Płeć a chrześcijańskie życie duchowe

Abstract

The question of how sexual diversity may infl uence the spiritual life has not been discussed too widely in Christian spirituality. It is a gap which needs to be fi lled all the more urgently since gender studies today, instead of stressing sexual diff erences, sometimes seem rather to point to the ways in which such diff erences can be obliterated or balanced in the cultural context. In the history of religion and philosophy the motifs of femininity and masculinity appear, for instance, in Chinese Taoism. They can also be found in the Old Testament, if we examine the image of the God Yahweh, who was called Father but many biblical texts show His maternal features as well. This idea of a mother-father God is exemplifi ed in a special way in the concept of God’s mercy which in Hebrew includes both the male perspective, hesed as staying true to previous commitments, and the female perspective, rahamim as closely related to the selfl ess love of a mother who cares for her child not because of its merits but its weakness and helplessness. In Christianity, the goals of the spiritual life, namely sanctity and perfection, can also be considered from a male and female perspective. The female perspective would mean, most of all, the reality of belonging to God, a close relationship in which we welcome the gratuitous gift leading to divinization. The male perspective is more mission-oriented and moral in its character; it focuses on an obligation, a concrete response to the gift of love. We can say that the perspective based on a relationship is more feminine, and the one which evokes moral ability rather masculine. The spiritual life, as such, should include a specifi c balance between these two factors. Such a balance would be manifested both within the dimension of asceticism (leading to perfection) and that of mysticism (directed towards a special intimacy with the Holy One.) Although many authors in the past saw in asceticism the starting point for the development of the spiritual life, and described mysticism as an eff ect of the purifi cation thus achieved, today it is more commonly thought that even at the outset of the spiritual journey there can be mystical phenomena since it is the proximity to the mystery of Christ that constitutes the actual source and strength of every inner endeavor of a Christian. A particular contribution to the description of our development in the sphere of psychology was made by Carl Gustav Jung. To him, the maturity of a middle-aged man was the ability to balance within himself the male and the female elements. Even though in his studies he does not refer directly to Christian spirituality, his anthropological refl ections may be considered an interesting insight to our understanding of the feminine and masculine within spirituality. All the more so since it was precisely in religion that he saw an element supporting the integration of the male and female elements in a person undergoing midlife crisis.