The Stein Speech (Abridged)

The Edith Stein sections of my May speech about "The Theology of Woman: St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross and John Paul II" have appeared in their entirety on the Dzielne Niewiasty blog. Twenty-four paragraphs strikes me as a lot for one blog post. I will skip the biographical stuff and just post the theological overview.

All direct quotations from Saint Edith Stein come from "Essays on Woman," Volume 2 of The Collected Works of Edith Stein, translated by Freda Mary Oben. As this was a speech, I didn't create the ordinary scholarly apparatus. And let me tell you, I regretted this later when I was translating the quotes into Polish. (Had I written the citations, I could potentially have found the official Polish version of St. Edith Stein's writings and swiftly looked them up.)

By the way, I am putting up a new tip jar because we are in serious need of a new vacuum cleaner in our battle with the common British clothes moth. B.A. would also like you to know that I have been known to proofread and edit the English style of academic essays for $40/hr. I accept work only from people who are recommended by their professors, however, so this is not an ad to the students, but to any professors who would prefer that someone fix up their keen but illegible foreign students' essays before the professors have to read them. Theology a specialty.

St. Edith Stein's Theology of Woman

It is a miracle that Saint Edith’s manuscripts and notebooks survived the war. When, after her arrest, a bomb fell on her monastery in the Netherlands, the nuns and villagers ran around rescuing her papers from the wind and the rain. Her writings on women were eventually gathered into a volume called “Die Frau: Ihre Aufgabe nach Natur und Gnade”, which translated means “Woman: Her task according to nature and Grace.” This book has been translated into several languages including Polish, and I think that everyone with university-level reading comprehension should read it. The essays are challenging, but deeply helpful for men and women to understand woman’s nature and what she is called to do in the modern world.

Saint Edith examined the reality of what it is to be a woman from two sources: Scripture and her experience of living as a woman among women as a teacher of girls and women. Her philosophical training under Husserl taught her to subject everything she was told about women to the light of lived experience. (It is a failure to do this which led Aristotle, most dramatically, to make severe errors about women, which subsequent generations merely parroted, without examining lived realities.)

Saint Edith identified a woman as human, first of all, called to the same overall human project as men: to be the image of God, bring forth children and be masters over the earth. Men and women are in the image of God because they have reason. They bring forth physical or spiritual children. They are masters over the created earth in several ways: they are “to fight and conquer it; to understand it and by knowledge to make it [their] own, to possess and enjoy it, and finally, and to make it in a sense [their] own creation through purposeful activity.” But Saint Edith sees that men and women differ in the ways they use their reason, have children, and exercise their rule over their earth. For example, men have a tendency to concentrate on only one subject or aspect at a time, whereas women have a tendency to multi-task and see “the whole picture”. In this they compliment and correct each other.

Saint Edith also observes that women are much more interested in people and in helping others with their work than men are; men literally prefer to mind their own business. Unless economic necessity directs otherwise, most men gravitate towards subjects and professions involving physical strength, independence or abstract thought, whereas women gravitate towards professions that focus on helping people: medicine, teaching, social work, translation. However, she sees no profession to which women are not suited: she observes that women have unique gifts to bring to what have been male-dominated professions. There is no need for women to become like men in order to enter a profession: what is needful is that a woman enter the profession for which her own unique personal talents most suit her and in such a way that this profession does not interfere with her primary vocation which is, whether or not she literally gives birth, a mother.

Motherhood is key to Saint Edith Stein’s theology of woman, and her great model for motherhood is Mary, Mother of God. Just as Our Lord Jesus Christ is the “New Adam” who frees humanity from the sin of Adam, so the Mother of God is the “New Eve” by whom Our Lord Jesus Christ enters the world. Eve was tempted by the serpent and sinned; Mary did not sin and gave birth to the Son who defeated the serpent.

