In limiting our conversations about men and women to questions of roles, of what each ought to do or is permitted to do, we have circumscribed the image of God in each to a “shallow functionalism.”1
Our existence precedes our activity, and the delight of God in the men and women he has created does not begin with joy over the work that we do or the roles that we play, but over the creatures that we are: beautiful, complex, glorious reflections of our divine Creator.
In the first creation account, God declares the goodness of his creation before humanity has begun the work that God has given them to do. We see this primary joy imitated by Adam, in his first glimpse of Eve. “This is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh!” Adam declares, and in that declaration, he focuses our attention on Eve’s existence, the delight that her very being is, apart from her purpose to be his partner in the work God has given humanity to do.
The simple presence of women in our churches, our communities, and our schools is worthy of giving thanks to God. When women also fulfill their calling to be ezer kenegdo2—this is a superabundant grace of God. To start with purpose first runs the risk of instrumentalizing our existence.
We must resist a way of understanding women as partial humans—that sees their creation as a way of making up for what Adam was lacking (and vice versa). Individual men and women are not parts that make up a whole human. Because of this, women’s value does not lie in what women can contribute to what men lack. We need each other, not because of a set list of characteristics or virtues that men have/lack and women have/lack, but because the fullness of a human life is one lived relationally across gender differences. The acts of giving and receiving, of generativity and receptivity, for example, are not limited to men and women respectively. Instead, to be human means to be engaged in both giving and receiving, in relation to each other, in imitation of the Triune God who both gives and receives within himself.3
And what I’ve said of women is true also of men. Each of us, male and female, young and old, from every nation and tribe, ought to be rejoiced over simply because we exist. Our existence testifies to the glorious beauty of our Creator, the God who gives us existence not because he needs us, but because he delights in our existence.
This is the gaze of delight of which Esther Meek speaks so joyfully in her latest book, The Mother’s Smile. Using the image of the mother who sees her child with “noticing regard,” with a love and delight that precedes and supersedes all that child may do, she writes of the way that we become attuned to reality—to reality as the convivial and superabundant overflow of Divine love. In the noticing regard we offer to each other, to our children but also to our friends, she says, we witness to a promise: “the hope of the face of God that will not go away.”
1This phrase is borrowed from Hans Urs von Balthasar, who is not talking about the relationships between men and women in the passage from which the phrase is pulled–and yet I thought it apt for this essay.
2I have been trying to articulate a translation of this rich phrase. My bulky suggestion is this: “partners of strength who work alongside men to fulfill God’s creational purposes in the world, in their particular embodiment as women”
3This paragraph draws from Abigail Favale’s writing on fractional complementarity v. integral complementarity: https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/rethinking-complementarity-from-stereotypes-to-icons/