Enforced Nunhood For Christian Women?
"A culture that...flogs or stones a girl for falling in love."
(Ayaan Hirsi Ali)
Captain Sensible writes: I came across the above quote recently. It's not a good thing, right? But hang on a minute. Are we metaphorically flogging and stoning Christian women for even just wanting to fall in love? Think about it. A Christian woman says she really wants to get married and have children. What could be more natural? And in accordance with God's plan too?
But what is the likely reaction she will receive to such a statement?
Stone 1) You must be content single!
Lash 1) You are making an idol out of marriage!
Stone 2) It may not be God's will for you to get married! You are sinning against God for trying to go against His plan for you!
Lash 2) You must be patient, and if that means you finally become barren, well then you'd better be jolly pleased with that too! Barrenness is obviously His will and perfect plan for your life, so you'd better quit being unhappy and be joyfully, blissfully content about it!
I seriously think we are going to look back at the spiritual abuse we are inflicting on our women and be nothing short of horrified.
The number of single women I am encountering, or reading about, that say how depressed they are because of their singleness is unbelievable. Worse still are the ones that try to give advice because, yes, they too were depressed, but somehow they have been able to beat their natural and Godly longings into submission, and now they realised how wrong they were for wanting the very thing that God commanded us to all do in the first place: Be fruitful and multiply! For the ones that do venture into a relationship, if it doesn't work out as they had hoped, they are more depressed than ever before. Unrequited love is extremely painful anyway, but one of the things that helps people get over it is when a new love comes along. For Christian women that think it's wrong to date outside of "the church", this may mean four years, five years, even more... As if they have all those endless years to waste!
Why are we doing this to our sisters? What really is the fruit of all this? Fewer and fewer children being born into Christian families, and men and women that are objects of either pity or suspicion in the world, as opposed to being salt and light.
We must stop enforcing nunhood on Christian women and then scolding them if they don't have peace about it. And of course they won't have peace about it, because it is not God's will for them to be nuns, but rather wives and mothers and in a timely fashion too ie. their youth.
It reminds me of a comment Debbie Maken made about a year ago, about "monks and nuns":
"It is amazing that a pop star would be able to spot something as sublime as the consuming need for romantic love, and yet Christians would feel the need to squelch same, as if it were an idol, something to subdue, master, destroy so that it cannot get in the way of our otherwise mediocre, half-hearted, mildly devoted relationships with God. None of us are that single-minded about God-- whether married or single. The simple reason for this is because God did not create us to be that way. We were not born to be monks, and we kid ourselves and contradict our very nature, the more that we think we are. We are not monks in any aspect of our lives from personal consumption to spending habits to being endlessly entertained, and yet when it comes to our sexuality, we think our selective monkishness and continued passivity to downright neglect of marriage will bring about more spirituality or devotion. There is a good word for cafeteria monkishness-- hypocrite.
"God is the creator of our sexuality and He meant for it to be good and for it to be acted on in the most appropriate way-- through marriage. For us to now place such a desire in competition with the creator of it is truly foolish.
"Sometimes when I hear about these bachelors writing on sites like Purposefully Single and all of these other singleness pundits extolling the virtues of this mystifying gift (the "gift of singleness"), I often feel like we are the children of Israel, where the promises and blessings of the Covenant are going to be skipped over us but be given to others who have followed His blueprint more closely-- i.e. to be fruitful and multiply. The broken hearts of many single women and men is only the beginning; we should fear the fallout a generation from now if this misteaching about the gift of singleness actually seeps any further into the body of Christ."
(Ayaan Hirsi Ali)
Captain Sensible writes: I came across the above quote recently. It's not a good thing, right? But hang on a minute. Are we metaphorically flogging and stoning Christian women for even just wanting to fall in love? Think about it. A Christian woman says she really wants to get married and have children. What could be more natural? And in accordance with God's plan too?
But what is the likely reaction she will receive to such a statement?
Stone 1) You must be content single!
Lash 1) You are making an idol out of marriage!
Stone 2) It may not be God's will for you to get married! You are sinning against God for trying to go against His plan for you!
Lash 2) You must be patient, and if that means you finally become barren, well then you'd better be jolly pleased with that too! Barrenness is obviously His will and perfect plan for your life, so you'd better quit being unhappy and be joyfully, blissfully content about it!
I seriously think we are going to look back at the spiritual abuse we are inflicting on our women and be nothing short of horrified.
The number of single women I am encountering, or reading about, that say how depressed they are because of their singleness is unbelievable. Worse still are the ones that try to give advice because, yes, they too were depressed, but somehow they have been able to beat their natural and Godly longings into submission, and now they realised how wrong they were for wanting the very thing that God commanded us to all do in the first place: Be fruitful and multiply! For the ones that do venture into a relationship, if it doesn't work out as they had hoped, they are more depressed than ever before. Unrequited love is extremely painful anyway, but one of the things that helps people get over it is when a new love comes along. For Christian women that think it's wrong to date outside of "the church", this may mean four years, five years, even more... As if they have all those endless years to waste!
Why are we doing this to our sisters? What really is the fruit of all this? Fewer and fewer children being born into Christian families, and men and women that are objects of either pity or suspicion in the world, as opposed to being salt and light.
We must stop enforcing nunhood on Christian women and then scolding them if they don't have peace about it. And of course they won't have peace about it, because it is not God's will for them to be nuns, but rather wives and mothers and in a timely fashion too ie. their youth.
It reminds me of a comment Debbie Maken made about a year ago, about "monks and nuns":
"It is amazing that a pop star would be able to spot something as sublime as the consuming need for romantic love, and yet Christians would feel the need to squelch same, as if it were an idol, something to subdue, master, destroy so that it cannot get in the way of our otherwise mediocre, half-hearted, mildly devoted relationships with God. None of us are that single-minded about God-- whether married or single. The simple reason for this is because God did not create us to be that way. We were not born to be monks, and we kid ourselves and contradict our very nature, the more that we think we are. We are not monks in any aspect of our lives from personal consumption to spending habits to being endlessly entertained, and yet when it comes to our sexuality, we think our selective monkishness and continued passivity to downright neglect of marriage will bring about more spirituality or devotion. There is a good word for cafeteria monkishness-- hypocrite.
"God is the creator of our sexuality and He meant for it to be good and for it to be acted on in the most appropriate way-- through marriage. For us to now place such a desire in competition with the creator of it is truly foolish.
"Sometimes when I hear about these bachelors writing on sites like Purposefully Single and all of these other singleness pundits extolling the virtues of this mystifying gift (the "gift of singleness"), I often feel like we are the children of Israel, where the promises and blessings of the Covenant are going to be skipped over us but be given to others who have followed His blueprint more closely-- i.e. to be fruitful and multiply. The broken hearts of many single women and men is only the beginning; we should fear the fallout a generation from now if this misteaching about the gift of singleness actually seeps any further into the body of Christ."
posted by Captain Sensible at 5:52 AM
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