Because the New Adam and the New Eve are mother and child, Saint Edith infers that woman’s most important role towards humanity is not her role as a wife, but her role as mother. Indeed, even a married woman’s role as a human wife is subordinate to her call to be a mother, which is to say, motherly. Edith talks of a spiritual motherhood, not just a physical motherhood; many women who do not have children, like female religious or other unmarried women, have a vast capacity for maternal love than can and should be used for the whole community. It is, in fact, a feminine gift which can help women become more like the Mother of God.

Jednakże w badaniach Księgi Rodzaju... Just kidding!

But in her studies of Genesis, Edith Stein notes two things in particular: that Adam was made before Eve and that Eve was made as a helper and a companion for Adam. She reflects that by having been created first, Adam seems to have a certain precedence over Eve. This masculine precedence is echoed in the fact that Our Lord Jesus Christ chose to live His humanity as a man. Thus, Saint Edith does not depart from the belief that woman was made for man, to be a helper and a companion for the man. And she sees in women around her an earnest desire to be helpful and to be companions for men. However, she notes that before the Fall, the relationship between man and woman was not the relationship of domination and submission it became after the Fall. Man’s tyranny over women is a result of Original Sin and should have no part of the redemption brought by Our Lord Jesus Christ. She notes that Adam showed what a bad master he was going to be when he immediately blamed Eve for giving him the apple.

Saint Edith has a keen sense that we still live under the effects of Original Sin and whenever she talks about humanity, femininity or masculinity, she always notes that we have a fallen humanity, a fallen femininity and a fallen masculinity. (She notes, too, that certain men have more developed feminine characteristics, and certain women have more developed masculine characteristics). Men have to strive against the fallen aspects of masculinity just as women have to strive against the fallen aspects of femininity. For example, men are more likely to become very narrow in their attitude towards the world: striving only for one thing or one goal, to the neglect of other needful things, including the feelings of other people. Women, however, with our interest in other people are more likely to become involved in other people’s business in a meddlesome way. And Stein also warns that if women become narrow in our approach to the world, we become narrow in a particularly dangerous way, abandoning abstract thought and creative action to focus solely on the possession and enjoyment of a good life. Our “reverent joy in the things of this world degenerates into greed” leading us to hoard things we don’t need, or to lapse “into a mindless, idle life of sensuality. “ We can well imagine what she means — ultimately to live for food, romance, entertainment and shopping.

Our primary model for overcoming the fallenness of our female nature is, for Saint Edith, the Mother of God. Not only is the Mother of God a model of obedience and openness to God, of marriage and of motherhood, but of how we should do our paid work. She writes, “Mary at the wedding of Cana in her quiet, observing look surveys everything and discovers what is lacking. Before anything is noticed, even before embarrassment sets in, she had procured the remedy. She finds ways and means, she gives necessary directives, doing all quietly. She draws no attention to herself. Let her be the prototype of women in professional life. Wherever situated, let her always perform her work quietly and dutifully, without claiming attention and appreciation. And at the same time, she should survey the conditions with vigilant eye. Let her be conscious of where there is a want and where help is needed, intervening and regulating as far as it is possible in her power in a discreet way. Then she will like a good spirit spread blessing everywhere.”

What Saint Edith was proposing was a radical departure from the arguments around the Woman Question. Instead of asserting with the feminists that women were the same as men, and therefore equal, or with the traditionalists that women were different from men, and therefore unequal, she asserted that women were both different from men and equal to men, with just one caveat: that men had some kind of precedence shown by the fact that Adam was created first and by the fact that Our Blessed Saviour chose to live His human life as a man. This precedence, however, does not mean that female life is any less important. Indeed, Stein points out that a woman’s assent — Eve’s to the serpent and then Mary’s to God — “determined the destiny of humanity as a whole.” And while Saint Edith affirmed that men, whose primary vocation seems to leadership, and fatherhood a secondary part of this leadership, are the heads of their families, she notes that a good leader knows when to deputize. She writes that “the husband will find that [the wife] will give him invaluable advice in guiding the lives of their children as well as themselves; indeed, often he would fulfil his duties as a leader best if he would yield to her and permit himself to be led by her.”

