Saturday, April 07, 2012

D is for Distruction.

According to Wikipedia, Blessed Pope John Paul II (santo subito) coined the term, “culture of life” during World Youth Day in Colorado in 1993.  While its opposite, the term “culture of death” is not attributed to him, many of his writings contained references to those aspects of post-modern life that attack the “culture of life.”

Now, I would love to take the opportunity to analyze the 13 points that make up the “culture of life,” and how this is relevant to both contemporary Christianity and contemporary feminism, but that would result in a post so long, that neither of us would want to read it in the end.  If you want to read into all 13 points, be my guest.  Instead, I will do my best to paraphrase.

Human beings are creators.  I honestly believe this is an inescapable fact, something so deep in our DNA that we could not change it if we tried.  When God breathed life into us so that we became part of Him, that instinctual creative force that He gave us is what we mean when we say we are made in the likeness of our Creator. 

Women, unlike men, were not only given the instinct to create, but the equipment as well.  Our ability to not only create life, but to sustain it simultaneously with our own until it is to the point of self-sustaining (aka birth), makes us uniquely capable of nurturing the creative instinct.

Birth-control and abortion, and the recent movement toward “fertility rights” severely cheapen this ability.  It likens our ultimate creative ability to a nuisance, an ordinary bodily function. 

The other forces of the “culture of death” such as infidelity, murder, unjust war, are also destructive forces, and therefore, attempts to incapacitate our attempts at creation.

Now, it is something to ponder that in order to create, we must destroy.  However, when the destructiveness does not end in creativity, nor does it have the goal of creation in mind, we should be dead against it.  As thinking human beings, as Christians, as women, we should be dead-set against it.  Otherwise, we are mere cogs in the machine that churn out more life-ending destructiveness.

1 comment:

Elise said...

Good points and nicely written!