Jesus is here..."But love does such things!"

A child born to us....from Adoration of the Child, Gerard van Honthorst (1620)

In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God;

God is being described. With him is someone else, someone called “the Word”; he is the expression of the meaning and fullness of God, the First Person, Speaker of the Word. This Second Person is also God, “was God,” yet there is only one God. Further, the Second Person “came” into his own: into the world which he had created. Let us consider carefully what this means: the everlasting, infinite Creator not only reigns over or in the world but, at a specific “moment,” crossed an unimaginable borderline and personally entered into history—he, the inaccessibly remote one! 

This is the Italian-German theologian Romano Guardini speaking in his classic The Lord. It's a classic because it has gained recognition generation by generation for offering incisive insight into the why and how of God among us. This book was first published in Germany in 1937, and an English-language translation was published in 1954. Guardini, a priest and and academic, influenced some of the ecumenical thinking expressed in the documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). 

Guardini, in a chapter of The Lord titled "The Incarnation" continues:

However, this journey of God from the everlasting into the transitory, this stride across the border into history, is something no human intellect can altogether grasp. The mind might even oppose the apparently fortuitous, human aspect of this interpretation with its own "purer" idea of godliness, yet precisely here lies hidden the kernel of Christianity. Before such an unheard of thought the intellect bogs down. Once at this point a friend gave me a clue that helped my understanding more than any measure of bare reason. He said: "But love does such things!" Again and again these words have come to the rescue when the mind has stopped short at some intellectual impasse. Not that they explain anything to the intelligence; they arouse the heart, enabling it to feel its way into the secrecy of God. The mystery is not understood, but it does move nearer, and the danger of "scandal: disappears.

None of the great things in human life springs from the intellect; every one of them issues from the heart and its love. If even human love has its own reasoning, comprehensible only to the heart that is open to it, how much truer must this be of God's love! When it is the depth and power of God that stirs, is there anything of which love is incapable? The glory of it is so overwhelming that to all who do not accept love as an absolute point of departure, its manifestations must seem the most senseless folly.

The particularity of God's coming to us in human form, as a kind of fulfilment of the proto-gospel of the ancient Greek and Roman legends, is astonishing given the social status of those given the responsibility of parental care, and the colonised nation, and the minor towns of birth and residence in which Jesus was planted to grow in stature and then to step forward to address the world. However, ...

If someone in Capharnaum or Jerusalem at the time had asked the Lord: Who are you? Who are your parents? To what house do you belong? – He might have answered in the words of St. John’s gospel: “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I am.” (8:58) Or he might have pointed out that he was “of the house and family of David.” (Luke 2:4)

How do the Evangelists begin their records of the life of Jesus of Nazareth who is Christ, the Anointed One? John probes the mystery of God’s existence for Jesus’ origin. His gospel opens: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was made nothing that has been made. . . . He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world knew him not. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. And we saw his glory – glory as of the only-begotten of the Father – full of grace and truth.” (John 1:1–14)

The incarnation, God taking on human form, and the trinity of persons in one Godhead, are the most distinctive truths of Christianity: 

Revelation shows that the merely unitarian God found in post-Christian Judaism, in Islam, and throughout the modern consciousness, does not exist. At the heart of that mystery which the Church expresses in her teaching of the trinity of persons in the unity of life stands the God of Revelation.

Here John seeks the root of Christ’s existence: in the second of the Most Holy Persons; the Word (Logos), in whom God the Speaker, reveals the fullness of his being. Speaker and Spoken, however, incline towards each other and are one in the love of the Holy Spirit. The Second “Countenance” of God, here called Word, is also named Son, since he who speaks the Word is known as Father.

In the Lord’s farewell address, the Holy Spirit is given the promising names of Consoler, Sustainer, for he will see to it that the brothers and sisters in Christ are not left orphans by his death. Through the Holy Spirit the Redeemer came to us, straight from the heart of the Heavenly Father. Son of God become man – not only descended to inhabit a human frame, but “become” man – literally; and in order that no possible doubt arise, (that, for example, it might never be asserted that Christ, despising the lowliness of the body, had united himself only with the essence of a holy soul or with an exalted spirit,) John specifies sharply: Christ “was made flesh.”

