Advent’s liturgical readings leading up to Jesus’ birth focus less on Mary and more on John the Baptist. Today’s reading on John focuses on how he relates to his body. John subjects his body to austere desert living, withholding basic needs from his body. John’s life style, asceticism, which neither Jesus nor Mary live, values mastering one’s body. Mastering one’s body is the value of patriarchs, who relate to the physical world as a master. Our bodies, like the world, are evil, meaning an adversary, an ‘it.’ ‘It,’ our body, is something which patriarchs desire autonomy from and domination over.
Patriarchs fear the innate unpredictability, weakness, and inherent vulnerability of our bodies. They certainly fear these qualities of a woman’s body, especially the vulnerability pregnancy creates. Women are thus especially harmed under patriarchy. Women are depicted as chaos, temptresses, wild, in communion with nature, and judged evil. Hence, throughout history and still, we are abducted, enslaved, raped, infected, trafficked, and murdered. If we are pregnant, whatever the circumstances, under patriarchy we are mastered for further violence – objectified, stereotyped, denied work, fired, refused health services, shamed, ostracized, institutionalized, sold, sterilized, poisoned, murdered, and influenced toward abortion. Abortion is a unique and especially sad example of patriarchy mastering women’s bodies and babies. Each are dehumanized to an ‘it.’ Abortion does not reflect a woman’s communion with nature, the physical world, nor our communion with our bodies or our babies. Abortion reflects patriarchy’s autonomy from nature, domination over the physical world including our bodies, and claiming the right to master ‘it.’ Thus, in the same way patriarchs routinely master the earth’s body – as an ‘it’ – to be poisoned, scarred, and scraped in environmental degradation, so too patriarchs routinely master women’s bodies – also as an ‘it’ – to be poisoned, scarred, and scraped in abortion. In the same way patriarchs routinely propagandized men to ‘choose’ to put their bodies in harm’s ways and kill the enemy soldier in war, so too Militarism is routinely propagandizing women to ‘choose’ to put their bodies in harm’s way and kill the enemy baby in abortion. Under patriarchy, slaves/women are denied the right to literacy, education, voting, finances, and of course the right to life. It is the master who chooses – ‘It is my slave.’ ‘It is my wife.’ ‘It is my right to own.’ ‘It is my right to choose.’ ‘It is none of your business.’ From patriarchs for all things violent: ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about ‘it.’ Patriarchy’s master class value system successfully recruits conformist women to its values of autonomy and domination. For example Cecil Richards and Gloria Steinem, wealthy white women who benefit from proximal control to patriarchs. Malcolm X distinguishes between fiercely abused field slaves and domestically abused house slaves – the house slave identifies with the master. Women propagandizing for patriarchy’s violence are house slaves. They are close to the master. They conform to the master’s military values of autonomy and domination.
As human beings we embody nature. We are nature. As such we are, to patriarchy’s eternal consternation, physically vulnerable, especially to weakness, to hurt, to change. We are emotionally vulnerable to each other, to life, including the life growing within us. Our bodily vulnerability is not an evil nor even a problem as patriarchy dictates. Not for those of us willingly in touch with our bodies. Not for those of us willingly generative with other free and wild life, including life growing within our body. Free of patriarchy we live our natural communion with creation. Creation’s wild vibrancy and power for life scares patriarchs. Creation’s power, like a woman’s, exposes patriarchy’s pathology toward domination and death. Unlike patriarchy, creation lives in beauty, in love, in vulnerability. Creation’s power for life can be appreciated by anyone, everyone, as we all hold life, the power for life within our bodies.
Prayer: Spirit of Life, we embody communion.
Question: In what ways have I been mastered by patriarchy and its deadly values and in what ways do I remain free?
December 09, 2018 Gospel Luke 3:1-6 Second Sunday of Advent