Women Really Are Amazing Creatures

Womanly Powers Are Amazing - Though Not the Girl Boss Powers We're Incessantly Told to Celebrate

Women really are amazing creatures. For anyone who is reading the Christmas story, it is impossible to avoid reflecting on the capacities of women. The earliest parts of the Christmas story revolve almost entirely around the women. Not just their existence, but specifically the story revolves around their life-giving, life-knitting, life-weaving super powers. Elizabeth, an expectant mother, pregnant with an unborn John the Baptist, plays an important affirming role for the merely betrothed and understandably alarmed Mary. Having never slept with her betrothed, she is nevertheless newly pregnant. The writer of Luke says that Mary “hurried” to Elizabeth’s home some distance away, after learning that Elizabeth was miraculously pregnant too. Mary received an unusually warm welcome immediately upon her arrival: John the Baptist, still in his mother’s womb, leapt for joy at the sound of Mary’s voice, already demonstrating his zeal for the coming Messiah who was growing in Mary’s womb.

The events surrounding Christmas are, in essential ways, a testament to the willingness of one woman in the distant past to embrace her womanly distinctives. Rather than resenting the imposition of a new life within her, she began by demonstrating a submissive acceptance (i.e. “May it be unto me according to your word”) before growing into actually celebrating what God had done (i.e. “My soul glorifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on, all generations will call me blessed…”).

The reactions of these women are what we moderns might call “leaning in”. Leaning in to their fertility. Leaning in to motherhood. Leaning in to the possibilities that attend unexpected pregnancies, instead of willfully blinding themselves to everything except the burdens.

And the enemy hates it when women lean into the life-giving ability that is theirs alone.

In one of the most unexpected twists and turns in the bible, if you read long enough, you will come to the end, and there you will find a rendition of the Christmas story that is both dark and fantastical, as if Tim Burton had somehow got himself hired on as a creative consultant. It is a story of a woman giving birth while a dragon positions himself in front of her, intending to devour the baby the moment it makes its entrance into the world. The dragon, though, is outmaneuvered by God, and it fails in its effort to consume the baby. The writer of the book of Revelation describes what follows the dragon’s failure this way:

Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus. - Revelation 12:17

Mary’s embrace of her womanly ability to bring forth new life ultimately helped change the world. She was the vessel God used to bring forth the King of Heaven when he came to our rescue. Every woman who leans into her own role of mother is also involved - in a smaller way but one no less real - in the most consequential act possible for sustaining the world. There is no future to be had, for anyone, without mothers and children. A mother’s occupation, the formation of living human beings, is the most profound and impactful endeavor imaginable. Everyone these days likes to drone on about sustainability. Well, there is nothing more essential to sustainability than mothers with children. Without them there will be nothing whatever to sustain.

So I guess it is no wonder that the dragon was enraged. And maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when, in bitterness, we find he has been working to subvert the distinctive powers of women. Human flourishing in the world is, after all, wholly dependent on the fruitfulness that is unique to women.

The psychosis brought on by feminism over the past sixty years, during which time women have been encouraged to eschew the consequentiality of motherhood in favor of devoting themselves to the pursuit of mere money, is laughably absurd when understood from a civilizational perspective. Women have been deceived into believing that the faux prestige of having a “career” is somehow more important than creating and nurturing entirely new human beings. From a societal perspective, such a mindset is actively suicidal. But at a personal level, it borders on the ridiculous. It boggles the mind that so many women have been snookered into exchanging the birthright of their most fertile years for the sodden pottage of modern workplace trivialities.

And yet, maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising. The enemy has always worked to thwart the purposes of God. Perhaps we should recognize an overarching theme in the enthusiasms of the last two generations. That old dragon has expended considerable effort to throttle human reproduction (“the pill”), and to denigrate motherhood (feminism). He has worked to undermine families (divorce) which alone are the incubators of childhood flourishing. The modern educational system leaves young men unprepared to take up the responsibilities of family life - thereby extending adolescence and delaying family formation. (Why is it that after enduring 12 years of monopolistic public education, most young men graduate with no measurable skills and no economic viability?) A lifestyle dedicated to consumption is actively encouraged, both by businesses and government. Indeed, our economy is actually dependent upon excessive consumption. Thus are we bombarded at every turn by media whose intent is to inflame our desire to consume. And, not coincidentally, our economy’s dependence on excessive household consumption works against the economic viability of single-income households and, thereby, undermines the desire of many mothers who wish to devote themselves to their children without having to maintain competing obligations.

Modern safetyism, among the other inflationary pressures it imposes, also requires children to ride in car seats well up into childhood. This amounts to a stealthy form of contraception, putting the costs associated with having a third child out of reach for many couples.

Even modern trends in decorating aesthetics militate against the kind of lifestyle that is conducive of having children in the home.

The suppression of fertility and the denigration of motherhood have another unhappy effect on women: they thwart the natural intuition about themselves that they might have otherwise celebrated in gratitude: the life-giving ability that women alone are capable of. The young woman described in the New York Post article, linked to above, has intuited that the ideas she has embraced may have robbed her of something. She is onto part of that “something” when she reasonably identifies the fact that her belief in feminist ideals has left her verging on losing her opportunity to ever have children. But it seems to me that children are only part of what has been stolen from her. By encouraging her, and many young women like her, to resent the beauty and benefits of her own fertility, feminism has pushed her to substitute joy in how she has been made, which joy she might otherwise have had, with a kind of self-loathing and resentment. “Why have you made me thus?!!” has emerged as the elemental, petulant and primal cry of modern feminism. One is left wondering if the resentment at the impositions of one’s own body, which resentment underpins feminist thinking, doesn’t contribute in some way to the mental health crisis being experienced by young women in the West. Feminist resentment at the constraints imposed by female embodiment would be, in that sense, analogous to the body dysmorphia one sees among transgenders, and with similarly unhappy mental health effects. Being estranged from the healthy capacities of one’s own body brings many things into a woman’s life, but settled happiness isn’t one of them.

By contrast, Mary willingly accepted God’s use of her womb as the vessel to knit together the one whose beauty and goodness the world has now celebrated on Christmas for thousands of years. Having expectations of herself that were consistent with the way she had been made, Mary was reconciled to the unique, life-making potential of her own body. She was thus able to play a central role in God’s audacious plan to rescue the world from the slavering jaws of the ancient dragon. Every mother before or since, by bringing her own family to life, has modeled for those around her the very same virtues which led Mary to nurture the new life God had placed within her womb — the unborn child who was destined to become the savior of the world.

Merry Christmas!