Woman

He wonders. How does a woman look at the world? He is only a man and so he cannot really look at her from up close. Or as up-close as he sometimes desires. He might as well be content to be able to look at her from a short distance. Only a woman can look as a woman at herself. And so he warns himself his view of her will always be clouded by distractions inevitably related to lust and love. And oh yes, also friendship.

She likes to do everything. Feeling as she does that the world always wants to contain her into a narrow corridor of “proper” behavior. Who will tell her? To do everything is only the same trap as awaits someone who will only do what is proper for a woman to do? She should only do what her heart drives her to do? What she dreams to be doing. But then, to be perfectly sure, nobody can tell her what to desire and dream except herself.

In the run of time, she can choose between being by herself, being homemaker, pursuing work or vocation, or any combination of all. But she wants to do everything. He would be tempted to say. She intends to do all because she’s a woman. And of course he would be wrong. Holding up a mirror to himself, he knows this too is exactly what he wants for himself. He too wants to do everything: work hard, play, take care of the kids, escape poverty, gain power of whatever sort, see the world and still keep a home. In that respect, men and women are all the same.

And if doing everything seems to us remarkable in a woman, that only marks the backwardness of our views. We hold on only to archaic biases that will soon grow to obsolescence because; really, these are self-serving biases perpetuated by men from an earlier time. Vikings expecting their wives to be home keeping their houses warm, their children safe, while they go off crossing oceans to conquer some poor village watched over only by women left behind by their own husbands.

Why can’t our roles be reversed? If it can’t be reversed for all, why can’t it be reversed for some? If not that, then why not reversed if only from time to time?

Perhaps the reason is that we would all discover that in the deepest core inside all of us, at the level of our souls: There is no difference between us. The lowest common denominator is only a core humanity not constrained by any consideration of gender. The soul has no gender because it cannot have. It suffers no need for it.

But then, that would be the most subversive discovery of all. The world would be changed. Too many things would become possible it would scare the pants off of those who commit themselves to making the world stay as it is till forever. Notwithstanding its perpetual poor state.

If the soul has no gender, how would that apply to gays? But for an even more interesting instance: Why can’t women be priests?

There is nothing in the Bible to say they can’t. If there is, he never came across it though he has read the Good Book. By his observation, the real reason we do not have women priests is only the same reason women Vikings never went off in long ships to pillage and conquer. And it was not entirely because the Viking women were too smart to see the forlorn and violent stupidity of that act.

Indeed, the true answer would not be simple. It would have a lot to do with the slow travel of history and the slow progress of changing cultures and values. But now is the best time to wonder these things and find how we might free the world even more than we already have. Now is a good time to think, Where love and freedom is concerned there is still a lot of work to be done. And the work neither requires a particularity of gender or religion. It is everyone’s work.

Perhaps the real reason we do have women priests is that if women became priests then the day must eventually come when one of them would be Pope. And then, who knows what would happen to the world after that?