Jezebel — Holy Hope Blog — Memorare Ministries

Dear Friends, In honor of today's March for Life in Washington, I offer the below reflection, which is not meant to be polemical or to condemn any one person for their participation in the Women's March last week. It is simply meant to name the spiritual reality that I believe we are dealing with and the spiritual remedy needed. Let us pray for the healing of the wounds of our nation, and all that drives women to seek abortion as a solution to an unexpected pregnancy. Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of life, pray for us.

Answer me, Lord! Answer me, that this people may know that you, Lord, are God and that you have brought them back to their senses. 1 Kings 18:37

A quick perusal through the Old Testament story of the Prophet Elijah (1 Kings 16 ff.) and his showdown with the wicked pagan queen, Jezebel, confirms that this week in America, everything old is new again. New again is the sinful human tendency to want absolute power and control, and new again is the willful determination to use aggression, violence and all manner of ungodly means to achieve it.

Case in point: This week’s January 22 anniversary of the infamous Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in America was preceded on January 21 by the Women’s March on Washington. After watching the coverage all weekend on various new outlets, I could conclude only one thing: the fundamental thing the marchers wanted to protect the state-sanctioned prerogative of killing their children, and they will steamroll anyone who tries to deny them that power. Because, while claiming they were marching for women’s rights, not one protester could actually articulate a right they were marching for which women don’t already possess. What bled through their protest, however, is that they fear losing the right to unrestricted access to abortion on demand under the Trump administration, and that they are willing to engage in a tirade of biblical proportions to make sure that doesn’t happen. Which brings me back to Jezebel.

Jezebel, the wife of Israel’s King Ahab and the power behind his throne, could be called “Eve on crack.” She influenced her husband to both engage in Baal worship and promote it among the Israelites, leading God’s people into apostasy through the practice of deviant sexual rituals, human sacrifice and self-mutilation—all for the purpose of controlling the fertility gods. Sound familiar? Jezebel operated without conscience or scruples to have her way, urging her husband to oppose the worship of the one true God, destroy his altars and kill his prophets, which Ahab promptly did. When Jezebel wanted Naboth’s vineyard, she had Naboth unjustly tried and killed. When Jezebel wanted to silence God’s prophets, she had hundreds of them slaughtered. And when Jezebel’s pagan prophets lost a major power encounter with Elijah on Mount Carmel, she chased Elijah down with all of the vim and vigor of hell to have his throat slit.

Sadly, Jezebel represents the epitome of disordered, fallen femininity: an unapologetically grasping woman who will assert her will and have her way, no matter how much blood is spilled. I couldn’t get her out of my mind as I witnessed the vulgarity and hatred spewing from the mouths, signs and clothing of those at the Women’s March. To my mind, what we witnessed in the Capitol last Saturday was the show of a demonic "spirit" named Jezebel that is the antithesis of spirit of Our Blessed Mother. Such a spirit can only be “tied up” through prayer, fasting and repentance (Mk 3:27, Mt 17:21), all of which we are summoned to by our bishops in response to the stronghold of death in our culture.

The hopeful news is that there’s another march in Washington today, and its protestors will march Mary’s way. They will humbly, prayerfully and respectfully show up in our nation’s capital to make a plea for protection and justice for the unborn. They will sing praise to God, carry banners that are dignified, and meet with legislators politely to plead the case that all human life is sacred and inviolable. They will dress modestly, behave courteously, and demonstrate nobly, seeking to show a confused world that love and humility beget love and humility, and that violence and aggression spawn more of the same. Marching Mary’s way, the protesters may remain unseen and hidden to the world-at-large as the secular news media, power brokers and pundits ignore them. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of March for Life protesters will march mightily under the standard of Almighty God for the cause of truth and life.

Mary’s way is never one of self-assertion, domination or control, but is instead the way of generous, unassuming, self-sacrificing love. Her open and welcoming stance toward both God and human life would never be labeled “powerful” according to the world’s criterions, but the Mother of the God-man is the most powerful woman who ever lived. Paradoxically, her power is manifested not through assertion, but instead through her absolute surrender to God and to love. She has much to teach us today about what it means to be women, but we must choose to follow her way.

Let us beg God to place Mary’s mantle of peace and protection over over each and every one of us, and over our nation. May we also ask, as Elisha asked Elijah, for a double portion of Mary’s spirit to fall upon us and upon the women of our land.