Only in the flesh, not in the bare spirit, can destiny and history come into being. . . .God descended to us in the person of the Savior, Redeemer, in order to have a destiny, to become history. Through the Incarnation, the founder of the new history stepped into our midst. With his coming, all that had been before fell into its historical place “before the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” anticipating or preparing for that hour; all that was to be, faced the fundamental choice between acceptance and rejection of the Incarnation.

He “dwelt among us,” “pitched his tent among us,” as one translation words it. “Tent” of the Logos – what is this but Christ’s body: God’s holy pavilion among men, the original tabernacle of the Lord in our Midst, the “temple” Jesus meant when he said to the Pharisees: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” (John 2:19)

Somewhere between that eternal beginning and the temporal life in the flesh lies the mystery of the Incarnation. St. John presents it austerely, swinging its full metaphysical weight. Nothing here of the wealth of lovely characterization and intimate detail that makes St. Luke’s account bloom so richly. Everything is concentrated on the ultimate, all-powerful essentials: Logos, flesh, step into the world; the eternal origin, the tangible earthly reality, [but still] the mystery of unity.

Merry Christmas everyone! And may it mean a rich appreciation of God's love for each of us.

Gerard van Honthorst - Adoration by the Shepherds (1622) cropped

The Pill: death just one more downside

Differences between men and women remain profound.    Photo by Keira Burton

The sexual revolution that followed widespread access to the contraceptive pill had been a mixed blessing for women, writer Louise Perry said in an interview with Radio New Zealand's Sunday Morning programme. Her focus is mainly on the social impact of the pill on women's lives.

Also in New Zealand, a coronor's court hearing was held last week into the deaths of two women caused by complications in taking the contraceptive pill. The pill has been "the big technology shock" that drives the sexual revolution, according to Perry, and the consequences for women have been severe.

As it happens, women are also suffering from the impact of another technological "advance", one that that benefits men, namely viagra. For comment on how that is so, go here.

But the deaths of the New Zealand women, one 24, the other 17, shows that deviating from what is natural can involve life and death consequences. This from a news report:

A coroner has issued a warning to women taking the contraceptive pill, and to doctors prescribing it, after two young women died 10 days apart in similar circumstances.

Both women had a previously unknown blood clotting condition, which is exacerbated when taking the hormonal pill, increasing the risk of developing deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism by 35 times.

In light of moves in a few countries to make hormonal contraceptives available over the counter, the coroner's judgment is telling:  

Coroner Ho has now given a warning regarding use of the combined oral contraceptive pill, which he said, if brought to public attention, could reduce the chances of the occurrence of other deaths in circumstances similar to the two women.

While use of the combined oral contraceptive pill increases the risk of developing deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism in all women, the risk increases with family or personal history of blood clotting conditions – which women may not even be aware of, he said.

All women starting the combined oral contraceptive pill should be told that there is an increased risk of venous thromboembolism.

Also, all prescribers of the combined oral contraceptive pill, and other hormone related medications, should ensure they take a comprehensive clinical history and inform patients about the risks of venous thromboembolism, the seriousness of the condition and the symptoms to look out for, he said.

In addition, medical practitioners need to be vigilant about the possibility of venous thromboembolism, even where a woman appears to have few risk factors. 

Nonchalance about women's deaths is not acceptable.

Though society accepts there will be victims of technology deemed useful for its way of life, nonchalance about this is not acceptable.

To return to Perry's train of thought, a lot that has become generally acceptable in societies captured by the sexual revolution mentality is not fair for women.  Perry said this on the RNZ interview at the time of the publication of her book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: 

“The argument I make basically is that women have got a pretty raw deal, because on the one hand, we suffer all of the consequences, negative consequences, when sex goes wrong, in terms of things like unwanted pregnancies, and sexual violence overwhelmingly, is perpetrated by men against women.

“But we don't get nearly as many of the positive sides of it because it is more likely to be things like casual sex are much more likely to be enjoyed by men and less so by women. 

“And so, while I argue that there are obviously all sorts of benefits from the sexual revolution, crucially the pill, which is the big technology shock that drives all of this, and that women are now able to control their reproduction in a way that wasn't possible in the past, just because the technology didn't exist to allow us to.”

