Lightning and the pedestal

Let us start with this report from the Northern Territory (Australia) news.

Now, that is somewhat annoying. if you are Tom, and you made the sculpture. It is also a reminder that the best memorials and plans can be destroyed. In seconds. Nature is capricious — as the Tasmanians are finding after a heatwave and fires destroyed the one part of Australia with a truly temperate climate.

What is worse is that there is an idea out there that women can put themselves on a pedestal and look down on men. This has been discussed extensively… but I want to look at it slightly differently. Not as to what it does to men, but what it does to women.  For it means that women tend not to think beyond their worries and complaints, as if they are fixed, like that statue… but on keeping a negative score.

You already love your husband, you married him, and you can easily think of several of his most complimentary features; physically, relationally, and practically. The problem isn’t that he has no great qualities*. The problem is that you’ve become mentally and emotionally lazy, not to mention selfish. Lazy, self-centered minds find faultfinding easy to do. The path of least resistance almost always takes us exactly where we do not need to go. In this case, it takes us to a stale marriage. In the most extreme case, it cause wives to assume a perfectly good marriage is broken because they’ve spent years rehearsing their husband’s faults to the exclusion of all else.

Now, I can see some people muttering that after going all hyperspiritual and talking about using victorian symbols and the meaning of them. I am just being mean to women. I’m ncasty. But one of the functions men have — and do to each other — is to confront each other. To correct.  Consider for a minute this situation.

I mentioned listening to a childless young woman in a Christian women’s prayer group  tell about how she had become a Christian and gotten engaged to a Christian man. They decided to remain abstinent before marriage (and rightly so) even though neither of them was a virgin. But oh dear, she ended up sleeping with a hot guy from work, and once she got married she felt so guilty about it that she could not achieve orgasm with her new husband unless she imagined him having sex with another woman or raping her. We were supposed to pray for her to be released from that guilt.

The woman wants back the virtue she has lost without the hard and painful work of confession and repentance and penance. Which we all have. (Note: the RCC may have a more formal means of doing this but the need to do better and make better follows from the consequences of what we do.) But SSM says something very astute about how the lack of correction works in a comment on this situation.

I’m curious to know how readers might suggest a woman could rebuke someone like this without causing complete chaos in the hen house, if you know what I mean. Remember, her reason given for requesting our prayers was for her to be cleared of guilty feelings so that she could reach orgasm without perverted fantasies. I wonder what would have been a socially acceptable way to point out that she seemed more concerned with how her own pleasure had been compromised by her sin than with true repentance and concern for how her sin had affected her husband.

The men in the thread had no difficulty managing to think of ways of doing this. But we practice confronting each other — the old art of rhetoric may have died a hundred years ago, but the use of logic to get to conclusions and emotion to convince one’s brethren to act has not changed. Men Judge — if nothing else who has  won this game, or that contest Part of that has always been confrontational — from Jesus asking a Samaritan women where her husband is, to only giving prizes to those who triumph.

But we are told this is judgmental: that we are all equally sinful, and (here is the logical error) we cannot state something is wrong. It is akin to saying that because I cannot see infrared I cannot describe colours.

But on a pedestal, no one can be corrected, no one can move, no one can change, no one can grow, and you nicely act as a lightning rod. Much better, woman of God, to come down.