Love 'em or hate 'em, women are here to stay

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, May 11, 2003 By: The Very Reverend Roger Dawson

Mothers' Day, May 11, 2003 sermon by The Very Reverend Roger Dawson Dean of St. Mary's Anglican Cathedral, Caracas

"I never preach about women" a colleague once told me, "if you praise them they think you have other motives and if you condemn them you have enemies for life."

"Believe me" , he added "if you get close enough to stab one they all bleed."

So his advice was to stay well clear of what we call the fairer sex and the better half. He may well be right, of course, but I dare say the same advice could be directed towards any group, male or female or even mixed groups be they housewives, architects, footballers, doctors or road sweepers and dare I add, clergy?

Actually I stay away from as many groups of clergy as I can, as I think they are the oddest group of all God" s creatures. George Bernard Shaw is reported to have said that when he saw a clutch of clergy he knew that God had a sense of humor.

Love 'em or hate 'em, women are most definitely here to sta, and it seems to me that we should treat each person as an individua, not as the stereotype member of a group, clan, tribe, race or family.

When I look into the mirror in a morning, as I am frequently forced to do to see how many hairs I have missed whilst shaving, I cannot but help noticing that I get more like my father every day. My mother says I walk like him and she gets upset when she sees me from a distance, because I have become so like him and her mind slips back to the time when he was alive, and she thinks for a moment that he has come back to see her.

I want to repeat something that I said last week, when talking about the appearances of Jesus to the disciples. Did they actually happen, these appearances, or did the followers think that they happened and so were confused when they came to recall the events?

Not wishing to appear as liars, they made the stories more plausible by adding segments that seemed to them to confirm that he actually did come and be with them. Unknown to each individual was that the other apostles were doing the same, and so we finish up with a catalogue of conflicting accounts. Maybe it was images from the past that were confused and merged into present realities that made them think that Jesus was alive.

Just like my mother thinks that her husband of more than fifty years, but has been dead for more than a dozen, is alive again and come to see her, when it is in fact her son. Of course I carry many of his genes, but I am not my father, only my father's son, and we don't need a DNA test to prove it. In addition I have her genes also, and that makes me into a different and unique person ...as we all are different and unique.

Although I don't look so much like her, though I did have blond hair from her side of the family that escaped from the top of my head when I was in my twenties, I am probably more like her in the way I think.

A common jibe in our household is "oh, you are just like your mother." Many of us are, including my dear wife ... and that is hardly a surprise for many spend their first five years of life almost exclusively with their mothers. They shape the way we are and together with our inherited behavioral genes, the people we are is set by the time we go to school. It is pretty well the way it has always been.

Even when we were hunter-gatherers living on the edge of the forest, the children stayed with the females whilst the males ventured out into the grasslands to hunt. Various societies have attempted to change the system but have hardly dented it. The Greeks, as much as anyone, have experimented with schools for boys to turn them into warriors, killing the girls off as not much use but then they came unstuck when they lost a battle and most of their army and there were not enough women to bear them more children, so they fell under someone else's idea of how civilization should be ordered and run.

The big question is ... is the system of females baring the children and being largely responsible for their initial upbringing the exact system that God had in mind when homo sapiens was designed?

No one will doubt that they are physically designed to the task of developing the child from cell and sperm to the moment nine months later when the infant is big enough to manage breathing on its own in the world outside.

From then on, whose responsibility is it?

Again we must say that the mother with her exquisitely designed feeding system has to take the leading role. So important is this and so welcome to all individuals that only those who associate the body with guilt think that displaying such objects is a terrible sin.

Roman matrons would go deliberately to the baths to discuss with other mothers the merits of the young girls who went to swim. All this in an endeavor to arrange the best shapes married their sons. The girls themselves had a better view of their prospective partners at the athletics at which the participants were naked.

The present Bishop of Gloucester went to Borneo and at the Sunday Eucharist found himself surrounded by half-naked altar girls and wondered if such a pleasant experience could ever happen in England.

All this body display was a terrible sin to Semitic peoples ... both Jews and Arabs ... who never put on a public display of nudity; and to this day the women in Arab lands are dressed so as to be invisible to others.

It has left the Western world in a confused state ... decadence and debauchery has gone hand in hand with sexual liberty and license, so many people have come to the conclusion that things sexual and of the body are less than pure and thus are against God's design.

Of course they can't be wholly against God's design, otherwise the human race would die out in a generation if we followed that edict.

The answer to the future understanding of our sexuality lies, like almost everything else, with our mothers. I have heard it expounded that homosexuality in men and women is because mothers either have not allowed their children to move over to make relationships with their fathers, or fathers have not allowed them to leave their mothers.

I think there is more to it than this, but I believe that it is true that mothers have an incredibly important and crucial role in the development of their offspring.

We are what our mothers shaped us to be.

Generally speaking, we are pleased with the job she did because we don't like to criticize ourselves ... thus any change in the system is going to be slow.

If women have a greater role in western society now than a century ago, it is because their mothers have taught them that this is OK ... not because men have given in.

If you have been listening to a mere man, thank you.