Meanwhile, Saint Edith put the good of the man and woman’s family life before any professional consideration. She is deeply concerned for the happiness of women who, through no choice of their own, find that their professional work conflicts with their responsibilities to their families. She notes that such a conflict is a heavier burden on mothers than it is on fathers. She asserts that “Any social condition is an unhealthy one which compels [my emphasis] married women to seek gainful employment and makes it impossible for them to manage their home. And we should accept as normal that the married woman is restricted to domestic life at a time when her household duties exact her total energies.” I think Saint Edith Stein would support a movement to grant Polish mothers more than just 20 weeks of maternity leave.

Saint Edith’s theology of woman is also the source for the notion of the complementarity of men and women: the idea that men and women, working together, combining masculine and feminine characteristics, create a balanced whole, not only in family life, but in professional and national life, as well. Saint Edith’s work is so well known today because of her most famous disciple, who never met her, and was in Kraków when Saint Edith was murdered with her sister in Auschwitz. I speak, of course, of Saint Jan Paweł II.

---from "A Speech about the Theology of Women of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross and St. John Paul II to the Dzielne Niewiasty in Kraków, Poland on May 4, 2014 " by Dorothy Cummings McLean.

The Reluctant Gatekeepers

Following on the work of St. Edith Stein and St. John Paul II, I feel no embarrassment in saying that men and women are different in fundamental ways. And again following Saint Edith, I observe that femininity, which women tend to have more of than men do, and masculinity, which men tend to have more of than women do, have been adversely affected by the Fall. Just as we live in a fallen world, a creation warped by Original Sin, so masculinity and femininity are fallen, too. All the more reason to look to Our Lord for the best example we have for what masculinity should look like and to His Blessed Mother, conceived without sin, for prelapsarian femininity.

St. Edith notes in her writing that Our Lord was the New Adam and Our Lady was the New Eve, and she reflects also that it is significant that Our Lady's principal role was not spousal but maternal. Both Saint Edith and Saint John Paul hold that all women are called to be mothers of one kind or another.

Saint Edith does not think that men's principal role is paternal. She thinks fatherhood is just a subset of the male call to leadership. Since the Fall, of course, this leadership contains the seeds of selfish tyranny. And fallen motherhood, I would add, contains the seeds of selfishness, too. Mothers have a huge amount of emotional power, and some use this power for evil. Think of the female mentor who develops relationships of trust with younger women at work only to stab them in the back. Yikes.

However, I think a much more likely female sin is to abdicate maternal responsibility, either letting their own kids run wild, or even indulging their bad habits, or giggling foolishly while their male friends behave badly, or just giving in when their boyfriends start to take their relationship "to another level" in the front of a Honda Civic.

At this point readers may shout, "But he shouldn't start to take the relationship to another level in the back of a Honda Civic! Why do I have to be the one who says no?" And I would say, "Because he's the one being excessive." According to the traditional scheme of things, masculine men take leadership in sexual advances. (I would add that more feminine men expect women to seduce them and feel disappointed when we don't.) This leadership is, thanks to the Fall, flawed. And therefore it is a principal of redeemed motherhood to say "No. Stop. This is getting a bit crazy, so I think we'd better cool it."

Frankly, whoever is being excessive is the one who needs correcting. I am sure B.A. could give you examples of feminine excess at the Historical House. Let me see. Oh, I suspect I am way too interested in my friends' lives. And I even used to mope or cry occasionally when not invited to certain parties, which B.A. thought was ridiculous. Saint Edith Stein would say that this was textbook fallen feminine behaviour, had expressions like "textbook behaviour" been current before 1942. Of course, B.A. gets excessive in his leadership, e.g. haranguing me in an over-exasperated tone, which I counter by wailing, "You're not making me feel better! I'm sorry I mentioned it. I should have called a WOMAN!" Etc, etc. Ah, the joys of marriage.

