Harnessing concealed strength woman Catholic Herald

"Driving to France, I found the modern world mystifying. We've lost the power of women and are bleeding out as a result."

During a 14-hour drive to the south of France, I found myself spending a good chunk of the time on the phone with my father's GP surgery. As I drove past French towns, I was updated on my position in the telephone queue. By the time I reached Dijon, I had made it into the top ten.

My 90-year-old dad is mystified by the new world he finds himself in. He feels lost and struggles to recognize the world he now inhabits. A world of increasing automation and de-personalized interaction.

This sense of loss is largely due to a kind of feminism that has run amuck. It claims radical egalitarianism and disdains the role of women as mothers. It has robbed our culture of the concealed strength of women - and its effects have been devastating.

Unfettered liberty, untethered from our creator, has resulted in a culture of sterility and death. Women have become objects to be used and discarded. This surrender is what the world is crying out for now and it requires women to recognize and harness their unique power as women, and not simply to imitate men.

As US philosopher Peter Kreeft astutely noted: "When God uses glue, don't use scissors." But we do, repeatedly, in the modern world.

Absent God, we fail to recognize that not only a visible (masculine) pillar but an invisible (feminine) pillar support the world. The power of the religious is the invisible power without which the visible pillars of the world have no integrity. Feminism has robbed us of this integrity. What follows is a world dominated by machines that embody the worst stereotypes of a godless masculinity.

The end point of a vision set apart from God eradicates woman because its horizontal worldview cannot acknowledge the invisible pillar which gives integrity to all that is visible. Feminism has succeeded in securing a great masculine victory.

"Man exercises his historically effective talents publicly and, in that performance, spends his strength, woman is also the carrier of historically effective talents and while her endowment is equal to that of man, she expends it not for herself but for the next generation," says Gertrude von Le Fort. "She is the carrier of the religious, the concealed strength of the culture, which is the surrendering power of the cosmos in the face of the eternal God. In this surrendering power lies the font of reverence for God and the appropriate humility of creature as creature."

When man and woman come together in marriage, we hear the words: "What god has joined together let no man put asunder". This same message of harmony between the masculine and the feminine echoes through all creation.

But instead of daring to look at that awesome panorama, our myopically focused world is full of policies, programs, and initiatives designed to heal the wounds created by our constant and continuous acts of self-harm.

In no longer acknowledging our dependency on God, we claim strength in our own salvific power and using the broken pieces that we have pulled apart we construct a world according to our own image. But our own image, if not a reflection of the divine, is beastly.

Never before has a true understanding of Mary the Theotokos been so important. Only Mary can show us the true meaning of woman as bride and mother and reveal to us the lost power of the feminine.

Unless we restore the charism of woman as woman, to be an instrument of God in the world, to be the surrendering power of creature before the creator, then we will bleed out from wounds inflicted by the enlightenment myth of perpetual progress through human power alone.