If we live long enough we may
find that his-tory/her-story is divisible into three parts
(personalities), analogous to Trinity. In our early lives we experience “second
person” relationships, the relationship between child and parents. In this
relationship we experience a sharing of personality with our parents who have
given to us our genetic make-up and who will invest a good portion of their
lives in nurturing our body/soul by provisioning for us, by their example of
living, and by the knowledge they impart to us. In image and likeness we carry
for our lifetimes the family character given to us by our parents. In the
family setting we learn the necessity of reciprocal relationships, that is,
being not just the recipient of the beneficence of others, but being ourselves
benefactors of love and service to others. In this period of life we grow into
wisdom, age and grace.
Practical relationships in the second
person experience prepare us for the matured, personal role of living, of
ourselves being persons grown into the parenting role of the “first person”. As
male or female, the role of parenting has much in common, but also much that is
unique in/to femaleness and maleness.
Scripture tells that humans are
made to God’s likeness, male and female. Sexual subtlety is the axiomatic
expression of quantum-electric (positive, female, and negative,
male) energy/matter. Femaleness, in symbol and fact, is characterized in
quantum-electric grounding, while maleness is characterized in the negative
energetic potential of free agent electrons swarming the nucleus. The high
achievement of reflective consciousness in subtle sexuality represents a
quantum leap in the advance of cosmic rationality. Based on evolutionary
evidence, it seems right to credit sexuality with the leap in consciousness
that we now experience in dialogic self-awareness. The left-right disposition
of the body’s limbs and organs testify to sexual polarity and mitotic cell
structuring. Prior to the separation of female/male sexes, organisms reproduced
by cell division, “asexually”; the function of reproduction by cell division is
characteristically a female trademark. There are mechanisms in animal
cells, including human, namely, the organelles, mitochondria and plastids, that
have their own DNA, which is transferred cell-to-cell by cell division, and are
carried in the female egg cytoplasm but not in the male sperm.
Mothers, by the endowments of nature
and nurture, are the more stabilizing component of family for they are
the persons in whom the nurturing of life begins and upon whom life most
depends. Womanhood confers stability and grounding to family and society.
Biologically, mothers invest personally the most in/to life. The ovum is the
major determining matrix of individual life, male and female. In the cell
matrix are all the raw materials of structural make-up needed in the growth of
the conceptus. The ovum contributes three distinct strands of DNA; two
pertain to essential cellular processes of energy maintenance and development
(mitochondria and plastids), which are outside the ovum’s nucleus. In the
nucleus of the egg-cell, one-half the genetic chromosomes is provided, while
the other half of the nuclear chromosomes is provided paternally, that is, by
the male sperm. To have a graphic sense of the relative contributions of the
ovum and the sperm, the sperm may be thought of as being the size of a tomato
seed, and the tomato fruit as corresponding in size to the ovum; even more
contrasting is the size of a rooster’s sperm and a hen’s egg.
The ovum is the ground state, the
gravitational place of rest and purpose for the sperm, even as the mother is
for her lifetime the place of refuge, solace and security for her conceptus,
infant and child. For mother and child, the father is an enabling presence, who
in word and work supports the mother’s totally preoccupying task of nurture. In
preserving the essential continuities of life, it is quite evident that the
role of the woman is far more substantive (spiritually/materially) than is the
role of the father. The mother’s spirituality predominates naturally in
conception and in the family setting, hence, it is right to analogize the role
of her person in trinity as that of holy spirit. The mother contributes
primarily, before birth and after, to the character of the spiritual dialogue
occurring between parents, and between parents and children. Her spirit is
essentially and necessarily “holy”, if familial, communal harmony is to work.
In the correspondence of purpose, father and children cooperate with the nurturing
work of mother. It is in the communal relationships of mutual nurturing that
the consciousness of Trinity is experienced and learned; this is true for
family as it is for civil society. Anything that frustrates necessary family
harmony registers also in the frustration of civil society. Familial trinity,
dialog, is the heart and soul of religious, civil society.