I was born to Protestant missionaries, and spent the first years I remember in Kabul, Afghanistan. Once, when my mother and I were walking down the dirt city road towards the bazaar, I saw a beggar by the side of the road, sitting against a wall. I was about three, and so my eyes met his, though he was seated. I think he was blind, and I remember my intense, visceral response: This is not right. I was distressed by the fact that this man seemed discarded, alone, and I expressed this to my mom. She said something, but whatever it was, it didn't satisfy me; I knew that there was something disordered about a human person as an outcast like unwanted plastic on a garbage heap. But I was a small child, and I was helpless, except to pray for him.

Though a small child, and though helpless, in a sense, I was onto something. That beggar and I, and all of us, are meant to be in communion with each other. We are social creatures, made for love, and the goal of love is communion, a unity. In this also we are made in the image of God, and not just in our rational faculty; indeed, this 'made- for'- a- unity- with- each- other-r and- with- God is perhaps a more foundational imaging of God than our intellectual capacity. You see, Wwe are an image, as individuals and as a human family, of the Trinity, and the Trinity is tThree pPersons in an eternal communion of outpouring, union, and complete self-gift. Their union is love. The Father eternally pours Himself out to beget the Son, the Word, and the Father and the Son in their love for one another produce the Holy Spirit, eternally. Christ calls us, in Scripture, Tto be one as We are One, and this is about love, about unity and community. Because we are made in this image, our end, our purpose, is also this union with each other, and all in God.; Tthus union and community through the radical self-gift is not only a symptom of our being made in the image of the Trinity, but also a call: In God, imaging is never static, like a photograph; it is a call, a vocation, a fulfillment of a person and of the human community.

What then, from this foundation, can we say aboutis the Gospel? It is good news, but what is that news? And is it, like our imaging, more than just good news? Is it also a life we must live to be true messengers? Well, heres an attempt to summarize the impossible:

Here is, in words, the Gospel: Through the profound humility of the Son, his willingness to self-give Himselfft to the entire creation, to all that is lower than Hihimself, through theHis sacrifice of Himself, all human beings, now redeemed, forgiven, and healed, can achieve through Christ this union with Godour source, our homeand through this primary union, union with each other. Again, union is the goal and fruit of love, and love is nothing if not lived. Therefore, we must live the Gospel, be the Gospel.

Now, that we've defined the Gospel, there are two issues that arise. The first is regarding the fact that God made humankind only and always as male or female.[footnoteRef:1] So, how does one you live out the Gospel as a woman? God made us in two genders, and He never does anything for naught. It has deep meaning not only for our biological lives, but also our spiritual lives as well. Gender, is, in a sense, a vocation thatwhich serves the higher calling of being a living Gospel, which in turn serves the highest calling of union with God, with others, in love. The second issue reveals itself in the fact that we are radically impoverished, and cannot ourselves live up to our vocation as a living gGospel. We need towill look at the issue of living the Gospel as a woman, which will help us, I think, to understand in particular our poverty as human beings, but also as women, and our particular healingas women. [1: JPII. Dignatis Mulieris, 1988.]

In this meditation on what it means to live the Gospel as a woman, I will be using John Paul II's 1988 encyclical, Dignitatis Mulieris, or The Dignity of Women: I will not be going through the document bit-by-bit, but rather will use it as a foundation.

In the beginning of histhe encyclical, Dignitatis Mulieribus, the Pope John Paul II quotes a claim of the Church (spoken during Vatican II) which caught my eye: The hour has come when the vocation of women is being achieved. Why did this catch my eye? Because if 'now is the hour,' then it indicates that previously the full vocation of women has beenn, perhaps, somewhat obscured, or not able fully to be achieved. The Church sometimes speaks prophetically, mysteriously, as if She is looking into great depths of cosmic importance, and I believe this to be one such prophecy. Women have been obscured, unable to act or impact the world on many levels, both through outright oppression and also, on the other extreme, through the modern movement to 'do everything that men do.' I am not a feminist, as Dorothy Sayers once exclaimed, and for me it is because I believe in a deep and unique calling of women that is only further obscured when women attempt to be men., or vice versa.

