feminine-genius

Where are the icons?

Jen Fulwiler and I are both converts, and for some reason this particular week, we both referenced our grandmothers as reminders of how the lives of women have changed -- and not for the better. In her reflection on Humanae Vitae, she notes:

I pulled up another stack of glossy rags and pushed them around my bed so that I could see all the covers at once. Something I had always wondered, but had never articulated, came to the forefront of my mind:

When, exactly, did the standard of beauty become a dictate that we must all look like Barbie dolls?

When I saw pictures of my ancestors, the women always looked beautiful, but in a way that didn’t overwhelm the senses with their physical beauty alone. The faded photographs of my grandmothers and their grandmothers showed clothing styles that left some attention for their faces, that didn’t detract from the subtleties of their expressions. The draping of the material smoothed over details, so that a few extra pounds could be smoothed into graceful curves.

Now, a century and a half later, society says a woman can hardly consider herself truly beautiful without a tight abdomen, slender physique, wrinkle-free face and, even, to quote one of the magazines in front of me, “ultra-sexy upper arms.” Upper arms? Did our ear canals now have to be sexy, too?

This was not a standard of beauty built on respect for women. In fact, it seemed like an outlook spawned by a society that demanded that women make themselves objects for men’s pleasure.

And when I considered when the standard of beauty began to change, I realized that it was right around the time that everyone started using contraception. Pope Paul VI wouldn’t have been surprised.

Paul VI was precisely right in saying that the acceptance of artificial birth control would negatively impact marriages and undermine respect for women. I note that in my latest column as well:

What are those doctrines that are so challenging? The Church teaches — and has always taught — that one reserves sexual intimacy for marriage, and that once married one stays married. Our grandmothers would have been distressed to know that these ideas were controversial, so the question must be: “What has changed in the fifty years since our grandmothers’ generation?”

In a nutshell, the sexual revolution wreaked its havoc on the world, making intimacy sterile and vows hollow. The ability to separate sex from babies shifted the fundamental meaning of the sexual embrace from a commitment with consequences to a frivolous pastime. Après ça, le deluge.

From that initial question, two follow. The first is, “Are these changes for the good?” Any mere glance at the sociological data in the last thirty years would indicate a firm No. Divorce rates have skyrocketed, sexually-transmitted diseases have multiplied, abortions have proliferated, fatherless children are ubiquitous and the promiscuity trends among children are shocking. While there is a single-mindedness among those who separate the actions of any individual from the wider drift of culture, prudent people cannot ignore the connections in these affairs. Those who care about children must acknowledge that their lives do not benefit from the disintegration of the family that has accrued in the last fifty years.

The second question is, “Should the Church follow the trajectory of the world?” This is where most of the confusion lies, because the population that has become accustomed to current trends has no collective memory of another way of life. In the 1992 court case, “Planned Parenthood vs. Casey,” the decision given noted that people “for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” Although Catholics have cause to deplore the decision, which rejected various proposed restrictions on abortion, the ruling indeed distilled the fundamental mindset of our age: sterile, uncommitted intimacy is sacrosanct.

Thankfully, most of us can remember our grandmothers' generation -- but that reality is morphing quickly, with the emerging generation detached from their traditional forebears at astounding rates. That means that WE must hold fast, keep the truth close to our hearts, and BE the icons that the world so desperately needs. Words on a page are one thing, homilies and exortations another, but the truth enfleshed in the lives of faithful people are most helpful.

And of course, enfolding all of us is God's grace -- pray for one another and trust that God will bring the truth to light!

Emerging with joy

I don't know much about this wrongful conviction, other than what was in the story, but of course the forgiveness angle was obvious. A mother of three was jailed for the murder of a homeless man, on the testimony of a [now deceased] woman with a penchant for lying. The actual murderers were eventual found, and now, 17 years after the conviction, Susan Mellen has been reunited with her family.

"I'm a free woman now. Let me do the running man," she said, and did a few jogging dance steps before the microphones. She joked and beamed but also described her imprisonment as "cruel punishment."

"I would cry every night" in prison, Mellen said, but never lost faith and even wrote "freedom" on the bottom of her tennis shoes "because I knew I was going to walk free one day."

Mellen said she held no ill will against those who put her behind bars. "No, no, I always forgave my enemies," she said. "Even your haters, you have to forgive them and sometimes you have to thank them because they bring you closer to God."

Mellen said she planned to go to dinner with her family and wanted to eat an avocado, steak, or maybe something she had never had. She also hoped to have a McDonald's Happy Meal with her youngest daughter. "Me and her were at McDonald's when I got arrested and we didn't have a happy meal that day," she said. "... It's a happy ending right now...We're going to have a new beginning."

I would contend that her spirit of forgiveness allowed her to dance and joke, during what would have otherwise been an opportunity for rage and resentment. Anger is not out of place, and there may be dark moments when it seems overwhelming, but if she keeps making her acts of forgiveness -- for the undoubted injustice and lost opportunities -- whe will maintain that joy for the rest of her life.

God bless her and her family!

Great! "Illumination and Support"

This is the most helpful address I've seen so far at the Synod:

Arturo and Hermelinda As Zamberline, married for 41 years with three children, addressed the Synod during the morning session Oct. 9. The designated subject for the session was the "pastoral challenges concerning an openness to life."

"We must admit without fear that many Catholic couples, even those who seek to live their marriage seriously, do not feel obligated to use only the natural methods" of birth control condoned by the Church, said the Zamberlines, leaders in their country of an international Catholic movement, Teams of Our Lady. "We must add that generally they are not questioned by their confessors" on the subject.

The Zamberlines, who are participating in the Synod as non-voting auditors, said the "rhythm of life" today makes it difficult to find time to learn natural methods of family planning, which they said have acquired an "unjust reputation of being unreliable," because they are badly explained and thus badly practised.

