A Monk's View: On Being a Woman

Dear Ana,

A book on the history of western children's literature arrived just after I sent you the last email. I opened to page 228 because there was a mention of the Harry Potter series. I scanned to the bottom, and this sentence caught my eye:

"...it's one of the controlling themes of female fiction, almost from its origin: that girls are always on the stage; that being female is a show; that there is always, as the girl grows up, a tension between staging one's behavior for the delectation of others or finding inner virtue..."

I have never thought of this so succinctly. But yes, girls are always a spectacle. The baby who is "daddy's little the girl;" the 6-year-old who looks "so cute in that little sun dress;" The teenager who stands for hours in front of the mirror; the young woman hoping to attract a husband; the career woman who becomes a symbol of her company's political correctness; the mother whose children look to her for every need; and on and on.

Do women ever get to just be human? Or is it true that women are the "glory of mankind" as St. Paul says, and therefore the target for every self-love or self-hate within the human community? So in this sense, while men are identified with the re-union of fallen humanity to God, women are identified with fallen humanity as such.

Jesus could have come into the world through normal intercourse between a man and a woman (there were many pious Jewish couples in Israel at the time). Or he could have been formed from the rib of Joseph or Simeon or Zacharias - which would have clearly connected Him with unfallen humanity. But he chose to be born from a woman, without any "help" from a men. I think the implications of God's choice in the manner of Jesus' birth are worth a deeper meditation. -implications about being a woman, about pain, about the way for women to live, about the creative nature of God.