent, is a world at risk”. The sin of Eve was her refusal to surrender to that religious force. The tempter said, “you will be like unto God” – and with Eve’s ambition, sin enters the world.
The fiat of Mary (the new Eve) turns that on its head in an astonishing way and reveals to us the power of surrender. It is this surrender which opens the way for our redemption from the chains of sin and death. That surrender is what the world is crying out for now and it requires women to recognise and harness their unique power as women, and not simply to imitate men.
Woman sheds her role when she makes herself into a man or into an object of use for a man. With her role discarded, she too is easy to discard. She becomes a sterile shell to be medicated, penetrated and abandoned in a contraceptive culture of casual sex. Only in such a culture could gay men rent a woman and dispose of a mother, ripping apart what God has glued together.
As US philosopher Peter Kreeft astutely noted: “When God uses glue, don’t use scissors.”
But we do, repeatedly, in the modern world.
God glued together union and procreation; man cuts them apart with contraception and surrogacy. God glued together sex and marriage; man cuts them apart in fornication and masturbation. God glued body and soul; man cuts them apart in mutilation and killings of all kinds, including euthanasia. God glued babies and mothers; man cuts them apart in abortion. God glued husband and wife; man cuts them apart in divorce. God glued male and female; man cuts them apart in homosexuality.
Only the big picture lets us see the connections. But we have lost sight of the big picture: that we are creatures made in the image and likeness of our creator; that freedom was given to us, not to progress blindly whatever the cost, but “as an exceptional sign of the divine image in man” (Gaudium et spes 17, Catechism 1731).
Absent God, we fail to recognise that not only a visible (masculine) pillar but an invisible (feminine) pillar support the world. The power of the religious is the invisible power without which the visible pillars of the world have no integrity. Feminism has robbed us of this integrity. What follows is a world dominated by machines that embody the worst stereotypes of a godless masculinity.
The end point of a vision set apart from God eradicates woman because its horizontal worldview cannot acknowledge the invisible pillar which gives integrity to all that is visible. Feminism has succeeded in securing a great masculine victory.
“Man exercises his historically effective talents publicly and, in that performance, spends his strength, woman is also the carrier of historically effective talents and while her endowment is equal to that of man, she expends it not for herself but for the next generation,” says Gertrude von Le Fort. “She is the carrier of the religious, the concealed strength of the culture, which is the surrendering power of the cosmos in the face of the eternal God. In this surrendering power lies the font of reverence for God and the appropriate humility of creature as creature.”
When man and woman come together in marriage, we hear the words: “What god has joined together let no man put asunder”. This same message of harmony between the masculine and the feminine echoes through all creation.
But instead of daring to look at that awesome panorama, our myopically focused world is full of policies, programmes and initiatives designed to heal the wounds created by our constant and continuous acts of self-harm.
In no longer acknowledging our dependency on God, we claim strength in our own salvific power and using the broken pieces that we have pulled apart we construct a world according to our own image. But our own image, if not a reflection of the divine, is beastly.
So is it any wonder then that a world created in our own image is likewise beastly.
Never before has a true understanding of Mary the Theotokos been so important. Only Mary can show us the true meaning of woman as bride and mother and reveal to us the lost power of the feminine.
Unless we restore the charism of woman as woman, to be an instrument of God in the world, to be the surrendering power of creature before the creator, then we will bleed out from wounds inflicted by the enlightenment myth of perpetual progress through human power alone.
There is no way apart from God. Eve tried it and it didn’t work. It’s time to do the Mary thing and teach it to our girls.
Photo: Christian Orthodox nuns holding candles and flowers walk along the narrow streets of Jerusalem’s Old City in a religious procession marking The Dormition of the ‘Theotokos’ (God-bearer), 25 August 2021. The early morning procession is an annual event that commemorates the Virgin Mary, during which Orthodox believers carry an icon of Mary from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to Mary’s Tomb Church, located on the foothills of the Mount of Olives, near Gethsemane garden, which is regarded as the burial place of Mary. (Photo by MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images.)
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