This post may end abruptly, so do not be alarmed. The grinding sound you hear is just me tearing myself away from the fabric of extra-cosmic being and returning to sub-atmaspheric flight.
Let's continue our exploration of the Mammals & the Pappals. Yes, the latter is a stupid sounding word, but it's too late to change it now. Besides, it's good enough to get the job done. Do not suppose the Principle can be tarnished by my verbal indiscretions.
To repeat: there are thousands of mammal species but only one pappal: that would be us, AKA Homo sapiens.
This is not to say there is no spiritual component to motherhood -- obviously -- only that the latter arises (chronologically, not ontologically) from the "bottom up," so to speak, and is a vertical prolongation of an antecedent biological reality, AKA nurturing and all this entails and implies on the human plane. Without this lengthy extrauterine nurturing the species would literally die, so thanks for the mammaries.
In contrast to motherhood, fatherhood begins as a spiritual reality and is prolonged "downward" into biology. It must be received from above and accomplished herebelow. In turn, this is a distant reflection of the Incarnation itself, through which the Son assumes the form of human nature.
The main point is that a man, in order to be one, must achieve something; or know something, be something (someone), conquer something, etc.
And please put down the rolling pin: nothing about what we're saying, or about to say, is a denigration or devaluation of the Feminine. If it is necessary to defend ourselves from the feminist rolling pin, we will do so with two words: Margaret. Thatcher.
Wait -- put down the knife!
Ultimately a human being, qua humanness, is always both: maleandfemale he created them. But darn it, it isn't good that maleandfemale should be allone, so He splits them up. A central purpose of marriage is to consecrate their reunion. Unless you have a better idea.
Note that the Logos begins as pure spirit, which drills down, so to speak, into biology. People who wonder why the Father can't be a mother, or Jesus her daughter, or priests women, just don't have a clue. It's like wondering why the Mother of God couldn't have been a man. Such fantasies are violations of the whole divine-human economy -- like "Admiral" " Rachel" Levine.
Also, in relation to God, the soul itself is feminine, since God is the agent and we the receptacle. Such schemes are full of nuances and qualifications, being that ours must be an "active passivity," but let's not veer into another topic. The point is, this dynamic obviously mirrors what goes in inside the Godhead in that our own little Yes to God is an echo of the big Yes that the Son says to the Father -- or Mary to the Holy Spirit, Abram to the Lord, Moses to I AM, etc.
I suppose if man were a reptile, then the Savior would have to be a good egg. But we are not reptiles, or at least we don't have to be. Even Adam Schiff wasn't born that way. He looks and behaves like he was hatched, but the choice of devolving and living under a rock was his to make.
Which brings to mind an important point about our fallenness: not only can it not be understood outside the context of our deiformity, but in my opinion, it is a commentary on it. Although the Fall is always present, it cannot be a complement of our deiformity, since it is a privation. Nor is it literally a necessity, since to say necessity is to say eternity, and the good news is that we aren't necessarily eternal under-achievers.
With these flourescent prelumenaries out of the way, let's go back to Rob Henderson's pneumagraphical essay. In it he notes that at the age of ten,
my adoptive parents got divorced. My adoptive father, angry at my mother for leaving him, decided to stop talking to me as a way to get back at her.
What kind of man would do this to a child? No kind of man. Except a bad and inadequate one.
But sometimes there is a hero. I won't say man, because the hee-ro could be Margaret Thatcher. But
if I am honest, the teachers who had the most positive effect on me were usually men. Perhaps, after being shunned by both my biological father and my adoptive father, some part of me was seeking a male role model -- though, at the time, I never would have understood or admitted this.
Lucky for us,
during my senior year, a male history teacher, an Air Force veteran, encouraged me to enlist. He knew my grades were awful -- I graduated in the bottom third of my high school class, with a 2.2 GPA -- but saw something in me, potential that I hadn’t yet discovered or maybe didn’t even want to.
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