Chapter 18: The Soul Is Feminine
THE SOUL IS FEMININE
IT IS still early morning as I sit down to my typewriter, although I have been up to the Coast Guard Station on my bicycle and seen thirty-one rabbits and two deer and looked through the pay telescope at the rusted hulk of the tanker Pendleton, which was wrecked in 1952. The tide is low. The clam diggers are out on the salt flats across the harbor with their rakes, and a schooner has just been towed by. Yesterday’s strong wind has subsided and the harbor is calm, the air still and warm.
Wind, weather, and tide fulfill His word. It is a calming, steadying thing to know that there is a word for us as well. Psalm 144:12 says, “May our daughters be like corner pillars cut for the structure of a palace.” Pillars uphold and support. This is a woman’s place, and all of us need to know what our place is and to be put in it. The command of God puts us there where we belong. We know our “creatureliness,” our dependence. If there is a command for us we know we are recognized. We know that we fit into God’s universe, we know our relation to the rest of mankind, to the family, and, if we have one, to a husband. Meekness, I believe, is the recognition of that place. Moses, the Bible tells us, was a “very meek man.” I don’t think of him at all as meek in the popular sense —timid, self-abnegating, colorless. Far from it. But to be meek is to have a sane and proper estimate of one’s place in the scheme of things. It is a sense of proportion.
According as a pillar is cut and shaped to fit into a particular place and carry a specified weight, it is by that cutting and shaping differentiated and limited. It is the very differentiation and limitation that that pillar has to offer. So with us. We’ve been cut to a certain size and shape to fulfill a certain function. It is this, not that. It is a woman’s offering, not a man’s, that we have to give.
Mary is the archetype of human self-giving. When told of the awesome privilege which was to be hers as the mother of the Most High, her response was total acceptance. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it unto me according to Thy word.” She might have hesitated because she didn’t want to go through life being known only as somebody’s mother. She might have had her own dreams of fulfillment. But she embraced at once the will of God. Her “Be it unto me” ought to be the response of every man or woman to that will, and it is in this sense that the soul and the Church have been seen throughout Christian history as female before God, for it is the nature of the woman to submit.