What Is Woman?
Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), John Singer Sargent, 1884
What is a woman?
I think a better question is, “Who is a woman?” In properly asking a question, we can find the answer. To ask what constitutes an object, something we search with our eyes. Who asks about a person, an identity, someone we want to know and experience. One question lives in the head, while the latter lives in the heart.
WOMAN IS Comforter
/ˈwo͝omən/ is comforter
She woos us
First off. Say her hame /ˈwo͝omən/. Our first experience of woman is how she woos us. She comforts us in her womb. She rocks us and cradles us to the feeling of pure bliss. Inside of her, she protects us from the noise of the world and all its harshness. I asked a friend for fun what’s her first memory, and it was in the womb when she heard yelling that was muffled and felt her mom pushed by her dad.
Woman is who we feel safe with; for some, she shields us and protects us from the demons of our father. Her skin is the first smell we experience; it matches the water we swam in in her womb. From her breast, we received the nourishment of life. Scientists and doctors will all confirm that breast milk from the mother is the most nourishing food for a baby and is designed genetically to match the child's needs; second, breast milk of another woman, and third, baby formula as a hierarchy of nourishment for infants.
Woman is Giver
The book “The Giving Tree” is about a boy who grows into old age and his relationship with a tree that symbolizes both Mother Earth and the mother of man. The boy grows from childhood playing with the tree, selling her fruit for money, and cutting her down to the stump. Finally, he uses her as a stool to sit on when she has nothing else to give; he is too old to use her for anything but a chair.
How do we participate in the use and abuse of the sources that give us life? As a woman with children, I experience how my children will drain me of all my energy. As a mother, I will gladly give and gladly forgive. I am woman.
I had a dream of observing a boy of five or six. I was given a perspective from the top of his head, like the GoPro you see on top of motorcyclists' helmets. The tossing and turning sickened me as I followed this boy around while he played. He ran down the stairs, about the house, and hid in the closet. The only other person with him in the house was his mother. She was working about the house doing chores and laundry while he played by himself.
The boy's feelings of peace stood out from the brief vision. As he ran about and played, he felt safe and at peace. His universe existed in his home, there with his mother. She is his woman.
When a woman is entirely herself, she realizes her power and sorrow. The boy from my dream will experience the peace she gives him without fully understanding its effects. What she knows, and he is yet to learn, is that man's masculine power protects the universe where they live.
Woman is lover
A woman holds the flame of love. She can keep the flame for a little while by herself, but her fire needs tending from the masculine counterpart of creation. The law of creation is that the feminine and the masculine unite to create life. There is no other way. Humans are not asexual beings. A woman is made to love; this love woos and draws in the masculine. Feminine woos and masculine protect as their expression of love, and life grows from that love. Roses bloom because her gardener tends to her needs and trims her branches. His skills will catalyze the blooming of flowers.
My son Isaac, who is slightly younger than the boy from my dream, experienced a different event with his mother. He sees his mother crying and asks her why she is sad. “I don’t want you to be sad, " he said, walking down the stairs.
He came back a couple of minutes later, and with a cup of cold water he could access from the refrigerator, offered it to his mother and said, “I brought you some water. It will make you feel much better.”
For his tender act of tending to his mother, she sipped the water and said, “Thank you, Isaac, for my water. I feel so much better.”
He smiled with glee and left the room.
Woman is fire
Like gravity is to the earth, the woman is within where the man is without. Her woo and love bind their universe into place, like a flame needing a protective glass to hold its fire safe. Touch it, and the glass will deter you. It is unseen but solid and protective. Woman is the feminine, the fire of the human spirit, and the energy that gives everything life.
“The foolish ones said to the wise, 'Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out.' “'No,' they replied, 'there may not be enough for both us and you.’” (Matthew 25: 8-10, NIV).
When we look at these words of Yeshua and look at the lamps as the human spirit, the maidens are guardians of human spirits. We can see how vital the feminine fire is to the masculine protection of the lamps that contain it. The oil is the product of their combined physical labor, and light is the reward of the spirit. Also, as a single spiritual person with two parts, the spiritual fire and the physical body that carries and protects that flame. The body protects the purity of the flaming soul.
Dwell within the spirit of God’s creation, and Yeshua's story has deeper spiritual meaning. Human beings are physical and spiritual beings separate from each other and part of a unit.
How have we allowed the oil to dry and the fire to go out?
The flame of woman provides light that man may see his actions. A woman with pure virtue will illuminate the wrongs of man. It is inevitable as a law of creation. Men who have accepted this truth cease to deceive their women. When a man desires a pure woman, he knows it’s time to clean up his act.
Her fire illuminates divine spiritual light that flows through her when she is pure. Her questions are wise and direct, hitting the man’s place of deception without effort. It is not her word that is audible; she is the mouthpiece for God.
A man feels inadequate and unworthy when he meets a pure woman when she shines light upon him. He has three choices: use the light for self-reflection, look for another woman with less fire, or dim her flame.
In our modern world, it is a sin that so much of a woman's fire dims daily. You can see it on TV, social media, and podcasts of so-called gender debates created to promote anger and division. The economics of life have always been attention. Attention towards money and how to acquire it. Towards sex and how to get it. The drive for comfort and how to sustain it.
Attention towards God gets lost in all the noise. A woman’s attention towards God points her inward to her spiritual fire. Her spiritual work is to ignite and tame her flame. A man’s drive towards a woman should be towards her spiritual fire. Their purity draws them to each other and into the center of divine light. The fire in her being. That is why the expression and union of man and woman through the sexual act creates new life inside the woman. There, the light of life originates and grows physically and divinely. Man meets God in the inner chambers of his woman’s womb, where new life unfolds, and woman comforts and needs comforting.
How has man prepared himself to enter woman’s inner chambers?