Counting

God is counting on me – in this unremarkable life of mine – God is counting on me to do my part…

Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at the Well (Angelika Kauffmann)

There is some purpose for me.  God has made it for me, and I am expected to fulfil that purpose in my life.

I have often wondered what I was supposed to do with my life.  I have not ever done anything terribly memorable or amazing.  I tend to do ordinary things in an ordinary way.  I am a daughter, sister, wife and mother and friend.

Saint Josemaria established Opus Dei as a movement within the Catholic Church to establish sanctity through work.  As part of this movement, there were schools established around the world.  I went to one of these schools as a child.  They always established the girls schools first, because the Saint believed that women had great strength to influence their families and that it was through the ministry of the daughter, sister, wife and mother that a woman would be able to influence her family to bring them closer to God.

“Women are called to bring to the family, to society and to the Church, characteristics which are their own and which they alone can give: their gentle warmth and untiring generosity, their love for detail, their quick‑wittedness and intuition, their simple and deep piety, their constancy... A woman's femininity is genuine only if she is aware of the beauty of this contribution for which there is no substitute and if she incorporates it into her own life.” (Saint Josemaria, “Conversations with Monsignor Escriva, at 87).

This is very important to understand this view of femininity.  The true feminine while different from the masculine is no less than the masculine.  A good wife is not inferior to a good husband – he is the head and she is the body – one cannot exist without the other. 

“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.  Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.  Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her  to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.  After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—  for we are members of his body.” (Ephesians 5:22-30).

And we are told to love each other – wives through submission as to God – meaning with trust and love, and husbands through love as God loves His Church – which He died for…

This means, in fact that a husband who dominates his wife has distorted the institution provided to us through God.  God made husbands and wives partners to each other – compliments.  Husbands to provide their masculinity and wives their femininity in equal measures just as a head and body are equally essential for life.  Where a husband corrupts this, he will dominate and abuse his wife, and where a wife corrupts this, she will manipulate her husband. 

And it occurs to me today that God is counting on me – in this unremarkable life of mine – God is counting on me to do my part…

For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.