But actually that is what marriage is for, other than having babies, I mean (of the body and/or of the spirit). Man confronts fallen femininity and helps his wife rise above it, and woman confronts fallen masculinity and helps her husband rise above that. To use a very basic example, husbands question the practical advantage of expensive if pretty shoes, and women ban sexual sin. The thought of B.A. saying "Aw geez" upon finding out I spent 65 quid on a new pair of pretty shoes generally stops me from buying a new pair of pretty shoes. And the force of my yowls that he change that channel, makes B.A. change the channel. I was so outraged by that rapey sexual scenario with the Turkish guy that poor B.A. never got to see "Downton Abbey" again. However, how dare they beam such filth into gthe sitting-rooms of Britain? (I admit it was an example of feminine excess to insult All Britain, e.g. What's wrong with you people?, at the time.)

Camille Paglia (you didn't see that name coming, did you?) thinks sexually active hom*sexu*l men are heroes for spitting in the eye of Mother Nature, but even she was shaken by the excesses of urban American gay cult*re in the 1970s. She blamed the excess on the fact that there were no women involved. Given that there was no feminine check on masculine sexual behaviour, she was not surprised by the AIDS epidemic. And, lo and behold, in current discussions around same-sex "marri*ge" the very concept of sexual fidelity is being held up to ridicule. I thought the Sex and the City franchise, though straining every fan's credulity in marrying off Anthony Marentino to Stanford Blatch, was refreshingly open about the fact that Anthony had no intention of curbing his polyandrous sex life just because he was married. And actually it could indeed be that Stanford wouldn't care, as long as Anthony respected their emotional bond, treating all his other partners as, I don't know, less than. For one thing, Stanley might take it as tacit permission to do the same thing. And thus they would encourage each other not in virtue but in excess. Most women, however, naturally and laudably draw the line at such self-indulgent (and destructive) promiscuity in the men they love.

I am not saying, by the way, that women do not suffer from sexual temptation. Of course we do. Obviously this is not something to brag about although certainly chastity educators {who trains these people? do they all have certificates from accredited institutions, or what?*) need to learn about contemporary realities instead of repeating the tired cliches that might have been true back in 1950, when pop culture was not giving girls a 24/7 training in vice. But I am saying that one thing hasn't changed, and it is that women are called to confront masculine excess, both in men and, increasingly, in themselves.


*Here's a thought. No Catholic school, parish or organization should host chastity speakers who have neither a certificate or diploma in moral theology (or philosophy) from an accredited institution nor episcopal oversight. Both would be best. Me, I have an M.Div., but no oversight. You should remember that, especially if you are young, and if teenage readers are ever troubled or enthusiastic about anything I write, I want you to discuss it with a wise and trusted adult who knows and loves you, okay? Just because someone on the internet seems smart or fun does not mean she or he has all the answers.

Neither Gods nor Monsters

I was greatly amused to read this piece in Crisis, for it is written by a theology professor at the University of Saint Thomas in Texas. There is no theology in it; it reads like one of my blogposts. Hey, I should be writing for Crisis.

(By the way, your Auntie Seraphic is rather broke at the moment. Does anyone know of any lovely magazine where they need someone to fill in a page or two? Are you yourself procrastinating at your desk at Elle or the National Catholic Register, perchance? Have you just had to fire a writer for drunkenness/incoherence? Contact ME, Auntie S, by email.)

Anyway, I found the article amusing also because it described how adolescent males don't understand women, and thus I learned something about adolescent males.

Poppets, sometimes teenage girls write in asking for advice about teenage boys, and I stare at the screen like a bunny in the headlights because I have no clue. I went to an all-girls school, and so busy were my brothers as teens that I saw them only at meals, really. I was absolutely clueless about teenage boys, whom I saw very rarely, and was wont to think of them either as gods (the few chosen by my imagination to fixate upon for months or years on end) or monsters, since everyone knew teenage boys were as horny as toads.

I was not particularly rooted in reality.

Since then, I think I have figured out adult men, but adolescent men have still been a mystery, except for the fact that many adult-looking men are actually still adolescents. And I do not mean this in a nasty, "shame-on-you" way, but as a statement of fact, as in "Some people do not get their wisdom teeth until they are in their 40s." Some people are just very young for their age. (I am very young for my age. This is good and bad: good because I retain the lightheartedness associated with youth, and bad because I don't know how to drive, am broke, etc.) Dr. Smith says in his article that he knows adolescent males aged 35.

