Luceat!

I’m glad we’ve had rather spirited discussion of late — kudos, all. I’ll offer here some scattered musings which I hope shed at least a bit more light on the topics at hand.

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 also 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.

For significant portions of the young Church, as I’ve seen during my time in FOCUS and elsewhere, a sort of siege mentality has set in. There is a very healthy way in which to view the ‘us/them’ dichotomy between members of the Body of Christ and those yet to be incorporated that is a recognition of the stark difference between being a Christian and not being one. However, when the ‘us/them’ is marked by fear and anxiety — “Lock the doors! Their ideas might get in!” — we’ve lost a necessary amount of confidence.

It is this latter approach to questions of gender roles and relationships I want to see zealous, young Catholics avoid. Too often this devolves into a ham-fisted moralization of the Faith, the imputation of roles and modes of behavior from without (”I have to court just like that guy who ‘kissed dating goodbye’, or I’m sinning!” or “X activity is masculine, Y is feminine, and never the twain shall meet!”) as opposed to the roles and relationships being the natural manifestation of living in accord with the gift of our being.

Katie does a good job of articulating the premises undergirding the ongoing discussion of Matt’s post and of giving us more to consider in reflections on bodiliness. What we have yet to do is propose a practical application. So, here’s a programme (attributed to Augustine) for bearing fruit as you ought:

Love God and do what you will.

This may seem sweeping and dismissive, but that is not my intent. It is my firm belief that each man or woman who sincerely follows Christ, who strives for purity and charity, who seeks after what is good and true and beautiful and desires to make these known to others will hear his or her vocation. In this sense, the question answers itself through an authentic lived experience.

This is necessarily a communal sort of thing — our vocation is not just a me-and-Jesus proposition; we are part of a body and have a special part to play in the health of the whole. As such, we will find a place where we fit in relation to others, where we are called to give of ourselves and simultaneously meet our deep need and the world’s. As has been said previously, males will bring something masculine, and females something feminine. If we take Paul’s exhortations in Ephesians 5 seriously, we find not an outmoded imposition of stifling roles, but a call to love — and I find it impossible to believe that any sane couple who honestly seeks to live out what the Saint proposes would end up subjugating or resenting one another.

So, can women be doctors, lawyers, corporate and military and political leaders? It certainly appears so. Are they being authentically feminine? Perhaps it is more to the point to ask: Is one’s active role or job the sole determinant for authentic living of one’s identity? Of course not! It seems to me the ‘how’ is as important as the ‘what’. These questions are as much the matter of the formation of conscience as anything. So long as one does not sin–ah! there’s the rub!–one is being more or less authentic to oneself.

While it would be quite fruitless to try to create an exhaustive list of the roles and positions men and women could hold without losing their respective identities, we must be careful not to fall into the trap of buying wholesale what some sectors of secular culture propose: that maleness and femaleness are mere accidents of biology which we can overcome, ignore, or transform with various forms of self-definition and social engineering. We must be aware — as in every epoch the Church must — that the Spirit of the Age is seldom the Spirit of Truth.