Virginity, Liminality and Authentically Liberating Feminism

The three most significant, influential women over the last century were (circle three):
Margaret Thatcher; Marilyn Monroe; Rachel Carson; Golda Meir;
Simone de Beauvoir; Mother Teresa; Saint Faustina; Margaret Sanger; Hillary Clinton; Edith Stein; Aretha Franklin; Madonna.

If you chose the three consecrated virgins, your Catholic intuitions are impeccable.

One of the really, really new things that came into the cosmos and history with Jesus was consecrated virginity. Ancient paganisms and Judaism, like contemporary liberalism, had not the faintest clue about this mystery.

Jesus and Mary were the first, unless you count John the Baptist. St. Joseph may have had a prior marriage but surely lived virginity in this utterly unique marriage. Saints Paul and John followed along. But a most striking thing about early Christianity was the spontaneous flowering of virginal consecration among young women. Resisting immense social pressures and breaking all sociological models, holy young women passionately, zealously, and tenderly surrendered themselves, through the evangelical counsels, to Christ their Bridegroom. Many suffered tortuous martyrdoms rather than compromise the nuptial donation they had pledged. Long before canon law could regulate institutionalized religious life such women surrendered themselves to prayer and service in a fluid, organic, seemingly effortless and utterly informal way. And yet, the inner form or gestalt was crystal clear: physical virginity, along with poverty and obedience, as a bridal surrender to their Great Lover.

Virginity is above all else liberating: it frees one from the complex web of obligations, pressures, limitations, and expectations associated with family, tribe, nation and empire. The virgin wants to please only the Lord and is free of the needs and expectations, not only of husband, but of father and tribe, of king, nation and state. She is free for prayer and contemplation, for deeds of mercy, and for proclamation of the Gospel. She is lifted out of the exhausting cycle of procreation into a luminous zone of restful contemplation and Spirit-infused action. She turns away from the earth to open her heart to heaven; and returns to earth with heavenly gifts. Her feminine receptivity and fecundity takes on sublimity as she conceives and delivers a heavenly newness into a world grown old in sin.

The virgin enters the zone of “liminality,” described by anthropologist Victor Turner as passing of a threshold into an alternate zone of freedom and novelty: “Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (1967: 97).
Liminal persons, he continues, have “no status, insignia, secular clothing, rank, kinship position, nothing to demarcate them structurally from their fellows” (1967: 98). They are, he continues, “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony” (1969: 95)

And so, the virgin bursts out of all social categories into a realm of novelty, possibility, creativity, contemplation and transcendent joy. She re-enters ordinary life, from the liminous, with a luminosity, a liberality, an abundant graciousness.
In time, of course, the Church came to regularize the virginal life in a more formal way. It became prone to stagnation, but our great religious women (think of the Theresas and the Catherines) efficaciously renewed the liberating, serendipitous, liminal nature of the virginal life. The Catholic faith has always treasured this state of life. It has evolved in a creative-if-sometimes-tension-filled relationship with a masculine, Petrine-clerical institution that can guide but never control it in its irrepressible dynamism.

Luther and his reformation, by contrast, brutally suppressed virginity and regressively compelled every woman back into the boundaries of the home. Protestantism is an attenuated masculinity relentlessly oppressive of the feminine in the dimensions of the sacramental, the virginal, the contemplative and the Marian. By contrast, Catholicism is an always-fruitful mutual fecundation between the (authoritative, efficacious masculine) Petrine and the (receptive, contemplative, feminine) Marian.

The fashionable feminism of the last several decades is a far cry from the liminosity of Catholic evangelical feminism. Unfortunately, it married itself to four horrible ideas. First, it mimics the worst corruption of the masculine in seeking power in the sense of social status and the power to exert external control over the “other.” And so, we see the demand for holy orders and enhanced social status. Likewise, we find liberal religious advocating for specific partisan policies and thereby situating themselves along side of similar lobbying groups (for union, environment, etc.) and enmeshing themselves in worldly pressure politics, far from the zone of luminosity. Secondly, 60s feminism taught that maternity (biological or spiritual) is less important for feminine identity than career, accomplishment, and social status. Thirdly, it emulated the most decadent masculinity in embracing sexual promiscuity as a right and value. And worse of all, it asserted the right of the mother to kill her unborn.

Nevertheless, in surprising and delightful ways, liminal, luminous, liberating feminine virginity is again flowering in the Church. Again, as in every generation, it is irrepressible, serendipitous, and fecund with new life. Far from distrusting and resenting the masculine, it longs for the Uber-masculinity of the Bridegroom, even as he gives Himself in the masculine dimension of the bridal Church. And graces are flowing from heaven through humble, hidden, prayerful women.