That was not a revelation to me. The revelation was why adolescent men moan, complain, and fight with women and then wonder why the women get mad.

Young men think of themselves as treating their guy friends with respect all the time, even if they've shoved them around the basketball court, sworn at them to high heaven, and told them how ridiculous their ideas are. For some strange reason, young women don't generally see it that way. For some reason, women tend to get offended when you shove them around, yell at them, and tell them how stupid their ideas are. Strange, I know, but it's a fact of life, so we'd better get young men used to it early, or we'll find them, as we so often find them today, utterly baffled as to why so many young women in their lives are upset and offended all the time.

Baffled and misogynist. I recently heard a young man complain that he could not tell a woman that her ideas are stupid without her getting angry, which is why this paragraph jumped out at me. The young man's theory, however, was this was because women are illogical and less able to argue abstract ideas in a dispassionate way.

As I studied epistemology in some depth at theology school, and got top marks, I found his theory personally annoying, which might have proved his point. I then had a conversation with B.A., who used to be a lecturer in philosophy, about women in philosophy, and found myself getting annoyed again.

But I think this is because--like many women--I can see the far-reaching implications of ideas faster than the average man can. The average man hones in exclusively on Point A, for example, whereas the average woman immediately sees Point A in relationship to Points B, C, W, and Z. The average man might not remember, for example, that for thousands of years women were kept out of higher education, careers, jobs teaching philosophy*, etc., on the grounds that we were supposedly much stupider than men.

But that's another post for another day. The point for reflection is that young men manhandle their male friends, cuss them out and tell them their ideas are stupid, and their male friends don't take this personally. And therefore when young men feel friendly towards young women--and not tongue-tied, frightened or angst-ridden--they feel confident in a bit of rough-housing, cussing and telling you your ideas are stupid.

I find this quite a relief because occasionally young men I like very much tell me how stupid my ideas are, and I wonder if they simply despise me. At best, I assume that they think I am just some kind of token man, i.e. not a real woman. However, it would appear that young men talk like this to women not because they despise us or think we aren't really women, but because young men think this is just how one speaks to all people with whom one is on friendly terms.

Well, well, well.

The fallout, of course, is not just that young men alienate the very women whom they like best. It is also that those young women who think being told they are stupid is all they deserve are going to giggle, cling to the young men and go along with their half-baked ideas of what women are supposed to be like. Dr Smith thinks that this is a recipe for unhappy marriages, and so do I. He thinks the solution is for parents to actually educate their sons about women, and so do I.

Of course, adolescent males being adolescents, they are likely to reject what their parents say. And this is too bad because it is then up to adolescent females to try and civilize Mr Rough-house, Cuss and Insult. What a lot of work for successive girlfriends on behalf of the woman Mr Rough-house, Cuss and Insult actually does marry in the end.

Happily for me, B.A. was perfect when I got him. And, of course, he wasn't an adolescent. I don't know when he made the transition from adolescent to adult because I wasn't around to see it. For all I know, it was just before I showed up.

Honestly, I don't think "adolescent" is an insult. It's just a stage. Not everybody matures at the same rate. Whether or not you have the patience to accompany an older adolescent through his painful acquisition of adulthood is something only you can decide.

*Saint Edith Stein could not get a German university post because German philosophy departments did not accept women as faculty until 1949.

Made for Friendship

Now that Lucy, Jeff and I have got you all riled up, I will calm you down with some soothing thoughts borrowed from Saint Edith Stein.

By the way, thank you very much to those readers who have written in to say that they have responded to my nagging and actually read Saint Edith Stein's essays on women. One of you mentioned feeling a bit mental because of wanting to talk about her with somebody, and I now recommend throwing a "Brainy Evening" party in which everyone invited has to read the Stein essay you send them and then talk about it during the party. Of course not all the guests will actually read it, so write key quotes on cue cards and hand them out with the drinks.

