by Carrie Gress
So much so that the independent woman who finds herself pregnant will think, “This baby cannot be, for it isn’t who I am.” The young women without means or with pressure from others will think, “This baby cannot be, for it isn’t who I am allowed to be.” And the mother of the less than perfect baby (or the baby who isn’t the right sex) will think, “This baby cannot be, for he isn’t who I want him to be.” That’s the power of pink.
Like abortion, foot-binding was foisted upon women by other women. “The truth, no matter how unpalatable, is that foot-binding was experienced, perpetuated and administered by women.” It did, however, finally come to an end. “Though utterly rejected in China now, … it survived for a thousand years in part because of women’s emotional investment in the practice.”29
One day something similar will be said about abortion: it was finally defeated when women realized that they didn’t need to maintain the emotional (or financial) investment in the practice. Until then, the cultural chaos that has been sown because of the rejection of motherhood will continue to leave everyone confused about how to live and who to be. As every woman knows, fashion always has a price.
____________________
1“The Devil Wears Prada,” screenplay, http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/devil_wears_prada.pdf.
2Helen Alvaré, Putting Children’s Interests First in US Family Law and Policy: With Power Comes Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State (Charlotte: TAN Books, 2018).
3“Margaret” is a pseudonym. Private conversation with the author, November, 2018.
4Legutko, The Demon in Democracy, 94.
5Ibid.
6Ibid.
7O’Beirne, Women Who Make the World Worse, xix.
8Claire Lehmann, “Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Gender Map of the World,” Quillette, November 10, 2018, https://quillette.com/2018/11/10/camille-paglia-its-time-for-a-new-map-of-the-gender-world/.
9Katie Mettler, “Hillary Clinton just said it, but ‘the future is female’ began as a 1970s lesbian separatist slogan,” The Washington Post, February 8, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/08/hillary-clinton-just-said-it-but-the-future-is-female-began-as-a-1970s-lesbian-separatist-slogan/?noredirect=on.
10Sri Leland Lewis, Random Molecular Mirroring (self-pub., 2002). (I found this quote online. The book is available on Kindle, but I can’t bring myself to purchase it.)
11Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself), Twitter, November 13, 2018.
12Chesler, Politically Incorrect, loc. 464.
13Ibid.
14Ibid., loc. 500.
15Robert Barron, “The Trouble with the ‘You Go Girl,’ Culture,” Word on Fire, October 18, 2016, https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/article/the-trouble-with-the-you-go-girl-culture/5291/.
16Ibid.
17Neumann, Great Mother, 267.
18Timothy Allen, “Meghalaya, India: Where women rule, and men are suffragettes,” BBC News, January 19, 2012, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16592633.
19Ibid.
20Hannah Booth, “The Kingdom of Women,” The Guardian, April 1, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/apr/01/the-kingdom-of-women-the-tibetan-tribe-where-a-man-is-never-the-boss.
21Joseph Pearce, “The Wisdom and Wickedness of Women,” The Imaginative Conservative, April 19, 2015, http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/04/the-wisdom-and-wickedness-of-women.html.
22The Senate Judiciary Committee has since released a 414-page summary concluding that there was no evidence to support allegations against Kavanaugh, Nov. 3, 2018, https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/press/rep/releases/senate-judiciary-committee-releases-summary-of-investigation-from-supreme-court-confirmation.
23Victoria Bissell Brown, “Thanks for not raping us, all you ‘good men.’ But it’s not enough.” The Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/10/12/thanks-not-raping-us-all-you-good-men-its-not-enough/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.943f0f3f7c1c
24Ibid.
25Ibid.
26Peggy Noonan, “Voices of Reason – And Unreason,” The Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/voices-of-reasonand-unreason-1539299053.
27Heather Dockray, “Witches Plan Multiple Mass Hexes of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh,” Mashable, October 17, 2018, https://mashable.com/article/witches-hex-kavanaugh/#KeWeUYGPqsqr.
28Quoted by Margaret Harper McCarthy, Torn Asunder (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2017), 244.
29Amanda Foreman, “Why Footbinding Persisted in China for a Millennium,” Smithsonian, February 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-footbinding-persisted-china-millennium-180953971/.
PART III
Mary, the Antidote
CHAPTER 7
The True Mother
“Virgin Mother, daughter of your Son,
humbler and loftier past creation’s measure,
the fulcrum of the everlasting plan,
You are she who ennobled human nature
so highly, that its Maker did not scorn
to make Himself the creature of His creature.”
