A woman should be able to rise without a man believing that her elevation requires his disappearance.
A man should be able to become vulnerable without a woman regarding his vulnerability as weakness.
A woman's strength should not threaten a man's dignity.
A man's strength should never require a woman's submission.
Neither should need the other to become smaller in order to become fully themselves. This is not merely a political project. It is a civilizational project.
And for Christianity, it is a project that must pass beneath the Cross.
The Cross asks woman and man to surrender not their dignity but their desire to dominate; not their identity but their superiority; not their difference but their hostility; not their history but the temptation to make history an everlasting courtroom in which each generation must prosecute the other.
We must remember injustice without becoming prisoners of accusation.
We must correct inequality without manufacturing new contempt.
We must protect freedom without destroying relationship.
We must pursue justice without abandoning mercy.
For the final purpose of equality cannot simply be that woman and man possess equal rights while remaining alienated from one another. Humanity requires something greater: the restoration of relationship itself.
Perhaps, then, the next great stage of the women's movement—and of men's moral development alongside it—must be a movement beyond the battle itself.
Not beyond justice.
Not beyond equality.
Not beyond remembering the wounds of history.
But beyond the assumption that human flourishing requires an enemy.
Human history began with woman and man standing before one another. Its tragedy has often been the story of what they did to one another. Its maturation must become the story of what they learn to become for one another.
Not master and servant.
Not victor and defeated.
Not ruler and ruled.
Not prosecutor and defendant.
But companion and companion.
Neighbor and neighbor.
Image of God before image of God.
And perhaps this is the civilization still waiting to be born:
a civilization in which woman does not have to kneel for man to stand, man does not have to fall for woman to rise,
and neither needs a throne between them to know their worth.
Beyond the battle of the sexes lies not the victory of one half of humanity. It lies the reconciliation and maturation of the whole.
And beneath the Cross, woman and man may finally discover that the future was never meant to belong to one against the other.
It was entrusted to them together.
Pastor Steven G. Lee
St. GMC Corps
September 3, 2026
No comments:
Post a Comment