Suffice it to say, Saint Edith would neither write "I blame men" nor agree to a thesis that "American [or German or Wrocławian, in her case] women lack charm." What Stein did do was examine masculinity and femininity in light of Scripture and philosophy, observing the gifts of each and the ways in which both had been warped slightly by original sin.

Stein thought that both masculinity and femininity brought necessary gifts to all of human life, including the factory floor, and emphasized that both men and women are made in the image and likeness of God. Humanity is a unity of two. And this is where it gets interesting.

Stein was not that interested in the subject of marriage, per se. When she thought of marriage, she thought in more general terms, of Man being wedded to Woman in the species called Human. Much more important to her than the husband-wife bond was the mother-child bond. In fact, she speculated that it was something erotic in the Adam-Eve relationship that brought about the Fall, which gave her posthumous orthodox editors a few seizures.

Saint Edith holds up Mary, Mother of God (and of us all) as the great model for women. And she sees that women have two choices in regards to our not inconsiderable influence on men: we can be sexy Eve and seriously mess them up, or we can be motherly Mary and lead them to Christ. Obviously she thinks we should be Mary, exercising either our biological or spiritual motherhood to help men--and other women--flourish.

This emphasis on motherhood is, I think, a very good corrective when men and women see each other as nothing more than erotic turn-ons and turn-offs. Very few of us would want to marry Jeff. Okay, but what can we do for Jeff? Jeff is a human being, our brother in Christ, a fellow Catholic, a fellow TRAD Catholic for some of us. What can we do for him?

We cannot do much, really, as long as Jeff is fixated on whether American Catholic women are worth marrying or not. One might want to ask Jeff if American Catholic women are worth befriending. After all, that is what Christian life is all about: "I call you friends," said the Lord. Friendship between men and women who are not related by ties of blood or marriage is part of the first century Christian revolution.

(I am suddenly reminded of a Jesuit classmate who met a Muslim acquaintance, a fellow student, on the streets of Toronto and made the "mistake" of addressing the Muslim student's wife, demurely tucked behind him. The Jesuit classmate felt badly for being so insensitive. He was glad the Muslim student had just pretended it hadn't happened. Auntie's snarled response to her Jesuit classmate: "This is TORONTO." She might have also said, "We are Christians.")

I hope Jeff has female friends, women who like him without feeling an overwhelming erotic attraction, for perhaps they will sit down with him, like the spiritual mothers they are, and explain why he is unlikely to attract any adult American women with his views.** If he understands that they truly desire his good, and he is grown up enough not to sulk that they don't desire him, then he might learn something and thus become more attractive to his fellow Americans.

Before I read the work of Edith Stein, which was not that long ago, I used to say that I didn't have many men friends. I would mention about B.A.'s friends, which caused some hilarity among B.A.'s friends, who are actually, although in a different way, my friends, too. (And reading this blog even though they know perfectly well it is for girls.)

I had a much narrower view of friendship than Saint Edith's, for my idea of friendship of necessity included a certain kind of emotional intimacy. But Saint Edith's thoughts on spiritual motherhood made me think about that again. It is possible to care for many men without becoming too attached to them or expecting them to behave like female friends or scandalizing anyone or annoying your husband, if you have one.

In other words, men are not just the caffeine in the coffee of life. And this reminds me of one of my men friends who occasionally addresses me as "Hen."

"Hen" is the Scottish, or maybe just Edinburgh, working-class term of endearment for neighbouring women. It is like American "honey" or "hon." Local wifies (women) address each other as "hen," and local men address local wifies as "hen" if they think they won't get into trouble. Apparently it is now a bit politically incorrect for men to call women "hen", although I can't imagine why. I certainly like being called "hen" better than "pal", which is how working-class Scottish men address each other.

Anyway, I thought for a long time how to respond to my friend's cries of "Hello, hen" or "How are you doing, hen?" because they are usually outbreaks of banter and the laws of banter demand the ability to banter back. So I listened very hard for how local women address local men and finally found a near equivalent for "hen".