But, she says, there are “whole bunch of downsides on the social level.”

That's because the differences between men and women remain profound.

“I think that it was a mistake for some strains of feminism to assume that trying to imitate men, and specifically to imitate a kind of masculine style of sexuality, was necessarily aspirational for women.

“So, the idea that if we could just kind of let go of all of those old-fashioned norms and just be more free then that would necessarily result in women being happier. I don't think that has happened.”

The contraceptive pill hasn’t liberated women

Perry quotes a line in her book ‘when motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood became a social choice for men’, and believes it is now more socially acceptable for men to walk away from their children and the mothers of their children.

“Particularly if they're conceived in kind of casual relationships, because the reasoning from these men and they'll say it pretty boldly sometimes, is well it was it was your fault for not using contraception properly, it was your fault for not getting an abortion. It's your problem now, basically. Which is obviously hugely destructive for the women who end up abandoned and their children most of all.”

It is ironic, she says, that a technology that allows women to take charge of their fertility would have led to an increase in single motherhood.

“You’d think it would be the opposite, wouldn't you? Because with a few exceptions, no woman would choose single motherhood; it is so difficult having to play the role of both mother and father. And we know that single mothers are much poorer than average, face all kinds of adversity.

“And yet that was precisely the effect of the pill.”

Social norms changed quickly

The pill rapidly changed societal norms in which young people lived, she says.

“The social norms that had existed to control horny young people, to put it bluntly, to keep them apart from one another, to control childbearing which was the function of all of these old fashioned norms often understood by feminists as being patriarchal and oppressive and of course they were that was one of their functions, one of their effects.

“But they also had other purposes around controlling the circumstances in which children were born and the environment in which they brought up in and when those norms were very, very rapidly destroyed at the same time as religion fading away in the West, you ended up with, for instance, the shotgun marriage just no longer serving any purpose whatsoever.

“And so, by the end of the 70s the shotgun marriage basically doesn't exist anymore.

“It's very, very rapid social change. And of course, it had benefits. But the argument that I'm making in the book is that it had a lot of downsides as well.”

Another voice on the failure of the feminist project 

Valerie M. Hudson, a distinguished professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, in reviewing Perry's book, writes: 

Ironically, although relatively effective and accessible contraception for women has been widely available since the 1960s, it has proved a double-edged sword for women. Contraception definitely helped women to obtain a much higher level of agency in their lives, which is all to the good, but at the same time there was one area in which women lost agency: The social ability to refuse a man casual sex.

Now sex is on men’s terms, and what ugly terms those turned out to be. As Perry puts it, many women today must pretend to derive pleasure from things they don’t want to do, and say they don’t mind when “friends with benefits” arrangements actually cause pain. It is plain, she writes, that “the sexual playing field is not equal, but it suits the interests of the powerful to pretend that it is.” Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows — and the minnows are, in the first place, female, and increasingly, the victims of the sexual “revolution” are children being sexually abused.

Perry doesn’t sugarcoat the antidote: Some desires are wrong, and they should be — even must be — repressed and not acted upon. The concept of “consent” is simply too low a bar, given the stakes. She argues for a new standard of sexual integrity, “one that recognizes other human beings as real people, invested with real value and dignity ... even if that means curtailing our freedoms.”

Rather than exercising agency “by having loveless, brusque sex with men they don’t like who show no regard for (them) and discard them immediately afterward,” women would realize, as most eventually do after significant harm, that “unwanted sex is worse than sexual frustration.” That “a truly feminist project would demand that it should be men, not women, who adjust their sexual appetites.”

A new ethic of sexual integrity, is needed. We need to be able to say that certain desires are wrong, and that there will be real accountability for the harm that pursuing them will cause. Consent is not enough and never can be when the playing field is so uneven. We need a better sexual revolution, one based on male sexual integrity, not male sexual license.

The WebMD website states: "Natural family planning is a form of birth control that doesn't involve pills or devices. As a result, it doesn't have side effects." More women are exploring that option, with the documentary The Business of Birth Control being one factor in highlighting the pharmaceutical industry's role in this area of potential harm to women's health and to their well-being in society.

Ω See also: Humanae Vitae, 1968. Also found here

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