Sunday, 6/23/13
We might highlight St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians where
he said, “For all of you who are baptized
in Christ, there is neither male nor female.”
I leaned on that line in a play I had for grade school kids
maybe fifteen years ago. My play was about Ignatius of Antioch and Emperor
Trajan. The play opened in the emperor’s court where a slave girl from Galatia
was sitting alone, going over the emperor’s mail, and to herself she was
singing, “Christians in Galatia taught me
to write, but I was made a slave by thugs who turned my days to night.”
Basically, for us Christians there is neither male nor
female, because before all else we are all persons made in God’s image. I have
been boring people by harping too much on the thought that each of us mirror’s
God in a unique way. I hope I am not wrong in this, but I consider God to be so
many faceted that each of us has the potential of being like God in a way no
one else is like him. Each of us, you and I, have the potential of being like
him in a way no one else is.
What put me on to this line of thought was Vatican II’s
document on Christian education. It stated that as teachers our task is to aid
each child in his or her task of becoming a unique person.
Much of our way of putting women down comes from social
structures that assign them to a lower place. Up until 1900 no women were
admitted to Harvard or Yale, and even tough women thought it should had to be so,
because women are the strong defenders of proprieties. From Korea fifty years
ago I have strong memories of a tough woman who wanted men and women to stick
to their proper roles.
Miss Pak was the English teacher in the Boys’ High School,
and she was had so often been coming to me for English conversation practice
that she thought it might be proper for her to become a Catholic. So she asked
me, “Should I become a Catholic?” And when I answered, “That’s up to you” she got
bossy with me, as she often did. She said, “You are the man. Don’t you even
know that men make the decisions?”
I was delighted yesterday with our newspaper’s account about
Moira Rossi. She is an intellectually disabled young woman who won in her
campaign to have the Florida Legislature pass a bill requiring that all state
statutes do away with applying the term Retarded to people like herself. The
Army urges us all to be the best we can be, and Moira’s strong religion has
always had her striving to be the best she can be.
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