This article was previously published at Aleteia.

FullSizeRender-2 As I watched the excellent movie Suffragette this past weekend, which documents the history of women’s struggle for the right to vote in England, two things really struck me: 1) The women’s rights movement was rightly spawned by the need for women to escape the unjust, dehumanizing and often brutal treatment suffered at the hands of men. 2) It took less than 100 years after gaining the right to vote for women to begin to use the same force, violence and dehumanizing domination they had sought to escape—most tragically, by exerting themselves against their unborn children.

While the movie did not place the struggle for women’s rights into a Christian context, I couldn’t help but think about Saint John Paul II’s words in Mulieris Dignitatem (On the Dignity and Vocation of Women), which I recently reread to prepare for a talk at a women’s conference. More relevant today than when he wrote the Apostolic Exhortation nearly 30 years ago, the great pope wrote forcefully and with striking clarity about the effects of Original Sin, particularly upon women:

“Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Gen. 3:16)… Domination takes the place of “being a sincere gift” and therefore living “for” the other…This “domination” indicates the disturbance of and loss of stability of that fundamental equality which the man and woman possess in the “unity of the two”: and this is especially to the disadvantage of the woman. Mulieris Dignitatem, par. 10.

In other words, the fundamental equality God intended between men and women was ruptured through sin; sin that has played itself out historically in disunity between the sexes, most often at the expense of women. As Suffragette accurately depicts, women have fought hard to gain a voice in a world ruled by lopsided patriarchal attitudes and customs, sometimes at the expense of their own lives. Their goal was threefold—the right to vote, the right to education and the right to employment, rights for which women in various areas of the world are still fighting today.

Sadly, the struggle for women’s rights did not stop with authentic human equality, but instead morphed into an all out battle over women’s “reproductive” (read: abortion) rights which rages throughout the world today. It is bitterly ironic that such “rights” demand that women imitate the male models of violence and domination they sought to overcome in the first place. John Paul II warned of the grave danger of such an approach:

Consequently, even the rightful opposition of women to what is expressed in the biblical words, "He shall rule over you" (Gen 3:16) must not under any condition lead to the "masculinization" of women. In the name of liberation from male "domination," women must not appropriate to themselves male characteristics contrary to their own feminine "originality." There is a well-founded fear that if they take this path, women will not “reach fulfillment,” but instead will deform and lose what constitutes their essential richness. Mulieris Dignitatem, par. 10.

And what constitutes the “essential richness” of women? While our feminine giftedness, which John Paul II referred to as “the genius of women,” is deep and multi-faceted, it is grounded in the fundamental orientation that women have toward love and life in virtue of the fact that our hearts, minds and bodies are ordered to motherhood, and hence, naturally toward loving and caring for other persons.

Suffragette left me asking: what went wrong in the fight for women’s rights, which has culminated in millions of women doing violence to the very persons we are called to nurture and protect? My theory is that the bastardization of the authentic movement for the recognition of women’s dignity was hijacked by what I call “the Jezebel spirit,” which is the age-old temptation toward grasping for power wherein women to use manipulation, domination, control and even violence to beat men at their own game.

One of my favorite stories from the Bible is in this week’s Mass readings, where the prophet Elijah engages in a showdown with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel during which the reality and power of Israel’s God—the one true God—is ably demonstrated. The backstory of that power encounter reveals that the wicked pagan queen, Jezebel, and her spineless husband, King Ahab, together led the Israelites into apostasy through “the veneration and worship of Baal” (1 Kings 16:31).

Interestingly, Baal worship involved the belief in having sway over the fertility gods, who were supposedly appeased by self-mutilation, deviant sexual practices and child sacrifice. Sound familiar? Jezebel’s “spirit”—in direction opposition to the spirit of Mary, the Mother of God—is all about exercising power for the sake of control: control over men, control over the gods, control over fertility and ultimately, control over life and death. In contrast, Mary’s spirit, which is the icon of both authentic femininity and all true humanity, is all about reigning supreme through the gift of self given to God and others in self-donating love, life-giving generosity and self-sacrificing service.

Mary or Jezebel? Each generation of women must decide whom we will emulate. Indeed, the future of the world depends on our choice—and the choice is in no uncertain terms one between life and death, the blessing or the curse.