"How are you doing, hen?" asked Friend, age 50.

"I'm doing fine, son," I replied.

**UPDATE: Sciencegirl brings up a good objection, so I will emphasize "the spiritual mothers they are"[already]. Spiritual motherhood is not some external-to-you spiritual-mother-costume you put on. And it is not sounding like Marmee in Little Woman or Jo in Little Men. If you're me, Spiritual Motherhood can sound like what I write here (although I don't talk to men like this). If you're Jeff's female friend, Spiritual Motherhood might indeed sound like, "Hey, Jeff, how are those Polish lessons going?"

Update 2: Erased two updates. Dear me. How exhausting. Sometimes when men leave comments I coldly rub them out. But sometimes when men leave comments I get really angry, but then feel badly later for getting really angry when this is supposed to be a friendly blog.

The Great Give-Away

My first lecture at the "Brave Women" retreat in Kraków next month is on St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, otherwise known as Edith Stein. Edith Stein was born in Wrocław (then Breslau) and died in Auschwitz, which is not far from Kraków.

Edith Stein was one of those mindbogglingly brilliant women born before the Second World War who was impeded in her career first by being female and second by being Jewish. ("Jewish" was considered an ethnic group or racial type, so converting to Christianity did not make a Jew not-Jewish in the eyes of wider society.) Stein was keenly interested in the "Woman Question" and her writings were very influential to the thought of a certain Karol Wojtyła and so, in time, to a papal encyclical called Mulieris Dignitatem.

I have often thought about readers who write to me saying that they long to "give themselves to a man" and thus find Single life an incredible burden and premarital sex a terrible temptation. (By the way, I pray for all my readers every Sunday at the Elevation of the Chalice.) So I was electrified when I read this passage in Stein's "The Ethos of Women's Professions":

It is the deepest desire of a woman’s heart to surrender itself lovingly to another, to be wholly his and to possess him wholly. This is at the root of her tendency towards the personal and the whole, which seems to us the specifically feminine characteristic. Where this total surrender is made to human being, it is a perverted self-surrender that enslaves her, and implies at the same time an unjustified demand which no human being can fulfil. Only God can receive the complete surrender of a person and in such a way that she will not lose, but gain her soul. And only God can give Himself to a human being in such a way that He will fulfil its whole being while losing nothing of His own. Hence the total surrender which is the principle of the religious life, is at the same time the only possible adequate fulfilment of women’s desire.
…
…What practical consquence follows from this? It certainly does not follow that all women who would fulfil their vocation should not become nuns. But it does follow that the fallen and perverted feminine nature [NB Stein has earlier explained the effects of the fall on both the feminine and masculine natures] can be restored to its purity and led to the heights of the vocational ethos such as the pure feminine nature represents, only if it is totally surrendered to God. Whether she lives as a mother in her home, in the limelight of public life or behind the silent walls of a convent, she must everywhere be a ‘handmaid of the Lord’, as the Mother of God had been in all the circumstances of her life, whether she was living as a virgin in the sacred precincts of the Temple, silently kept house at Bethlehem and Nazareth or guided the apostles and the first Christian community after the death of her Son. If every woman were an image of the Mother of God, a spouse of Christ and an apostle of the divine Heart, she woul fulfil her feminine vocation no matter in what circumstances she lived and what her external activities might be.

Discuss.

Puppy Love in the Cold War

Once upon a time, my little chickadees, two great powers divided much of the world. These powers were called NATO and the USSR, which is to say the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Both powers were rather worried that one would attack the other, and they both pointed nuclear warheads in each other's direction.

My mother spent her childhood under the shadow of the Bomb, and so did I. My mother's primary school welcomed refugee Germans, and my primary school welcomed refugee Yugoslavs, Romanians, Poles, Hungarians, Vietnamese and others who had managed to escape the confines of life under Communism. A Polish priest, two steps ahead of the SB, appeared in my parish. A Hungarian priest, recently released from captivity, recovered in the Hungarian parish around the corner, down the street.

