“It took a woman to write a song like that,” Ron Man, our worship leader, said as we were putting our music away and saying how much we love singing, "Before the Throne of God Above".
I loved his saying that. One, because I’m a woman. Two, because he, a man, said it. Three, because it’s so gloriously politically incorrect. And four, because it’s a great lead-in for the thoughts I want to share.
In my ESL class, we’re reading Lois Lowry’s, "The Giver", a story about a community in which everything is safe and painfree. The people have opted for "sameness" and control over risk, choice, and emotion. Adventure, art, romance, even love have been sacrificed in order to create a world without danger, war, poverty, crime, or suffering.
No reader of the book would conclude they want a world like this, but I see many parallels to American life today. We have a remedy for almost every difficulty; many pursue a trouble-free life at the expense of true fulfillment.
But the idea that I want to explore is this idea of Sameness, particularly as seen in our culture’s move towards androgyny. The Sameness in Lowry’s world was intentional, and ultimately rightfully opposed. I’m afraid the Sameness in our world goes largely unchallenged, having been churned out as the latest deception designed to blur, smear, ultimately destroy the beauty which is the creation of two sexes. Male and female, created He them.
It’s as if, after centuries of failing to wipe out truth entirely, the strategists of hell said, “Let’s go back and start at the beginning.” With Bible spread out as maps in a war room, they mapped out their course.
IN THE BEGINNING.... “Except for the few philosophers and scientists we’ll have to deal with separately, let’s make sure the humans don’t think much about this. If we can shorten their gaze, cause them to live out their lives in cubicles and schedules, filling their days with appointments and improvements and looking forward to the next pleasure, then most of them won’t even ask why they’re here, or “What’s it all about?”
GOD.... “We can do a lot more with this. Our pagan gods have been found out. Atheism, like martyrdom, backfires. If we can’t eliminate the concept entirely, let’s stretch it so thin that it can mean anything and everything, and therefore nothing.”
CREATED.... Later they said, “Now that was a stroke of genius. Who knew it could be so easy? Almost unopposed, the humans accepted that the world was a lucky byproduct of an explosion and their earliest ancestors lived in goo. Our job has never been easier.”
And more recently we can imagine:
MALE AND FEMALE.... “No need to spend all our efforts stirring up trouble over their differences. The differences themselves provide too much joy, too much tragedy, the stuff of literature and romance, things we need to eliminate if we’re ever to keep them from thinking about Them. All we have to do is convince them the differences are onerous, frustrating. It won't be long until the very words masculine and feminine will be met with scorn. Oh what a day! What delight we'll have in defacing His precious beauties, in destroying the distinctions He so loves.”
