D
djeter
Guest
"My humanity is something always profoundly greater, even other, than I am. Sexual differentiation highlights this. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to take seriously what the poets and song writers have always told us: men and women seem to experience and understand reality in some remarkably different ways. Christian theology has tended to ignore this, treating human “nature” independently of its sexual concretization.
While there is much that we can say about being human which is true about both men and women, perhaps we are only now beginning to realize that there is much which cannot be said quite so simply. Each of us, male or female, must realize the fact that there is another mode and experience of being human which is different from, and not reducible to, one’s own. There is another way of being human which remains inaccessibly mysterious.
Therefore, no human being can claim to experience or understand the mystery of what it means to be human only from his or her humanity. The real humanity of each person, male or female, is something that points beyond itself to a real other. This is a paradox. Male and female are not simply accidental characteristics of human being; neither are they two different creatures. They are irreducibly different in one humanity.
This, it seems to me, expresses something of the mystery of God and about our relationship with God. The mystery of the sexually other human is a symbol of the absolute mystery of God’s other-ness and of our relatedness to and transcendence towards God as our final personal wholeness and fulfillment. Our humanity is essentially ecstatic, other-directed. We are whole and entire only in our relationships with others: both human others and with God, that divine Other.
From “The Christian View of Humanity” by John Sachs, a leading Catholic scholar
If you THINK about that, you will see how it impacts the Church’s defense of marriage and how the same sex version of marriage could never pass muster.
A Most Catholic Vindication looks at Maureen Dowd’s ill thought accusations against Benedict and the Church as well as Mary Eberstadt’s spirited defense of Humanae Vitae after 40 years against the various and sundry blasphemies of cafeteria Catholics.
You can find it all here:
payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/10/27/a-catholic-vindication/
Great fun to consider…
dj
While there is much that we can say about being human which is true about both men and women, perhaps we are only now beginning to realize that there is much which cannot be said quite so simply. Each of us, male or female, must realize the fact that there is another mode and experience of being human which is different from, and not reducible to, one’s own. There is another way of being human which remains inaccessibly mysterious.
Therefore, no human being can claim to experience or understand the mystery of what it means to be human only from his or her humanity. The real humanity of each person, male or female, is something that points beyond itself to a real other. This is a paradox. Male and female are not simply accidental characteristics of human being; neither are they two different creatures. They are irreducibly different in one humanity.
This, it seems to me, expresses something of the mystery of God and about our relationship with God. The mystery of the sexually other human is a symbol of the absolute mystery of God’s other-ness and of our relatedness to and transcendence towards God as our final personal wholeness and fulfillment. Our humanity is essentially ecstatic, other-directed. We are whole and entire only in our relationships with others: both human others and with God, that divine Other.
From “The Christian View of Humanity” by John Sachs, a leading Catholic scholar
If you THINK about that, you will see how it impacts the Church’s defense of marriage and how the same sex version of marriage could never pass muster.
A Most Catholic Vindication looks at Maureen Dowd’s ill thought accusations against Benedict and the Church as well as Mary Eberstadt’s spirited defense of Humanae Vitae after 40 years against the various and sundry blasphemies of cafeteria Catholics.
You can find it all here:
payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/10/27/a-catholic-vindication/
Great fun to consider…
dj