“Woman is the model and archetype of the whole human race. She reveals t all of us what it means to be human. Because to be human means to be open–to receive the Divine Gift, bear it forth, nurture it, and share it with the world. That’s the theology of a woman’s body” (Pope Saint John Paul II).
Do you know who you are? No, I’m not asking your name, what you do for a living, or if you play a sport. I’m asking, Do you actually KNOW WHO YOU ARE?
Today we are told our identities are fluid, changeable. We are told our sex is not only “assigned” at birth, but also that our sex (the physical bodily expression of maleness or femaleness) is only a servant to our more “important” gender–how we self-express and see ourselves in society. In other words, we are told our gender (how we self-express) is to comply with how we feel, rather than aligning how we feel (which can change depending on our state of mind or mood) with the reality of the body, which is our “sex.”
At the root of all of this confusion is our disrupted relationship with God and with the Holy Spirit who lovingly calls us into right order with Him. As our culture increasingly rejects Him, we become more confused and willing to accept the dystopia and dysphoria that result from this separation. As Gaudium et Spes declared, “When God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible” (36). Commenting on this idea, Jason Evert explains in Ascension’s course on Theology of the Body, “When we lose sight of supernatural realities, we will lose sight of natural realities” (Segment 2, Session 1). Indeed, we have lost sight of the reality of who we are, not only physically (we reject our very bodies), but also spiritually–who we are in God.
Here are some additional excerpts to ponder from Jason’s presentation:
“Our bodies reveal not only our identity as male and female, but also our calling.” Who we are is determined by our bodies, and it is this identity that calls us into relationship with one another in a unique and ordered way. When we don’t know who we are as male and female, our relationships with ourselves and each other become disordered.
“Men and women make the invisible love of God visible on earth by the way we love.” Although God is invisible, He is made visible, made manifest, through our very bodies and the way we love one another. We are called to reflect the perfect love of the Trinity. God’s relationship with the Son is expressed through the Holy Spirit, who is the unending and ever-moving love between them.
Today we are encouraged to identify with our concupiscence; we are encouraged to declare, “God made me this way, so I’m fine as I am.” But this is not who we really are. “If I come to think that my brokenness is who I am and who God wants me to be, then I’m normalizing my brokenness. And we will assume the Church is out of touch with reality if it expects us to live differently.” But JP II has a different vision. He declares that “our brokenness is not who God created us to be…These vices do not [constitute] our identities. We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures.”
What is your identity? How are you defining it? Do you know who you are?
“In JP II’s teaching, which is not just his teaching, but the whole teaching of the Christian tradition, there’s this analogy in the Bible that God is the bridegroom and humanity is the bride. And the idea is that St. John says this is love, not that we first loved God, but that he first loved us. This puts the creature, whether you’re male or female, in a posture of receptivity before God. This is why John Paul II says woman is the model and the archetype of the whole human race because to be human means to open, to receive divine love, conceive divine love, and bear it forth. That’s the theology of a woman’s body” (Christopher West with Mike Mangione, YouTube, ‘TOB Completely Changed My Artistic Process,’ Nov. 13, 2022).
At a time in our culture when everything true, everything real, has been upended, let us return to Saint Pope John Paul II and his Theology of the Body. Cultural wokeism is so extreme that even the designations of male and female have lost distinction. We are told they are the same, interchangeable, indistinguishable, fluid, and assigned. Ironically and perhaps saddest of all, is that much of this ignominious drivel is coming from the remnants of ardent feminism and the contemporary women’s movement itself. Today young women are unapologetically inculcated with a hatred of their inherent femininity, while simultaneously heralding a combination of androgyny and masculine tendencies. While fluidly vacillating between the male and female, they are taught to decry all forms of true masculinity as dangerous and toxic. This confusion, this uncertainty, can lead only to this: depression, anxiety, fear, and anger. Sound familiar?
The depravity of rejecting male and female results not only in an utterly chaotic society, but it also undermines the very uniqueness of womanhood. When did “sameness” become the aim of our culture? I suppose it is the logical result of other disastrous goals like equity and inclusion. We are not encouraged to celebrate differences; we are told to squash them so that no one feels left out of the group. Of course, this is a schizophrenic position at a time when we are also indoctrinated to acknowledge and celebrate racial differences lest we be labeled racists and bigots. Again, Marxist wokeism is not meant to make sense; its very aim is to divide and scatter. And for people of faith, this, of course, is demonic at its core.
What if more young women were informed about John Paul’s teachings? What if instead of sameness and transgenderism and the lies about gender assignments they learned that they were created in and by God as women: “the archetype of the whole human race”? What if, as West describes, they represent the very essence not only of what it means to be feminine but of humanity itself?
Women! Your greatness doesn’t reside in your ability to be like men, to be androgenous or trans or fluid. Your strength doesn’t rest in your freedom to function sexually like men, to “freely” abort life if you feel like it, or to live autonomously or uncommitted without husbands or children. Your greatness is born out of your very bodily identity as woman. Only in you is life conceived. Only in you does it spark and then grow. Only through you does humanity flourish. You are the unique, essential participant in God’s plan. One woman lost the world, but another who came after her said “yes” to God and participated in its salvation.
Girls, women, know who you are. This greatness is your identity. This is why God made you. You have a purpose. It is through your bodies and hearts, full of faith and charity, that society might actually be saved once more.
To Live Gladly 