"The great majority of couples do not reject the use of contraceptive methods. In general, they do not consider them a moral problem," the Zamberlines said.

The Brazilian couple concluded with an appeal to the Pope and the Synod to help Catholics understand and obey Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical by Pope Paul VI that affirmed Church teaching against contraception.

"If couples, as well as clergy, could at least find illumination and support, that would already be a great encouragement! Often, contradictory advice only aggravates their confusion. We ask, may the magisterium hasten to give priests and faithful the major lines of a pastoral teaching program to help people adopt and observe the principles laid out in Humanae Vitae," the Zamberlines said.

In remarks introducing the couple to the assembly, Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois of Paris, one of three Synod presidents appointed by the Pope, said Catholic couples "often do not believe that the use of contraceptive methods is a sin and therefore they tend not to speak of them in confession and so they receive Communion untroubled."

"It is necessary to encourage a mentality of openness to life to thwart the contraceptive mentality and the spread of an individualist anthropological model that in certain countries has led to a strong demographic drop whose social and human consequences are not sufficiently considered today," the cardinal said.

This address outlines clear and concise challenges:

• natural methods of spacing children are not being taught;
• couples don't know that contracepting is a serious sin;
• a mentality has accrued that separates married love from its natural fruitfulness.

Fine -- that's one of the primary reasons for this Synod -- to see how mammon has confused the faithful, who are called to be lights amidst the darkness. Too  much of that confusion has seeped into the Church, and it must be resisted with the light of Christ. As I note in my latest column (not yet online):

Scripture makes clear that the Church cannot bow to secular conventions, as Saint Paul cautioned: “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2) or as Chesterton pithily remarked, “those who marry the spirit of this age will find themselves widows in the next.” So what do we do for a generation that insists that Church teaching is too demanding, uncharitable, and unlivable? We reject capitulation and insist on that transformation which makes all things possible.

Just as a parent doesn’t coddle a child who finds algebra “impossibly hard,” the Church should lovingly but firmly explain the foundational principles that make authentic chastity entirely possible. Just as reviewing the groundwork for equations—the nature of constants and variables—prepares a student for success in math, reminding the faithful about divinely revealed truth and God’s passionate love for humanity will allow them to “renew their minds” according to his purpose. And in that equation, while there is nothing so variable as the whims of man to live in a world of his own making, there is nothing so constant as divine grace which restores him to reality, drawing him back to the love that will set him free.

My prayer is that the Synod proposes concrete ways to "illuminate and support" married couples so that they can live the fullness of their vocation, and provide inspiration to those who want something more than what the world offers. Illuminate the darkness, support the good, and remind people of their inherent dignity!

Wednesday Woes: A mother at the foot of a cross

That 's what comes to mind in the case of an Iranian prisoner, whose mother describes her anguish over her daughter's impending execution.

A distraught Shole Pakravan, whose daughter, Rayhaneh Jabbari, 26, has spent seven years in prison awaiting execution, spoke to FoxNews.com via Skype and begged for her daughter's life. "The only thing I want ... from God, from people around the world ... in any way, in any form, is I just want to bring Rayhaneh back home," Pakravan said in Farsi, which was translated by FoxNews.com. "I wish they would come tie a rope around my neck and kill me instead, but to allow Rayhaneh to come back home."

More here. Petition here. Prayers, please, for this case and all the others. May all the innocent "doves" be freed.

How can women help?

Called to discuss the particular needs of the family at this time, a special session of the Synod of Bishops is about to begin, and George Weigel has some good words:

The Synod discussion, in other words, should take the crisis of marriage and the family as a given and then lift up Christian marriages, lived faithfully and fruitfully, as the answer to that crisis. The Synod should begin with what is good and true and beautiful about Christian marriage and Christian family life, and show, by living examples, how that truth, goodness and beauty respond to the deepest longings of the human heart for solidarity, fidelity and fruitful love.

It’s quite obvious that the Church faces real pastoral challenges in dealing with broken marriages and their results. But to begin the discussion of marriage and the family in the 21st century there is to begin at the wrong end of things. For it is only within the truth-about-marriage, which was given to the Church by the Lord himself, that compassionate and truthful solutions to those pastoral problems can be found.

That said, besides living our marriages well -- despite the trials and difficulties, supporting those who are married, and reminding others of how grace transforms couples and makes it all possible, how can women specifically help? By understanding authentic femininity and where the woman's particular gifts lie. John Paul II didn't stop with the family, but wrote on that topic in Mulieris Dignitatem ("On the Dignity and Vocation of Women").

Interestingly, a quote at the end of the novel, Middlemarch (by George Eliot), highlights the beauty of a woman's life well lived, as it relates to the quiet heroine in that book:

And Dorothea..she had no dreams of being praised above other women. Feeling that there was always something better which she might have done if she had only been better and known better, her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and on all those Dorotheas who live faithfully their hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs.

As ever, the importance of our vocation rests, not on doing, but being (although that "being" does spill out into the gift of self!) In that stellar novel, Dorothea was a steadfast example of being good. That said, in order to "be good," we need to know who we are before God, and what specifically he entrusted to the care of women. In the words of John Paul II:

The moral and spiritual strength of a woman is joined to her awareness that God entrusts the human being to her in a special way. Of course, God entrusts every human being to each and every other human being. But this entrusting concerns women in a special way - precisely by reason of their femininity - and this in a particular way determines their vocation (MD. 30)

When we live our little piece well, we have helped those around us to see the truth, removing possible obstacles that hinder people from turning to the Source of authentic love.

Do consider reading MD, and sharing it with a group of women at your parish!