Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking a fair bit about sexual difference and sundry related topics. With a theme so all-encompassing in its import, I usually find it worthwhile to lay down some groundwork. Over the course of our reflections, it is my hope each of us will be challenged to come to a fuller answer to the perpetual question “Who am I?”
In the mind of the Church, the question “Who is man?” receives an answer pointing to a greater question: “Who is God?” The Church has held from the beginning that man is made imago Dei (in the image and likeness of God), that our very being is unintelligible without reference to the Creator.
Man’s origin indicates his purpose. We find fulfillment in living as the image of God–giving of ourselves in relationship to God and fellow man as an echo or imitation of God’s gratuitous gift of being-out-of-nothing.
For many of you, this isn’t any sort of news; however, I propose that we have a problem when we begin to think that we have these fundamental truths well in hand. If we lose a sense of wonder about the very fact that we are (see boldface above), we lose a necessary part of being human. Simply put, when we forget that all that we are and have are gift, we have forgotten the Giver–we then lose sight of a grander purpose for life than petty self-assertion, we begin to view ourselves as entitled to all the goods (material and otherwise) we could possibly acquire, and we set ourselves as the rule for right living.
Only a transcendent value safeguards human dignity. The above is only a rough sketch, but here in essence is the foundation for asserting that we cannot attempt to reinvent or redefine humanity to some image better to our liking without doing some grave violence to the human family.
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1 Gender Questions: A Diagnosis in Light of Recent Controversy // Nov 21, 2007 at 7:09 pm
[...] I’ve found that conversations about gender (even in circles composed of presumably like-minded individuals) so often go astray, diverted almost immediately into questions of permission and prohibitions. This is why I tried to lay a sort of foundation for the issues at play in an earlier post. We leap so readily from “masculinity/femininity means generally such-and-such” to “Does this mean I can or can’t do this or that? Are you saying I’m not a real man/woman if I do/don’t do this or that?”I believe the volatility of such exchanges stems from our collective anxiety about identity. I find that youth and young adults in the Church wrestle (consciously and unconsciously) with the suppositions about gender they’ve inherited from the post-Sexual Revolution zeitgeist, struggling to find a way to understand masculinity and femininity in light of the Faith. Those who have consciously embraced the moral instructions of the Church (leaving aside for now those who claim a Catholic identity and yet fail to challenge the assumptions of secularism) find they must often reject most popular mores regarding romantic relationships and inter-gender propriety. [...]
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