Men and Catholic Spirituality?

[JReducation]

The love we have for God is spiritual and heart centered. It is agape and has nothing to do with the sex of the person. It is found by obediance and perseverence only.

Forget the

Now I get what you were trying to say.

Have a blessed Holy Week.

Br. JR, OSF

 

[newyorkcatholic]

Not sure if this was mentioned, but the Church is not shy about sex. The fact that the Church has thought so much about proper and improper expressions of sexuality is precisely because it is so sacred, and through sex God brings, with the cooperation of the parents, new bodies into existence which He infuses with a truly new (ex nihilo created) soul.

So there’s nothing surprising in the fact that spiritual writers use sexual metaphors. They are metaphors of devotion, love, complementarity, ecstasy, union. They are not genital in nature.

Since it is not biological or genital, it applies to all of us. God is likened to the the bridegroom because he comes down to us and we are the ones who submit to Him. Spiritually we are all feminine. For linguistic reasons but also for spiritual reasons the spiritual writers, most (not by any means all) of them men, spoke of their own souls as “she.”

We are all part of the Church (“She”) who awaits the Bridegroom. We are all, through the Church, married to Jesus, our Bridegroom.

Actual human marriage is but a faint echo of this great reality.

Similarly, we see God as Father even if we didn’t have earthly fathers (e.g. never knew them).