Love Given, Received, and Shared
What is it that marks the "feminine" so distinctly from the "masculine"—the "bride" from the "Bridegroom?" The answer is her maternity.
To be female is a complicated but precise work of the Creator. Above all, her spiritual maternity differentiates her from the masculine because regardless of emotion or augmentation, man cannot receive and nourish life from within himself, and he never will.
The spiritual and biological maternity inherent in the woman is the space where God breathes, and love first takes root within the created world. Beyond just flesh and blood, the motherhood of the Bride receives the Word of God, nourishes it, and births God's adopted sons and daughters. It is a sacred work of evangelization that begins with the gift of spousal love.
In today’s Gospel, Matthew writes of the “Great Commission.” Here, Christ tells His disciples, Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
When our Creator created the human person in His image and likeness, as male and female, He had the spousal love of the Cross in His mind’s eye. The gift of love between the masculine and feminine is a sign of our redemption, a sign of the Bridegroom offering Himself as a sincere gift of self to the Bride, and the Bride receiving this gift of new life.
We must never forget God's design and purpose for spousal love that points us to Christ's work on the Cross— to evangelize His love. Marriage between one man and one woman, one bride and one bridgegroom, serves as a signpost pointing all we encounter to God’s perfect love.
We must resist the temptation to redefine God's plan. Instead, we must allow Him to enter into what we're feeling —our desires, our longings, pain, and confusion — to help us make sense of who He created us to be and how we can flourish within His perfect design.
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