Yet, we know, as women, that as of yet, the Church has not developed fully the true calling of a woman, though as we will see, it is incipient in the Scriptures and the Tradition of the Church. Many of us, I know, have wondered what role we have in the Church. Unlike men, we do not have a prescribed 'role' that is only for women, one that comes with an office,in the literal and the figurative meaning of that word. Many of us have wondered if our role is what it has been for thousands of years: to cook and cleanfuneral luncheons. Are we, without a unique, official role, second-class Church citizens? Are we somehow, as imaged in the life of the Church, 'children of a lesser god?': told, literally, not to speak in the Church (by St. Paul);, living often under the shadow of Eve sinned first and tempted Adam;, without a visible model of an office, without the authority that comes with that;, barred from seminaries and education for millennia, without formal influence for hundreds of years in the hierarchy of the Church;, without recourse to a woman for Church-sanctioned, visible and official spiritual direction in sensitive matters;, without a female Doctor of the Church until the 1970s. Is, our only possible occial role--a religious--not a distinct role for women? Is the feminine a passive 'prime matter' of Aristotle, lacking adequate form and thus lower in the hierarchy of being? Is receptivity, which is a feminine quality in essence, passive, dependent on the active, and thus, as St. Thomas Aquinas seems to indicate, inferiorlower?

Furthermore, our God is always, in the West, spoken of exclusively as a male: God the Father, God the Son....God the Holy Spirit in the East is often referred to as having more feminine qualities, but this is never emphasized in the Western Church. In the Church, the understanding of the receptive role as it pertains uniquely for women has not been, in my opinion, fully developed.

JP II, in Dignitatis Mulieris states that, nevertheless, the feminine is found in God, as exemplified in Holy Scripture.

Why is this so important? Let me make this clear: If God is our source and we are made in His image, and all our dignity as children of God comes from Him, then for women as women to have the same profound imaging of God, the feminine must also be found in Him, or from Him, as its source. If the feminine receptivity, the receptive, is found in the Trinity, then it cannot be lower, because there can be nothing in a simple, all-good, balanced God that is somehow 'less;;' if something is found to have its source in God, then it is by essence thea highest good. The good news, not so well publicized, is that we find this feminine in God in Holy Scripture, and JPII takes great care to reveal some of the many instances to us:

Isaiah 49: 14-15

But Zion said, ' The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.' Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you. (Isaiah 49: 14-15).

Isaiah 66:13

As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you. (Isaiah 66:13).

Pslams 131: 2-3

Like a child quieted at its mother's breast; like a child that is quieted in my soul. O Israel, hope in the Lord. (Psalms 131: 2-3).

John Paul II says:, In various passages the love of God who cares for His people is shown to be like that of a motherin many passages God's love is presented as the masculine love of a bridegroom and father; but also sometimes as the feminine love of a mother. Thus we find the source of the feminine in God, as He is the source of the masculine. Thus one cannot identify the feminine in essence with 'prime matter more than form (Aristotle),' or something that is less divine and more evil (Plotinus) because it is farther away from the pure, active, divine principle. Because of the Trinity, there is the active principle and the receptive principle in God: a look at Andrei Rublev's icon The Trinity tells us this visually. At the higher levels, at the oObject level of the physical signs of gender, we see, aslike Evdokimov teaches in his Woman and the Salvation of the World, that the received and receptive, the masculine and the feminine, are the polarities that which allow for a relationship of love. Masculine and feminine, then, as both roles in the life of the Church and in creation, are signs pointing to this polarity of relationship and love, an eternal expression of John Paul II's 'original solitude' and 'radical self-gift.' Of course, Remember, though, that God, in Himself, is beyond gender;, so that gender is found in Him as a Source source of everything, yet it does notcannot define His essencem. But at least we know that our vocation as women is also, in a sense, an image of God and is thus as profound as the masculine, and necessary for the Church. In the Church, the understanding of the receptive role as it pertains uniquely for women has not been, in my opinion, fully developed.

To find the dignity and therefore vocation of women, let us also look at the New Testament. In the stories therein, we find, poetically, the vocation of a woman.

One day, when Jesus was having a meal with religious leaders, a woman came in, anointed His feet, and dried them with her hair. He had not been, oddly, offered the customary honor of having his feet washed. A prostitute who had been forgiven by Jesus broke all custom and protocol, shaming herself in the eyes of the world, to do a greater honor.