—Dante Alighieri
In 1963, Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique. In it, she attempts to describe the issue that is plaguing women of the West and their dissatisfaction with being wives and mothers. She wrote:
If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a matter of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone recognizes. It is the key to these other new and old problems which have been torturing women and their husbands and children, and puzzling their doctors and educators for years. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”1
What Friedan described is an interesting snapshot about women of her time, but there is something about it that she missed. What she described as “the ache with no name” actually has a name. What she unwittingly describes rests deep in our souls—an ache for God. “The feminist movement had its spiritual roots in the dullness and the narrowness of the middle-class family,” said Gertrud von le Fort. “From the need of the unfulfilled souls the women of that period cried out for spirit and for love.”2 Friedan and the many women who followed her mistook the object of this universal hunger in the human soul to be something other than God. Missing this key piece of data could only happen by people living in a theologically illiterate culture, who simply don’t know, or misinterpreted, the stories told by our predecessors that helped us identify this nameless-ache. The Jewish Friedan probably didn’t know St. Augustine’s “Our hearts are made for you, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in you.” But she also seems to not have known quotes that respond to this ache in her own faith tradition: “For he satisfies him who is thirsty, and the hungry he fills with good things” (Ps 107:9), or “For I will satisfy the weary soul, and every languishing soul I will replenish” (Jer 31:25). Friedan did not discover something new, what was new was that she just didn’t know what she discovered.
What is the antidote, then, to this ache without a name? God, of course, but particularly for women, the unique relationship every woman has to be his beloved daughter. This is why Mary offers us the best model of what it means to be a woman, because she surrendered every piece of herself to God the Father as a beloved daughter.
Mary knew the truth about herself: that everything she had, everything she was, and everything she would ever do was because of the gifts offered to her by her Father, her Creator. She not only knew the truth about herself—which has made her the humblest woman to ever live—but she also knew the truth about God, who he is, especially as Father and Creator.
The human heart aches for God, but the female heart aches for some very specific things: to know t
he truth of who we are and secure a recognition of our dignity, a longing to be fruitful or to do what is good, and a desire to be beautiful. These desires run deep in a woman’s soul. They don’t just stem from a superficial place, but are gifted to us by God. The only way that they can truly be satisfied is to surrender them back to God. One of the concepts that will be considered in this chapter, as well as chapters 8 and 9, is the recognition that we are created in God’s image and likeness so that when we live lives that are surrendered to him, his attributes can shine through us. It is sin that deforms us, but sanctity restores our wholeness to living truth, goodness, and beauty without tarnish. When our will is put aside and we take up the will of God, then he will be seen in us, in our being, actions, and beauty. This is the reality of Mary: that she is the truest reflection of God who ever lived—other than her Son—so her existence reveals great truths about God. Mary’s purity allows the essence of God to shine through her. The title for the nameless ache posed by Friedan and other women becomes remarkably clear when we start to understand exactly who Mary is.
The Most Powerful Woman in the World
For many, Mary remains a silent, still statue, locked in a saccharine pose, tucked away in a side altar of a church. There is much more to this woman, however, that goes well beyond our contemporary impression of her.
In 2015, National Geographic called her the most powerful woman in the world. Journalist Maureen Orth explained:
Mary is everywhere: Marigolds are named for her. Hail Mary passes save football games. The image in Mexico of Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of the most reproduced female likenesses ever. Mary draws millions each year to shrines such as Fatima, in Portugal, and Knock, in Ireland, sustaining religious tourism estimated to be worth billions of dollars a year and providing thousands of jobs. She inspired the creation of many great works of art and architecture (Michelangelo’s “Pietà,” Notre Dame Cathedral), as well as poetry, liturgy, and music (Monteverdi’s Vespers for the Blessed Virgin). And she is the spiritual confidante of billions of people, no matter how isolated or forgotten.3
She has been hailed as the most powerful woman in the world; the most painted, photographed, and prayed to throughout human history. For centuries, children were named for her, songs were sung for her, gardens were grown for her, battles fought for her, sacrifices made for her.
Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty (1892–1975), who was imprisoned first by the Nazis and then by the Communists in Hungary for twenty-three years, said of her, “Veneration of Mary is the great genius which gives Christianity its power, courage, and victoriousness.”4
Not just another saint, she is the saint. It was only through her fiat, her yes in willingly accepting the motherhood of God, that Jesus was able to come into the world. Anglican convert Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman described Mary as our “happier world.” By leading her children to her Son, the Blessed Mother helps “them to regain that which has been lost through the fall and sin. She rids us of false teaching. Far from a saccharine devotion, Mary burns through the vices of the cynic, the jaded, the angry, the agitated and the hopeless. In their place, she plants the gifts of peace, order, hope, strength, goodness, and creativity.”5
The Blessed Mother is a kind of safeguard to help Christians remain close to Christ. Many of the devout and faithful have discarded her, believing that devotion to her is an offense to Christ, but millennia of faithful offer a different view. “Son and Mother went together,” said Cardinal Newman, “and the experience of three centuries has confirmed their testimony, for Catholics who have honoured the Mother, still worship the Son, while Protestants, who now have ceased to confess the Son, began then by scoffing at the Mother.”6 Far from an obstacle to her Son, she is the portal through whom so many faithful have been brought closer to him. Saint Bridget of Sweden was told by the Blessed Virgin, “My son and I redeemed the world as with one heart.” To embrace her Immaculate Heart is to simultaneously embrace his Sacred Heart.
