The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory by Favale Abigail

Author:Favale, Abigail [Favale, Abigail]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642292176
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2022-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

Body as Sacrament

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time here on the biological plane. It’s important to understand what sex is, and how sexual development unfolds, in order to be able to counter the postmodern myths. That can’t be the extent of our discussion, however, if we’re thinking from a Christian perspective. Our consideration of sex and gender must be attuned to the holistic and sacred reality of the person —the person as an integrated unity of body and soul. We must follow a path of contemplation that sees the various dimensions of personhood in order to receive the miracle of each person. This is a path that moves toward integration, from disorder to wholeness. The postmodern approach to sex and gender runs in the opposite direction, into fragmentation, a piecemeal self, where body and psyche and desire are split off from one another and rearrangeable—where the body is not the foundation of personal identity, but rather its lifeless tool.

In contrast, the personalist approach allows us to see each human being as a person , rather than a collection of ever-proliferating labels, and, more importantly, to attune our awareness to the sacramentality of every human body. Bodies are not “just” bodies. Bodies are persons made manifest. The sacramental principle is always at work: the visible reveals the invisible. The body reveals to us the eternal and divine reality of the person—a reality that can only break into the tangible, sensible world through embodiment.

That is how God enters into our world and reveals himself, through the incarnational reality of Christ, who became a body that we might know and love the invisible God. The Incarnation is both a historical moment, a plot on the timeline of the world story, and an eternal moment. The divine Person who quickened in the womb of Mary is also the Person who, in the Eucharist, clothes himself in the molecules of wine and bread, that he might be placed on our tongues and engulfed by our hearts. This mystery—the sacramental mystery of the Incarnation—should frame our vision of all that is.

Too easily, we lose sight of this mystery; we allow our vision to contract, to become superficial and self-serving. We fall into the perennial error of seeing some human bodies as not-quite-human and thus disposable, cast out of the circle of what’s seen and what’s valued.

This time-worn tendency is on glaring display in Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”. Told from the perspective of an imaginative child who fantasizes about heroic martyrdom while skimping on her prayers, this story casts a bright beam on the dignity and sacramentality of the intersex person.

There’s a fair in town, one with a Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, and “closed tent” exhibits for adults only. The child protagonist hears two older girls talking in hushed tones about what they saw in one of the tents: a “freak” that was “a man and woman both”. 9 This person had “a particular name”, but the girls don’t remember it, instead using demeaning terms like “you-know-what” and the excising pronoun “It”.

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