Another woman anointed the head of Jesus with a very expensive oil, and was rebuked by a disciple. Jesus answers, Let her alone. She anoints me for my burial, and does me a service.

The women, on the Via Dolorosa, were weeping. We hear of no women jeering, though there may have been those; what is emphasized is the women's reaction: They wept.

Mary Magdalene, called The Apostle to the Apostles waited at the tomb. She knew where to be, and she, the first to recognize Christ, reached out to touch him, like a mother, or a lover, to just touch Him. Though He tells her not to touch Him, her actions, as the actions of the other women, show us something essential.

Each of these women could see. They, knew, and acted, with an immediacy and vitality that revealedshowed theira correct sight. They seemed to know who Jesus was in a more immediate, deep, and full-personal way than the men: emotional, spiritual, rational, bodilyand that all at once. They, like all women, knew first through their whole being. Women take in information,: wWhat you are eating, what you have've eaten today, or all week;, whether or not your clothes are dirty, or if you look happier or more sad from extremely subtle clues. They look deeply into another's eyes and seem, sometimes, to see the soul. For example, if women are in a meeting of some sort, one might whisper to another, Marianne looks upset today.; Iif you are in a meeting with mostly men, and I've been in a few of these, you will never find the men whispering about how Jack looks sad today. The men are almost totally focused on the task at handwhich is a good thingbut they do not take in the massive amounts of seemingly unimportant details that women doall the time.

I've often thought that this quality of 'taking in' is very important in the nurture of small children. In order to keep groups of small, somewhat irrational creatures safe and to help them confirm their identity, to help them feel loved, and yet not go crazy, a person must notice a great deal of small signs. Most men, when having to take care of groups of small children, will often get stressed out because they are wondering what on earth is going to happen next; whereas most women in that situation will be able to 'read' the children, by taking them in, in a sense, and are able to predict with an uncanny ability what will happen next. Or, Oonce a large group of us played pictionary, men against women. The women won every time. Every time. The men, finally, in exasperation, started saying, It is as if you can read each other's minds.

Once I heard a comedian talk about male and female brains: the male brain was characterized as a collection of separate boxes, with one empty box ('downtime in front of the TV with merry-go-round channels'); the female brain was like a string ball of different colored wireseverything was connected in a seeming labyrinth, and all the wires seemed often lit up at once, completely baffling to men.

This seems indicative to me of an ability, a calling, to receive through a multiplicity of signs, and to love based upon the reception of another human being, in all his or her uniqueness. The woman who washed Jesus' feet, the woman who anointed Him, the women who wept, were all receivers, like satellite dishes, and so recognized Him in a visceral, full-person way, and they loved commenisuerate to the receptivity they were given by God. Often in Scripture, when a woman is responding to Jesus with her whole being, body and soul, the men around are asking, What is she doing? If love is dependent on knowledge of the beloved, and grows according to the growth of knowledge of the other, than what great love would arise from the full-on reception of the Incarnated God? Their reactions begin to make sense: rushing in where no woman is allowed and with the glory of womanhood, washing dust from His feet,; pouring a year's worth of wages in perfume on His head,; weeping at the sight of Him carrying His cross, when most people would see just another pathetic criminal, a common victim of Roman law.; Aa woman who waited in the early darkness of a graveyard because she knew Him, loved Him, and reached out to bring Him to herself as we all must desire to do. She hoped, out of a receptive knowledge that keeps loving and, hoping, even when all hope seems gone. A woman's love is love to the point of foolishness. Women, normally, are often foolish about those they lovethey will go to great lengths to help others, and will rush in where men and angels fear to tread. All of this, of course can have downsides, and women are most often accused of being 'busybodies.' But yet this is simply the dark side of a very profound gift. As women bring the dark side to the light, their vocation becomes clear.

Once, when I was very sick, and had been in pain for many months, I became suicidal. My husband, at his wit's end, called my women friends, my spiritual friends, and three of them came over. They came in to my messy room, my messy life, messy emotions, and sat there, in that space of pain and despair. They looked at me, and took my pain into themselves, and gave me back to myself. Love became the bond, and unity the healing. They took my pain on as best they could, and from a worldly perspective, even a rational perspective, it wasis foolishness.

