Coming Clean

It’s been such a long time
And I was just a child then
What will you say when you see my face?

Well it’s funny now
I just don’t feel like a man
What will you say?

–Jeff Buckley in concert

I’ve read a lot of griping about gender inequality within Christianity lately. It smacks of either (1) men feeling like women are poor, beaten down persons incapable of fending for themselves … in need of a hero or (2) penis envy (used more for cultural conotation moreso than any female desire to be equipped with a penis).

I don’t really understand what’s so hard to wrestle with here. I mean, I can understand the difficulty in nailing down the particulars, but it seems like an awful lot of word space is being used up to debate whether or not there even is a worthwhile difference and order between genders within humanity as understood by Christianity.

It seems pretty clear to me: God sets up relations between Him and humanity and has expressed those in the terms of the same gender that humanity has as a source of difference in itself. Jesus is male, and Jesus had plenty of opportunity to establish women in authority - but He didn’t. But Jesus gave a lot of time to women in His teaching, so we shouldn’t for a second think that women are some kind of second class citizen. Just different jobs for different genders that make a whole humanity and image the nature of God and His order.

Why people can’t agree on that much baffles me.

I do one of two things:
- try to be as mindless as possible
- try to be as engaged in thought as possible

Being mindless is easy - turn on the TV.

Being engaged is easy - find a puzzle: a game, a thought problem, a book.

Thing is, when I have time to myself, I seldom think to pray. I doubt this phenomenon is rare. Often, I try to pass off reflection of the theological/Biblical variety as prayer. While interesting and often educational/insightful, I don’t think it really counts as prayer.

So, then, I’m left wondering what is prayer, and how I can I know it to be worthwhile. So many times, people tell you it’s suppose be you and God time. God’s been really quiet these days - leaving me to wander back to the reflection stuff more than giving me the sense of some kind of communing. Very frustrating. But in absence of the perception of the presence of the Person, what am I to do? It all seems very backwards and counter-intuitive for what it is suppose to be about.