The Gift of Womanhood

By Father Luigi Faccenda, OFM Conv
Originally published for Spes Nostra, September-October 1995: 3. Print

According to God's plan, men and women have the same dignity and are completmentary to each other. The woman Eve "was taken out" of the man Adam. The biblical account, beyond its imaginative language, signifies that men and women have the same nature and the same origin. In this way one can understand their mutual attraction and the profound union between them. In the beginning men and women were created equal. The one human being exists in two distinct complimentary forms: male and female.

While in Genesis 2:18-25 complementarity may seem to be one-sided (the woman created for the man), Genesis 1:26-28 removes any doubt. The help is anything but unilateral: the woman is a helper for the man, just as the man is a helper for the woman!

They are not identical one to the other, but both are created in the image and likeness of God, and together they are a manifestation of Him. Men and women are equal for what they have in common: intelligence, love, and personhood. They are complementary being, called to be the image of God in reciprocal self-giving and communion.

There is also another statement, dependent on the first one, but even richer in innovation and consequence: the man Adam and the woman Eve meet in order to overcome solitude. This statement surely comes from experience. Humans cannot achieve self-realization in solitude. This experience is seen here in a spiritual way, because God does not abandon man to solitude, but rather calls him to interpersonal communion. The interpersaonl relation is indispensable for humasn in order to attain salvation and self-realization. Solitude is poverty and powerlessness, humans are not self-sufficient beings.

It is God who brings the woman to the man. Man's reaction is one of joyful surprise in discovering in her those aspects of equality, reciprocity, and complementarity which he desired and could not find elsewhere. Adam and Eve are in dialogue, are images of God, and are called to subdue the earth. (Yet), there is clear awareness that this plan is now present in a historical situation marked by sin which contradicts it by causing division, domination, and self-centeredness.

In Genesis, original sin is described as humans' attempt to find fulfillment apart from God and his plan. The effect of this attempt is a self-centeredness which leads to division and domination. Man and woman become divided, although created to be complementary and united to each other.  The man seeks to dominate the woman as a result of self-seeking, and competition for supremacy replaces a mutual striving for unity. God intended dialogue, not domination.

Let us ask the Blessed Virgin to help all men and women of our time to be aware of the beauty of God's plan and to lean from her the joy of being fully themselves, establishing mutual relations of respectful and genuine love.