There is nothing like a dame...nothing in the world...there is nothing you can name...that is anything like a dame. Rogers and Hammerstein, "South Pacific"
I fell into a burning ring of fire. Johnny Cash
It will not surprise you, dear Reader, that your Fleckinstein has been accused of being "patriarchal" and so, however unintentionally, misogynist. The reality is entirely different: an extreme love of women, even approaching adoration. Why such intense attraction? Admiration? Delight? Obsession? Desire? Tenderness? It is in part temperamental: we see in many young ones a pronounced attachment to the mother or father, to women or men. But most responsibility goes to my own mother, a woman of exceptional beauty, inner and outer, and generosity. She mothered me wonderfully. Additionally, I have been very loved by very many very good women. And so, in every encounter with a woman, (not excluding psychopaths, borderlines, criminals) I have zero capacity for sustained suspicion, resentment or malice as I resonate with radiant positivity, quiet euphoria, serenity, trust and impulsive generosity. Eve's sin I personally blame on the passivity and neglect of Adam. And so you see here the root of my boundless contempt for Cultural Progressivism: it denies the iconic loveliness of the feminine as well as the heroic nobility of genuine virility. Granted I have suffered more than my share of toxic gynephilia, understood here as disordered attraction to women, rooted in concupiscence, that is needy-selfish-lustful-covetous-sterile-ungenerous. But one of the joys of aging within the sacramental embrace of our maternal Church is the slow but steady diminishment of those disordered cravings and the purification and intensification of wholesome philogyny as generous, fraternal, paternal, free and fruitful.
Whitney Houston, Barbara Streisand, Maria Callas, Julie Andrews, Cher, Amy Grant, Taylor Swift, Joan Baez, Celine Dion...What is it about a woman's voice? Indescribable! Delightful, abundant, generous, resonant with emotion, at once earthly and heavenly, inspiring, mystical and miraculous, down-to-earth, heartbreaking, lucid, iconic, comforting, inebriating and yet sobering.
Similarly, in these my "golden years," I clearly prefer woman writers and thinkers, in all my areas of interest: spirituality, theology, psychology, philosophy, culture and even politics. My favorites:
Contemporary: Heather King, Tracey Rowlands, Mary Anne Glendon, Mary Harrington, Patricia Snow, Abigail Favale, Mary Eberstadt, Mary Healy, Rhonda Chevrin,
Late 20th Century: Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Adrienne von Speyr, Madaleine Del Brell, Caryll Houselander, Elizabeth Anscombe, Elizabeth Moberly,
Early 20th Century: Edith Stein, St. Faustina, St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, Elizabeth Leseur, Flannery O'Connor, Etty Hellison, Sigrid Undset, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil.
My own intellect is very masculine: abstract, detached, clear, certain, prosaic, sober, authoritative, transcendent of emotion, comprehensive, assertive, combative, philosophical. So it needs the balance of the feminine intellect which is: contemplative, receptive, intuitive, sensitive, engaged, corporeal, synthetic, compassionate, artistic, fluid, organic, inclusive, refined, conciliatory.
In accord with nature and Providence, the paternal and maternal complement and complete each other. The tragedy of our society is that we are both fatherless and motherless. Certainly we are not "patriarchy" in the sense of ruled by fathers. Rather, our culture is permeated by a disordered, toxic, diminished "masculinity" of technological control-abstraction-detachment, devoid of the feminine as natural, organic, receptive, communal and contemplative. And so, for example, mainstream feminism itself is a flight from the feminine in its competitive, jealous mimicry of disordered masculinity as sexual license, careerism, power-status envy, and individualism.
We find something entirely different in the internal life of the Marian, which is to say maternal, Catholic Church. Balthasar has taught us that the Marian (feminine, receptive, contemplative, unitive) influence is superior to the Petrine (masculine, hierarchical, apostolic). And so, virile, priestly, apostolic authority that is authentically Catholic is never a mimicry of the power dynamics of the techno-dominant world, but rather placed under the influence of Mary, Queen of angels and saints, Mother of Christ and all of us. Genuine paternity is strong, stable, certain and is the fruit of the seed of the filial position of being both held and liberated by the loving Mother.
Carl Jung taught that in the second half of life the recessive, hidden aspect of the personality (the anima) emerges so that the assertive male manifests feminine aspects previously camouflaged. This makes a great deal of sense. In any case, within Catholic life, reception of the feminine or Marian influence is essential to the maturation of fruitful paternity. On that note, we end prayerfully:
We place ourselves, Mary our Mother, under the mantle of your holiness, your purity, your tenderness, your beauty and your love.
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