"Now that's talent"
on the feminine genius
James’ highest compliment given is “that person has talent.” That person is “talented.” “Talent,” which I, historically, always took to be a specific skill aimed toward a specific goal, is actually broader.
What James means by talent is what the Italians mean by papabile — someone who is Pope material. Someone who has saperfare or know-how. You know they are talented by the way they get shit done. A talented person does not delay or let a project dangle in limbo too long.
No gender, age, or race has a corner on the talent market. A talented person is she who moves, moves well, with and for others, and makes something excellent and necessary.
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I find myself extremely tired of the phrase “feminine genius,” because I do not think of the contributions of women as a nice extra to the talent of men. A woman’s genius is pure genius. Because isn't masculine genius just genius? A woman’s talent is just talent, it’s essential for making the world turn.
Does the feminine genius mean something inherent in feminity that the world can’t do without? I wonder if we sometimes forget that in Christ there is no male or female. That gender—like all things—is transformed in the mystical body of Christ.
As for that first question, the more I work in the Church and am alive in the world, the more I feel as though it is the women who are doing the essential work of turning the world. There is no “feminine” genius or “women’s” space. There is the essential work of moving, loving, making, and caring, staying alive. This is the space of true living, and it is mostly sustained by the efforts of women and the men who are most like Christ, who, by all the characteristics listed by Aristotle, is quite a womanly man. Which brings us to that second question.
What do I (and Aristotle) mean by a womanly man? One who is not afraid of weakness. Who recognizes, like Paul, that in our weakness is our strength. Who, like a woman being split open by a child, brings new life into the world by being broken open. It is, of course, these men, who give of themselves rather than gather for themselves who display what I suppose John Paul II would call a “feminine genius” but I think most fathers of the church would call “an imitation of Christ.”
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My week has been completely upended by the arrival of a Venezuelan family into our lives on Saturday. The story of welcoming them, of being welcomed by them and of drawing upon all the different beginning seedlets of our Chicago community to welcome them to the United States and find them some beginnings of stability has probably been a great adventure. It’s an adventure that has made it so that I have fallen quite behind on the work I was meant to do this week. But a life-giving adventure—it has reminded me many times of our pilgrimage. Except now, instead of being the pilgrims, we are the hosts, welcoming the pilgrims. And these pilgrims have walked 200 times more miles than we did, through much more difficult, much less welcoming conditions: scorpion bites, videos that show them on train cars, just above madly spinning wheels, swollen rivers.
But welcoming the stranger is the greatest gift we give ourselves, I have discovered. Our lives are enriched immensely by pushing our communities out to incorporate people we thought they couldn’t hold. Our new friends, in our neighborhood, have brought such richness to our week.
And, over and over again, as I have asked for help, as I have cast about for aid, it is the most ordinary people, the people with the least amount of money, the fewest resources, who step up to help. People who are already busy who make the time, people who have little can give much, a widow with two mites.
We refuse to believe what Christ tells us over and over again: that poverty is true wealth. St. Francis calls Lady Poverty a beautiful lady. When I see the goodness of people willing to welcome a new family into their house, I truly see the beauty Francis saw in Lady Poverty. In these moments, I wonder, why would anyone want to become rich?
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So I suppose I feel slightly allergic to speaking about women as though they were a space apart, because, out in the world, it is women and the spaces created and facilitated by women where I feel the essential action of the Catholic liturgy is made real, incarnate.
When I see communities fueled by self-giving love, that mirror and radiate the infinite gift of God that the Catholic Church celebrates each Eucharistic meal into the world, I so often find women at their heart. I see in them the mystery that loving beyond our limits is the bread that feeds creation.
There are no events but thoughts, and the heart’s hard turning and the heart’s slow learning where to love and who, writes Annie Dillard. The rest is merely gossip and tales for other times.
I have encountered so many people today, this week, who live in the gossip. Who live in the inessential world of ego and competition where personal worth and power is measured in dollar signs and degrees behind your name.
The communities they build are shallow and brittle.
But the communities built by the people living in the essential events of the heart, who know that shared neediness is the glue that holds us together, are the communities who call me forth out of myself to be a better, more loving heart. To pay attention to the real thoughts and events of my hard heart turning, slowly, learning to love without limit.