This receptive ability is mirrored on the physical level. Our bodies, indeed everything in the material world, is a sign of something greater, as St. Paul said,: Everything indicates the glory and nature of God, so men have no excuse. Receptivity is both a burden and a gift, capable of bringing great pain as well as great joy. It is a taking another into oneself, almost a becoming of the Other, so as to love, to create unity. On the physical level, the marital embrace for the woman is a receptivity of the most profound kind, a receptivity wherein the physical and the emotional and the spiritual meet. This creates a unity in love out of which another person may come; and the woman bears this person, receives him or her, and knows this new person beyond rational knowing. As it said in the Old Testament, a woman cannot forget her sucking child; also, a woman cannot forget the child of her womb. I have never forgotten even my child who never was born. Ellie died at eight weeks, a miscarriage, and I have never forgotten her, and on some level, I know her. My husband, though saddened by her death, did not, could not, know her. If you were able to ask mothers about their miscarriages, they will tell you, I believe, that they still remember those children, because they received them and loved them as they loved themselves; the line between others and a woman can sometimes be very porous, and this is true also of women who are not physically mothers.

The spiritual receptivity of others, and the love that comes, the unity and community, is the higher meaning, or object, behind the sign of the physical for a woman.

However, the greatest examples are yet to come. :

Mary and Martha were sisters, close to Christ. The famous story, of course, has given us idiomatic phrases like, You're a Martha. But beyond the colloquialisms, Mary and Martha show us two faces of the feminine genius. Martha, more active, but still a woman who saw, gives one of the best summaries of the mission of Jesus, and confirms His identity, even in her grief;, perhaps out if it: L'Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died, but even now I know that God will grant whatever you ask of him.' Jesus said to her, 'Your brother will rise again.' Martha said, 'I know he will rise again at the resurrection on the last day.'

Some commentators have wondered why Martha did not ask Jesus directly to raise Lazarus, surmising that her faith was imperfect; however, St. Augustine of Hippo calls Martha's confession of faith,'the perfect example' because she not only believes that Jesus can raise her brother, but she knows she must also submit to His will, and the will of the Father.[footnoteRef:2] She shows none of the characteristic confusion of the disciples, but speaks more like a prophet, like John the Baptist, with a deeper, receptive, intuitive knowledge giving rise to a great sight. [2: St. Augustine. On St. John's Gospel]

Mary, her sister, of course, is a contemplative, like Mary the Mother of Jesus. Contemplation is receptivity. Contemplation by its definition is to ponder, or to watch, or to take in. It is a kind of prayer born in silence; if we are focused on talking, we cannot contemplate, and this is a feminine posture before God. The Lord does say of the contemplative Mary, She has chosen the better part and I believe He was talking to women of their highest calling, a calling through which they would serve the Church, though not as Martha perhaps, at that moment, would have understood it (though I am sure that she understood it well later).

Our finest, and greatest example of the feminine posture, the receptive and contemplative posture resulting in the deepest, highest, poetic and full knowledge, and thus unity and love, is the Theotokos, the Blessed Mother. The Annunciation is the story of a person receiving God, to such an extent that a God-man results: not from her own power, but by receiving God the Holy Spirit. John Paul II states that this New Covenant, that of an Incarnated God, is the first and only covenant made with a woman alone,. ..and this, I argue, is the greatest covenant among the others: Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David. There is the dignity of woman for you!

Later, Scripture states about Mary,: ...Aand she pondered all these things in her heart. This is a woman receiving and contemplating; it is more than just looking, or the sight of the rational.: It is a kind of unity with people and events. It must have been painful at times for her, especially at the Cross, but out of her reception of this ultimate pain came her Motherhood of the Universal Church.

What does this all add up to, for women? We are called to receptivity and contemplation at such a level that it produces a lively, intuitive response of knowing love, knowing not primarily concepts but knowing human beings, in all the varied situations we find. ...Itit is a unique sensitivity that humanizes and with holiness, divinizes every situation and person, bringing this theosis through Christ. We are called to the martyrdom of a foolish love, one that hopes and loves past all rational hope, a knowing that 'what is impossible with human beings is possible with God.' We are called, like mothers, to confirm and draw out the identity and potential of the people, the individual people, around us, one at a time.