For centuries, she has been a lightning rod of the Christian faith, more controversial than even her Son. During the English Reformation in the sixteenth century, painting after painting of the Madonna were tossed on bonfires to get rid of any of the “popish” scent still wafting over the English Channel. During the eighteenth-century French Revolution, there were many vile desecrations of Our Lady, including the renaming of Notre Dame Cathedral as the Temple of Reason, dedicated to the Goddess of Liberty, while her statues were destroyed, and prostitutes were put on display on the altars. Then in the twentieth century, in Soviet Russia, the Church of Our Lady of Kazan, in Red Square in then Leningrad (St. Petersburg), was destroyed and replaced with a tribute to Soviet communism. These famous revolutions did not, however, have the last word when it came to Our Lady. Time and again, she has triumphed over her enemies.
Mary’s relationship with her rival goddesses has been no different than these relatively modern enemies, starting with the patron goddess of Mary’s adopted town, Ephesus, following Christ’s crucifixion. Some traditions tell us that she and St. John moved there, where they lived out the rest of their lives in a humble home halfway between the sea and a mountain top. Her home, rediscovered in the 1800s and carefully excavated during times of peace, can still be visited today.
The virgin goddess Artemis (known to the Romans as Diana), currently being resurrected by the goddess movement, was the most powerful goddess in the Roman world. Her temple at Ephesus is known as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. When St. Paul preached in Ephesus, he was driven out of the temple by devotees of Artemis who were worried that Christianity might be bad for their souvenir sales. It seemed that, for a time, the virgin goddess had the upper hand over Christianity, but eventually the temple was destroyed in AD 401. Then just thirty years later, Our Lady was proclaimed the Mother of God in the same city at the Council of Ephesus. Cyril of Alexandria, who convened the council in place of the pope, joyfully announced to the locals chanting in the streets, “Mother of God! Mother of God!” that after much debate, Mary had indeed been proclaimed the Mother of God. He described Mary to them as “the Mother of God, the holy ornament of all the universe, the unquenchable lamp, the crown of virginity, the scepter, the container of the uncontainable, mother and virgin.”7 It is now Our Lady who is forever associated with Ephesus, as well as St. Paul and his letters to the Ephesians, which are full of tenderness, wisdom, and charity; no doubt a corrective to the lack of faith and vices he witnessed in the ancient city.
Artemis is the not the only goddess Mary has silenced. In Rome, she is honored in the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, or Our Lady Over Minerva (known as the goddess Athena in Greek). The church to Our Lady was built over the ruins of a temple honoring Minerva. Our Lady of Victory, or Victory-Bearer, had been a title of Athena. It was given to Our Lady after many successful battles where an icon of her was venerated or the Rosary was prayed for Christians to be victorious, such as the battle of Lepanto or one of the sieges of Constantinople. And a stone’s throw from this church is the Pantheon, formerly a temple to all gods but now dedicated to St. Mary and all the martyrs.
Even Our Lady’s apparitions on Tepeyac Hill to St. Juan Diego involved conquering one or, possibly, two different goddesses worshipped by the blood-thirsty Aztecs: the relatively benign goddess Quezalcoatl and the more vicious Cōātlīcue, known as the “devouring mother,” who wore a “skirt of snakes” and a necklace made of human hearts, hands, and skulls. Mary’s apparition, which converted an estimated four to ten million natives, put an end to any type of goddess worship of that era. (Life Tip: Avoid the woman or goddess who is holding or wearing a snake. Things never go well when there is a snake.)
As I explained in my book The Marian Option, while many consider Our Lady to be weak and saccharine, she is no wilting daisy. A ninth-century priest wrote that Mary “is called terrible as an army arrayed for battle.”8 Many of Mary’s titles speak to her capacity to defend the Church and Christians; history has witnessed her “terri
ble” saving power over and over again throughout the centuries.
But even given her status as a warrior against her enemies, Our Lady is a warm and tender mother to us all. At the foot of the cross, through the horrible laboring of Calvary, she accepted us as her children: “‘Woman, behold your son!’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother!’ And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home” (Jn 19:25–27). As a demon commanded to tell the truth tells us, “In an instant, she loved all her children for all generations and said her second ‘yes.’ After her ‘yes’ to the Angel, she said her ‘yes’ to her son on the Cross so that you would all become her children.”9 She loves us with the perfect love of a perfect mother, responding to all the needs of her children with compassion and care.
The Woman and the Goddesses
Our Lady is not a goddess, but a woman. Who she is, however, is far beyond the wildest imagining of our pagan and even Jewish ancestors. Up until the point of Mary of Nazareth’s entry into history, every goddess had some sort of Achilles’ heel plaguing her, a vice that would confound her. Never had there been a perfect woman. It was a radically new thing that entered into fallen human history when God gave us a woman—a mortal woman, not a goddess—who was both sinless and perfect, without a major vice weighing her down. It is an idea that could only have been given to us by God. Yes, there were goddesses who had the title of Queen of Heaven, or who were stars over the sea, or virgins, or mothers of divinity, but never was there a woman who was both a virgin and a mother, and not a goddess. In Our Lady, God gave us something truly unique. Ironically, it is the woman, not the goddess, who is perfect and immortal, mother to all, and Mother of God.