How many years ago did it first occur to me that life is meant to be confusing, disjointed & messy. That pretty much reflects the mission each of us was sent here to work through - moving, as much as we can, away from the human form we were born into toward the spiritual self we truly are. Not easy, very uncomfortable, massively confusing. And essential.
It's worth noting that the question of whether or not women are suited to serve in the ministry was of interest to my mother waaaay more than it was to me. What an experience, sitting in on the to & fro, without any personal investment.
Mom belonged to both online discussion groups - Concept, which held that women were not suited for the priesthood, and Caritas, which held that the priesthood is incomplete without them. Maybe Mom leaned more to the later; her heart staunchly supported a male-only ministry, but her head couldn't forget a passage in the Writings ~ the masculine without the perception of the feminine is intellect without wisdom. There were some interesting discussions as she composed her thoughts for me to transcribe to e-mail.
One discussion that never came up, at least that I recall, was about how including women does make it more challenging for the Council of the Clergy to stick to agenda-focused discussions. And women think in foreign ways, compared to men. Even John & I joke that his life would be far easier if he didn't have to be married to a woman. We see things through radically different filters & think in almost opposite ways.
But it's not supposed to be easy. The Bible is pretty clear on what happened - mankind is created in the image of the Divine, male & female. To be the image of the God requires conjunction of the two.
The ministry of my birth religion would say that marriage provides the conjunction that makes the One of God. Doesn't make sense to me. The Writings teach that an angel consists of a man & a woman who truly love only the other, who look to the Divine in all things, who act with love & kindness. Married love leads to an angel, not God.
So, how does the masculine & the feminine conjoin to be the image of God? Maybe that transcends marriage, which is between two people, and embraces the universal, reflected in how we interact with EVERYTHING.
My mother never fully understood how much the established ministry of her church disagreed with her view of the importance of the feminine view in all aspects of the organization. To her, it was obvious - we are taught that everything in life reflects the conjugial relationship, which itself reflects our relationship with the Divine. The reason she wasn't completely won over by the argument that women belong in the ministry is because she also believed that a female priest would be distinctly different from the existing male model, and no one was ever able to describe how it might look sound act. No one took the time & bother to really think about & respond to her perfectly understandable question.
Life isn't meant to be easy. We are meant to come up with unsettling questions, look them right in the eye, do our best to come up with answers even what we keep seeming to get are more questions. Life is not pat. It is meant to be messy, disjointed & confusing. We're meant to work through those difficult, unsettling states toward clarity enlightenment understanding.
Women seem more at ease with messiness. That's my opinion. We're more at ease with facing it, chipping away at it, clearing & cleaning. We realize that neat & tidy is wonderful, but not the natural state of most people. We trust our intuition, even when it seems counter-intuitive. (Going to have to ponder that word ~ counter-intuitive. Isn't all intuition counter-intuitive?) Council of the Clergy meetings would never be the same - and that is, in my opinion, exactly as God intended. Not easy, but right.
No comments:
Post a Comment