The Face of God

Of course, the fact that Mary is not only a creature, not only a human person, but a woman is important, terribly important, and important especially for me, a man. Sexual differentiation is, I think, a principal way in which human beings experience otherness, and so transcendence, for both good and ill. It is a principal way in which we come to know ourselves, and a principal way in which we seek to fulfill ourselves, not only through such things as marriage and family, but also through our own characteristically masculine and feminine perfections.

There are, in fact, few things about the human person as intrinsically and all-encompassingly relational as sex, as being male or being female. For this reason, of course, there are few things about the human person that are viewed, quite correctly, as more of a threat to the proud and self-sufficient.

I know little about feminine pathologies, but certainly all the principal pathologies of masculinity consist of attempts to remove or erase the essentially relational nature of sex and masculinity. For the perverse, masculinity is nothing more or other than perfect self-sufficiency and the complete lack of dependencies and relations; and for such men, women can never be anything other than props, tools, and toys for their own utterly self-interested self-sufficiency—when, that is, they are not correctly perceived as threats, whose very existence is a disproof of all this blasphemous nonsense.

Of course, this basic dynamic takes many forms, most far less overt and pure. For many men, even many Christian men, it takes the basic form of depending on the support of women for the maintenance of pride and the illusion of self-sufficiency while denying any honor or authority to them whatsoever. Men depend upon women, and are ashamed of it, and so they must pretend that these women are nothing to them, or at least always keep such women below, subject, honoring and not honored.

Again, the Protestantism I grew up with is in this way quite instructive. I think, really and truly, that practically all of the pathologies of such a religion, especially in its treatment of women but in many areas as well, could be corrected if its leaders were forced, each and every day, to get down on their knees and publicaly venerate a woman as superior to them, above them, and beg for her help.

It is good, then, that God was born of a woman; and it is good, too, that he was born a man. It is very good, it is our salvation, that God was made into a zygote, a fetus, within the womb of a woman, it is good that he was made an infant in the arms of a woman, and under her power. God is not ashamed of this—far from it.

Even more, God did not wish, and he does not wish, to pass over, to overlook, to set aside all this weakness, all this dependency, all this vulnerability: he wishes it to be glorified throughout all eternity, he wishes us to worship him in and through it. He wishes, he demands, that we worship him not merely at a distance in the heavens, or seated on a throne judging the world, but small and weak in the womb of his mother, and in her arms.

God will give us no strength except through his own weakness. Christ Jesus, God made flesh, honored Mary as his mother; and he not only asks, he demands, he requires, that we do the same.

At every point and in every way, then, God has refused to submit to our pride, but has humbled us through the greatness of his own humility. We thought to ourselves, foolishly, that God would free us from our neighbor, would free us from ourselves, our relations and desires and dependencies: and nothing could be farther from the truth.