Receiving - again and again

I know I've written before about the idea of reception, but I don't have it down quite yet.

Maybe those of us in ministry and similar careers, like medicine or teaching, are more inclined towards giving of ourselves and less likely to know how to receive graciously. Maybe it's a woman thing, that our gift of self so permeates our being that reception is foreign. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think so.

I was at a bit of a crossroads a few days back, both in the direction of my prayer and my calling, and struggling with the idea of how to use my gifts now, and later. And, urged by some to be proactive, I was trying to make lists and consider options, weigh good against bad, you know - figure it all out. Now, there is a level of prudence and responsibility in all this that is good and right. But when I realized that there is so much in my life I can't control, that despite my best efforts, relying on God means actually relying on God, I got a little nervous.

That is, until, during a conversation with a dear friend, she said to me: just receive the gift.

Um, yeah. I knew that.

Sometimes I am too arrogant to receive. I think I know best, know what I need, seek independence and self-assuredly set out to Get What I Want. After all, this is the way of the modern woman, is it not? Reception relies on others. It is, in fact, completely dependent on someone else to be motivated to give. And it also means being ready to receive at just that moment when someone else gives.

So I have to be open to being in communion with others, to participating in the rhythm of belonging. And I have to be ready. Ready means not being so full of my own self and so full of my own stuff that I am too full to take in. It means when I give so completely an outpouring of myself that I don't fill the void with a vacuum. It means being really, truly "open". Open to the gift.

And so I'm going to try again today. I'm going to trust that God has a gift to give me, and that it probably will come through other people. I'm going to let someone else pour themselves out in gift, because I agree with Gaudiam et Spes that the outpouring of self makes us free. And I am going to heed those words- themselves a gift- of my friend who loves me. Receive the gift. Maybe then I can accept the moment, take a deep breath, and find the answers to my questions about who I am, by being open to who others are.

How Feminine can we get?

This weekend, our diocese held a men's conference at our parish. Now, mind you , I was not there, so anything I know about it is hearsay :) But I had some thoughts after hearing about things like the statistic that only 23% of active church participants are men, and after finishing up a paper for my Christology class about the notion of Christ and gender. Maybe I'm just trying to make up for the dreadful holes in that paper, but I've been thinking...

It seems to me that with the emphasis in the past few decades on the femininity of the Church as Bride, the receptive partner to Christ the Bridegroom, that we're really missing something. Or risking something.

That is to say, we are over-feminizing the Church.

What do I mean by this? Well, we have to ask whether men are disappearing from our ranks, and why? And if you look around Church on a given Sunday, well, sure, there are ordained men on the altar, but the stats are telling us the ratio in parishes of men in the pews is 3:1 and some places 7:1, women to men. So where are the men?

My pastor said something to me about a touchy-feely church, where men don't feel comfortable participating. And that made my shoulders tense. Because as a woman- I do not appreciate a touchy-feely approach to faith either! Faith is hard. It means choices, and sacrifice, and struggle, and waiting and longing. Women know about these things; they are part of the genius we live. But I heard what he was saying. Somehow we began to embrace the emotional in a way which excluded the rational, the intellectual, and maybe even the faithful.

To conclude that this is not masculine enough for the modern man to connect with makes sense to me. But I have to wonder if it is not also some kind of super-femininity that the modern woman doesn't relate to either. Maybe that's why of those women, so few are under forty. And of those who are there, I wonder how many are really satisfied with the challenge to their own spiritual growth and depth.

If we have a church that is emasculating our men and over-feminizing our women, then we as lay people are not answering the call to engage the world.
If we cannot manage to understand the integrated sexuality of Jesus, who is incarnated in a male body and still opens for us a feminine heart, then we will feel threatened in our own sense of identity, and begin to grasp for power.

And isn't that where we have been in these emotional years? The struggle for power seems to outweigh the proper respect for the other. The need to have a louder voice or bigger part frustrates the collaboration of men and women, and we respond by digging in our heels or running away.

I think we need a revitalized anthropology. A sense of the truth of who we are, and what it means to be male and female, and how that makes perfect sense in the light of God the Trinity. But unless and until we begin to make these steps and love the otherness and find freedom in the truth of who I am as woman or as man... unless I move to that integrated sense of being masculine in a feminine way and feminine in a masculine way, the power grab will continue, and the church will lose herself altogether.