Living, Visible Icons Are We

...there is a givenness to our bodies; they are inscribed with sacred meaning that is not determined or constructed by our whim. Bodies speak the language of symbol, with or without our permission. 

Living, Life-Giving Icons Are We

What, then, is this symbolic meaning? What divine truth do we proclaim through our sexed bodies? Sacred Scripture and tradition give us a central metaphor to understand the relationship between God and humankind: this is the metaphor of conjugal union. This is an intensely bodily metaphor, evoking the image of man and woman becoming one flesh. Such union is made possible by complementary sexual difference. To speak in crudely biological terms: in sexual union, the couple joins their incomplete reproductive systems to become a complete reproductive unit. Both man and woman bring to this coupling the intrinsic potential to create a new person; they have within themselves the seeds of life. But the modes of their potentialities are not identical. The man has the capacity to transmit life outside of himself, while the woman has the potential to gestate new life within. 

If we take these biological realities as a mirror for God and humankind, the male sex is analogous to God because God endows life from himself but stands apart from it; he transcends. The female sex is representative of humankind because its power lies in receptivity; the human being is created to receive the love of God, be inwardly transformed, and let that love bear fruit. 

Receptivity to God, embodied in the form of woman, is humanity’s ultimate purpose. This is the telos of our existence: to say yes to divine grace, to be subsumed by divine love, and to welcome the inner metamorphosis it brings. Woman, then, is the representative human being before God; she carries the image of this receptivity to which all are beckoned, male and female alike. 

We are unused to thinking about sex in symbolic terms, so it is easy to misunderstand the argument. I am not here suggesting that all women must be mothers in the literal sense or that women are more spiritual than men or that men are more proximate to God. These objections forget that we are dealing with a metaphor of the relation, not of God or humanity in isolation. Each sex is telling the same story of divine-human communion through the language of the body, albeit from two distinct angles. To put it another way, paraphrasing the words of Pope Francis, the beauty of God’s creative design inscribes the image of God not on man and woman in isolation from one another, but in their alliance.

Men do not have some shared capacity, skill, or accomplishment that women do not, and vice versa—no, their bodies simply point toward different spiritual realities. In the same way that water naturally symbolizes that which cleanses and quenches, the male form evokes the image of husband and father, as the female form does mother and bride. This symbolic taxonomy imbues each body with divine significance, especially those our culture deems most worthless, like the ailing, the aging, the dying: “It is the lonely woman upon her sickbed who can but carry the growing Christ within her own soul.” 

The sacramental, analogical imagination of Catholicism shifts the value of sexed identity from an extrinsic act to intrinsic dignity: from doing to being. This opens the possibilities of sex-lived-out, freeing us from constricting stereotypes and compelled performance. Bodily sex is not made purposeful through mandated tasks, restrictive temporal roles, or fashionable aesthetics. The supreme meaning of the sexed body is to be a living, visible icon, one who gestures continually toward the world beyond the veil.




Favale, Abigail Rine . The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (pp. 208-210). Ignatius Press. 2022

Every Atom Pregnant With Mystery

...matter is never just matter. Dirt is never just dirt, butterflies are never just butterflies, and flesh is never just flesh. All were created by God. As such, all communicate something about God. Everything in the universe—every star, every tree, every body—proclaims some truth about its Maker. They are all... a metaphor. They are all a revelation. Every atom in the universe is pregnant with mystery, pregnant with grace, capable of helping man discover the truth about himself and God.

 
God, however, didn’t set His creation in place as an everlasting witness to Himself and then withdraw from that creation. Rather, He is intimately present in it, always and everywhere. The sacramental worldview helps us see that, showing us that heaven and earth aren’t separated from each other by an unbridgeable gulf or an unbreachable wall. Man may have turned his back on God but God never turned His back on man. Even in the days before Christ’s coming, He was at work in the world, finding ways to speak to man from behind the veil. Then, when He became man, when He took on flesh, loving, suffering and dying for us, heaven came to earth.

And it still comes to earth, every day in every place where the holy sacrifice of the Mass is offered. Every time Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary is made present in time, so is heaven, with all its hosts. The veil between time and eternity is drawn back, and the angels and saints worship with us as we kneel before the Eucharistic Christ...

That’s the sacramental worldview. It’s a worldview where heaven comes to earth, grace penetrates matter, and every individual’s story is part of the cosmic story of salvation history. It’s a worldview where everything has a meaning, everyone has a purpose, and every moment is accounted for in a Divine Plan. It is, ultimately, a worldview that says Sartre was wrong and Flannery O’Connor was right. Hell isn’t other people. Other people are Christs.



Stimpson, Emily. These Beautiful Bones: An Everyday Theology of the Body (p. 24-25). Emmaus Road Publishing, 2013

Valorizing Masculinity: An Internal Contradiction of Modern American Feminism

What led me to feminism in the first place was an intense need to have my dignity as a woman affirmed. I had an intuition that being a woman was meaningful, that it carried some kind of significance—one that had been overlooked, even distorted, in the fundamentalist evangelicalism of my childhood. I seized onto feminism as an affirmation of that intuition, and for a time, it gave me the language I needed to begin to express and understand what I felt to be true.

Why should women valorize
or imitate masculinity?

Quickly, though, as I foraged more deeply into the categories and concepts of contemporary feminism, I also fell prey to its internal contradictions. The central of these is that modern American feminism, at its core, valorizes the masculine, affirming the key virtues of autonomy, success, and power.

In college, when my evangelical feminism was at its height, the question I dreaded most was this: doesn’t feminism have an undue emphasis on power, and isn’t that antithetical to the gospel? I had an answer to this of course, which I kept ready in the holster, just in case—but the reason I dreaded the question was because I didn’t think my answer was a good one. Even then, I saw a tension between the Christian virtues of self-giving love, humility, obedience, and the virtues of feminism, which were preoccupied with power imbalances, with making sure everyone gets an equal slice of the pie. But instead of listening to that tension, my response was to find a way to bury it. This signals to me how, even then, my feminist commitments had subtly supplanted my Christian ones.

Favale, Abigail Rine. Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion (pp. 116-117). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.