Today is my mom’s birthday and were she alive we’d be having some sort
of combined St. Patrick’s Day / birthday celebration. Since she has started the eternal chapter of
her life, I’ll instead honor the day by offering some “theology of women”
thoughts based upon witnessing her faith for over 40 years.
The Roman Catholic hierarchy seems to assert that Jesus’ sexual organs
are his most important body parts. Why
do I say this? The hierarchy asserts
that a priest must “naturally” remind people of Jesus’ physical body and only other
men can do this. The most differentiating
physical attributes between a male and a female are sexual organs. So, it’s easy to surmise that the hierarchy
believes Jesus’ most important physical attributes are his sexual organs if
they are required to evoke recollection of the man.
This is curious in its own right because the hierarchy further asserts
that Jesus never used his sexual organs for their natural intended purpose so
why are they so all-fired important…but I digress. Regardless of the hierarchy’s generous
willingness to tell me what my thoughts and feelings should be, I know what they
are. The person who most reminds me of Jesus’
physical person is my mom.
No, I wasn’t raised by a “mom” who was really just a man dressing in
drag. I wasn’t raised by a woman who
later had a sex change operation either.
I was raised by my natural mother who was female all her life. Yet, she reminded me physically of Jesus more
than any other person I’ve encountered.
You might ask, “Why?”
Even if you don’t ask, “why”, I will elaborate because that …and maybe
a little jetlag following my return from Southeast Asia find me awake in the
wee hours of her birthday.
Jesus fed his flock, not by knocking out 80 hour weeks and turning over
his paycheck to his wife so she could buy groceries that she would later cook
and serve as meals to the flock. Rather,
he fed the world by offering himself, his own body. No man I know does this but mothers do it all
the time.
My mother fed me and my numerous siblings from her very body. She fed
us when we were in utero, where a
mother’s body sacrifices nutrients to her child even to the detriment of her
own body. After we were born, she
continued to feed us from her body, nursing us each for several months
post-partum.
Jesus also welcomes us to enter into his Body. Thus, we become part of the Body of
Christ. I think maybe this is Jesus’ way
of saying, “I love you so much that I will make myself vulnerable so you can
enter my body…” This is a profoundly
deep expression of love. Women as wives
and mothers welcome others to enter their bodies also, through sexual
intercourse or through pregnancy. My
mother welcomed me into her body via her pregnancy carrying me. She made herself vulnerable to allow me to enter
her body and be a part of her body, even when I was no longer a physical
resident of her body.
Thus, I readily see Jesus, not only in my mother but in many mothers
whose greatest joy comes from making themselves vulnerable to allow others to
share their body so that they may have life.
People say Jesus is our “brother” but my brothers never permitted me
nor did I ever want to enter their bodies.
There’s nothing that poured forth from my brothers’ bodies that I found
suitable for consumption or nourishment.
There is no part of their flesh that fed me. Yet, there was from my mom as there is from
Jesus.
Since the hierarchy asserts that physical recollection of Jesus is
required of the person leading a Eucharistic celebration of the Mass lest we
sacrifice sacramental validity, then it would seem that hierarchy would need to also assert that this person must be a mother. No other type of person has sacrificed their body
to give life to others. No one else
intimately knows what is involved in feeding others from their own flesh. How curious that only one man did what many
women do, and how comical to say only ordained men understand and portray it. Donning effeminate garb does not fool me into
thinking a male priest has the slightest clue about sacrificing his body to feed
me like my mother did or Jesus does. It
was not the superficiality of my mother’s clothes that fed me. It was the fiber of her physical being. When I became a mother myself, I better
understood the profound life-giving, sacrificial, deep love my mother
expressed. It became my inspiration to
try to imitate her and Christ as best I could.
The experience of feeding another from one’s own body is beyond the
experience of every man in history except Jesus. At best, other men can observe others literally
feeding others from their own body, but they cannot do it themselves. Maybe because men are incapable of this
primary life-giving experience, they suppress or discredit the expressions of
those who do. Maybe this is why women’s
voices are so often ignored in the church unless they echo the experiences of
men.
The bottom line is that I didn’t live in the time of Jesus so didn’t
see his physical body and thus, I have never seen his sexual organs. Believe it or not, even if I had met Jesus
face-to-face in his time, I sincerely doubt his sexual organs would have been
my focal point because it’s not my focal point when meeting men today. I just don’t say, “There’s a guy; he sure
reminds me of Jesus because they have the same standard sexual equipment
package.”
I can imagine that this fixation on a priest having the same sexual
organs as Jesus might be especially offensive to survivors of clergy sexual
abuse; it is to me and I was never sexually assaulted by a priest. If Jesus’ sexual organs are so important to
remind us of Jesus, how dare they be used for sexual violence? How dare anyone tolerate that, enable that or
minimize that? Quite frankly, this is a
no-brainer: people who use their flesh to violate others or who minimize
another’s use of flesh to violate others do not remind me of Jesus.
Conversely, it’s just a no-brainer that my mom’s or any mom’s holy,
joyous sacrifice feeding her flock from her own flesh physically reminds me of Jesus. Active use of her body parts to feed others reminds me of Jesus far more than the male clergy's passive non-use of body parts.