We thought in terms of "Evil Empire" and "Iron Curtain". My brother bought a single called "Russians," in which Sting hopes "the Russians love their children, too." There were hit songs about nuclear war: "99 Red Balloons" and "Forever Young" were just two of many. It was widely known that the Iron Curtain was difficult to get through, and photos of poor Eastern Germans who had been shot trying to get over the Berlin Wall appeared in Time magazine.

Occasionally, though, people could get temporary visas to visit either side of the Iron Curtain. When I was about six, a Polish couple and one or two of their children came to Canada to visit their brother, my father's friend. They all came to visit my family at the cottage we had rented or borrowed beside Georgian Bay, a famous beauty spot in Ontario. The eldest son of this Polish family was about five years old, spoke absolutely no English and was struck by a passion for little me. Being without guile, he threw his arms around me at once, and seemed glued to my side for the duration of his visit.

I was rather astonished by this, and there exists a photo of my six year old self caught in something between a hug and a headlock smiling weakly at the camera. Small Canadian boys of my acquaintance did not act like that, especially not towards me. However, even at six I knew that inspiring this kind of regard in a boy was what a great many people thought life was all about. So when my admirer went home, I inquired of my mother where that was, and that is how I realized that real people lived behind the Iron Curtain. I had some shy notion of sending him one of my toys, but my mother said people behind the Iron Curtain did not need toys but basic things like soap and medicine. She impressed upon me that they were all tremendously poor and hard to see, and I was unlikely ever to see my admirer again.

All this seemed very unfair, and in those days I was easily discouraged. It did not even occur to me to suggest we send over a nice box of soap and medicine, then. Instead I treasured the fact, so important in the decadent West, that I had once had an admirer, and it was some comfort in the horrible years ahead when that became the primary measure of one's worth in the schoolyard. It was even, I blush to admit, balm to a recent graze to my ego when a Polish parishioner mentioned (yet again) the superior beauty of Polish girls in general. I informed him that I, at any rate, had been up to Polish standards when I was six.

This set a train of thought in motion, and it slowly chugged its way across the maps laid out after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nobody had expected the Wall to fall--on reruns of Star Trek Pavel Chekhov still nattered on about cossacks and Leningrad--but it did, shattering the Iron Curtain between thriving us and impoverished them. And what is more, and possibly even more staggering, is that it is now possible to find almost anybody alive through the internet. So I found my first admirer on Facebook.

Dear me. I fear that like Tosca I live for art and love, and not necessarily in that order. At any rate, it was the work of moments to find my father's friend, to click on the page of the son of his old age, to swiftly scroll down the list of his friends to his presumed cousin and click on his name. And there he was. I recognized him at once, and my heart flipped over. He now lives in Canada.

My mother skyped later with his name, written decades ago in her old phone book, but I had remembered his Christian name and the shape of his surname, so this was only confirmation of what I had discovered already. And I was already feeling embarrassed by my sudden curiosity, since it is perhaps not fitting for married ladies to look up complete strangers, also married, they met briefly when they were six.

However, I think the moral of all this story is that history is astonishing. When I was a child, people were so physically and politically divided that, not only was it unlikely to stay friends with Polish children after their short Western holiday, we were not sure if any of us would make it to the next century. When I was 17, we were watching horror films about the coming nuclear apocalypse, and when I was 19, we were suddenly watching Germans streaming over the shattered Wall to embrace long-lost members of their families. The Cold War was over.

My American father once said that the fact that despite our best efforts World War III never happened is solid evidence that there really is a God who loves us. And as I search my brain for a reason I should have written this post, it occurs to me that it is, after all, American Thanksgiving. So I would like to give thanks for the fall of the Wall and also for the technological miracle that helps people find people in seconds.

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By the way, American readers should sign up in the combox below if they want to play "Points" with other American readers. In short, you count up how many times Thanksgiving guests (or hosts) mention your Single status. In the morning, report in tomorrow's combox. Sisters can all get a point each if the mention is collective, e.g. "Why aren't ANY of you girls married off yet? What is with boys today?"