Its beautiful, and so are you

I spent hours at the UK dental clinic today, waiting to be seen. This afforded me some time to dig into Sister Prudence Allen's "The Concept of Woman" Vol. II.

Sr. Prudence is an amazing scholar, a holy and wise woman. I realized reading books like Ortlund's will only make me feel hopeless and nutty, so I tucked into an afternoon of a positive view of female identity.

Allen argues for a gender complementarity (I promise, I cannot do her ideas justice). She takes seriously the exhortation of Pope John Paul II to bring the feminine genius into the spotlight of the Church. A gender complementarity views females and males as created equally in intellectual, emotional, and spiritual capacity.

There are some differences that men and women embody (i.e. God has made women to be mothers). But this does not limit these characteristics to the gender that embodies them: men behave as mothers when they birth new ideas, nurture through discipleship, and allow God to conceive a renewed spirit within them. While being male or female is pretty black and white, both genders can participate in the others' defining characteristics.

I think a lot of the pop culture kind of books I've read about Christian women believe that the difference between men and women lies within the soul in this way: if the human person is a combination of emotion, intellect, will, reason, spirit, and so on, then women are people who are lead more by their emotions than reason, men are creatures of will rather than emotion, etc. Yet this does not fit with the picture of a holy person who is balanced in all things. I agree with Plato that a soul that has one attribute bigger than another is not beautiful.

So... if a woman was sanctified, hence balanced in her soul, she would lose her femininity! And this cannot be. So you cannot say that a woman is a creature led by emotion more than reason unless you want to say we can shed our gender or that women cannot be fully holy people. In other words, gender by this definition means an engendered soul is an ugly one.

Just my thoughts on the reading I did today. (Can anyone guess why I titled this post the way I did? Brownie points for the person who gets it).