John Paul II says, The feminine receives, the masculine is received. Both are found in God. Both actions are a form of self-gift, and when they come together, polarities and opposites that they are, great fruitfulness and unity is born. We find an astounding example of this movement of the masculine and feminine in the image of Christ and the Church. The Church is spoken of as feminine, and this is not because women are to men as a human institution is to God (lower in essence). This is because the Church receives Christ, primarily in the Eucharist, and Christ is received. The feminine and masculine here is much more about a calling, a mystical role. Within the Trinity there isis both receiving and being received, both akin to feminine and masculine, and thus a fruitful unity of love. To be signs in the flesh of this much higher, mysterious, spiritual reality is indeed a dignity for both men and women in the Church: and each is absolutely irreplaceable.

John Paul II also states that, Tthe moral and spiritual strength of a woman is that God entrusts her to take a human being into herself. This becomes a motherhood of both body and spirit: She 'ponders' them, 'contemplates' them, 'becomes them,' and so, like God in whose image she is made, becomes a source of communion for them. John Paul II continues, In a world where there is loss of sensitivity to what is human, women are essential.

So, from this, can we say we are needed in the Church? That we indeed have a role? The question I have asked myself, with some bitterness at times, is why there has been no prescribed office solely for women, as there is for men. I have often thought that without this, women are relegated to second-class citizens, left to wander on the fringe of the Church, cleaning and cooking. Funeral luncheons.

I have been at funeral luncheons, though, and have seen women fulfilling their vocation. They are cooking and cleaning, serving, and yet with their multi-wired brain, they notice those who seem sad, or alone, and will go over and just sit, or hug the person, or even cry with him or her. In fact, the women thought up the idea of funeral luncheons, and put them together, because they pondered and received the knowledge that it would help in a place of great pain, and that it would create unity in love in very spontaneous and real ways.

I have been at mass when a woman will gently touch the shoulder of someone near her, or women who will visit nursing homes, make meals for new mothers, or will provide a place of refuge, like a an older woman who becomes mother for an over-worked, lonely priest.

I have seen when a parish priest was dying, the women in the parish gather to help the other priest clean, and sit with the dying man, changing bandages, unafraid of the very human carnage that is sometimes the process of death. They rushed in, took it in, and sat where hope was gone, and then for months afterward, shared with others the beauty of God in the midst of his death, creating a kind of unity in love among parishioners.

I have begun to understand that the particular vocation of women who are not nuns cannot be done within the prescriptions of a particular office. Instead of thinking, Wwe don't have an office like men, we should think, Wwe are not confined by an office. The role of a woman in the Church, because it is contemplative and receptive, must by its nature, be spontaneous and free to act, to be receptive at all times and places to the needs and the persons brought by God. It is not, in the life of the parish, be a vocation that can be associated with a specific set of clothes or tasks.

There is, though, an 'official' feminine model in the Church: the contemplative, cloistered religious. You will say, But men do this too, --and I would respond that they are, in this, following the feminine model as women follow the model of the royal priesthood of believers. As Wwe women follow the evangelization model of John the Baptist at times, so certain men are called to imitate the Blessed Mother. This is where, in Christ, love goes beyond gender, as it does in God.

An example of this model and this 'no male or female in Christ,' (in terms of political or social inequality, a kind of moving past gender to deeper realities, as in 'the priesthood of believers,') was shown me in a visit (actaually, a gate-crashing, but that's another story) to a cloistered Carmelite monastery in Clark, WYy. A monk there told me that their job is to be the heart of the Church, and like the Blessed Mother, to pray and ponder and contemplate, for the good of the rest of the Church. Like the heart, he said, we pump grace and love through prayer throughout the Church, and like the heart, we are hidden and protected. This monk understood deeply the beauty of the feminine, and he follows as his greatest models the Blessed Mother and St. Therese of Lisieux.

Like this very tangible model, or that of St. Therese of Lisieux who cried, I know what is my vocation! It is to be Love! the role and, the office of women as visible signs in the Church, is through contemplation and reception, to create aunew unity and love, which is, in the end, the purpose and end of all the Church: unity with God in Christ and with each other. God has given women, asked women, to be creative, and has given us, in the Church, the creative space to do it. He trusts us that much.