In honor of International Women’s Day yesterday I’m gonna go there.
When I watched Wonder Woman I bawled. It came from a deep place and surprised me, but I did.
***SPOILER ALERT***
Diana, who has trained her entire life for war finally steps onto war-torn soil. She is surrounded by suffering and injustice and every cell in her body is feeling the need to respond. But those people are not the mission. There is nothing that can be done for them. Or so she is told repeatedly by her male colleagues. And finally after being told no and reminded of the mission many times, she has finally had enough. She can’t not do something and so she ignores the pleas of her colleagues, she sluffs off her cape like she sluffs off their expectations. She takes up her weapons and steps into No Man’s Land. As she pushes in on the enemy and the others rise to follow and do battle alongside her I am struck by the beauty of the thing and I am almost ugly crying in the theatre. I’m not even sure why. As Dan and I walk home I begin to process what it was that produced that response in me.
I believe men and women are different and that that is a gift. I don’t necessarily believe that there are personality traits that belong to only men or only women. For example I believe that there are gentle and nurturing men and that there are strong and ambitious women and that there is nothing wrong with that. However, I do believe that the way a gentle and nurturing man will express those traits will likely look different than the way and gentle and nurturing woman expresses those traits and so forth. I think this is the case because our brains and bodies work differently, we interact with our worlds differently and the social realities that form us are different (i.e. both nature and nurture make us different). So without going to much farther down the gender theory path, because that’s not where I’m going with all this, my personal view is that men and women are different and our diversity is a gift.
So, what did I see in Wonder Woman that lead me to cry for the beauty of it? I saw a group of warriors out to do battle against evil. I saw the strengths of Diana and the strengths of her male counterparts. They both had the same goal – end the war – but they approached that in different ways. The men were focused on the mission – this is the one thing we have to do to get the job done. And there was Diana, who absolutely could not put blinders on to the suffering she was seeing. She was moved by what she saw and she had to do something about it. When she made that decisive step into No Man’s Land in order to take back the town from the enemy, she was responding to a call that the men had not heard, but when they saw her leaning into her purpose they jumped up and they supported her and they decided to fight alongside her.
Dare I say that we have often characterized the “emotion” of women as a weakness, a liability, a distraction? What if we could view it as a strength?What if we released women to feel deeply, to perceive injustice with prophetic vision of how things ought to be, to be burdened and to mourn for their communities, or the communities of another, to dream of a better way and to be moved into action. What if we released women to pursue their calling with the gifts and strengths and abilities that God knit into them while they were in their mothers’ womb. And what if it wasn’t just some little side-show (how sweet!) but that we actually got behind them as they charged the darkness in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Of course we needed Steve too. We needed his focus and his drive toward the thing that he was called to. We needed his form of conviction and bravery. We needed him to fly that plane in the sky sacrificing himself for the sake of the village to which they had just brought liberty under Wonder Woman’s calling. We need him and his strengths just as much as we need her and her strengths. And while I’m advocating for women here, the broader point is this: we need one another.
Imagine if all of God’s sons and all of God’s daughters were included in the fight, armed to fight in the battle and freed to lead the charge on the hills to which He has called them. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12), and the battle is too big to leave any one of God’s soldiers untrained and unengaged and doubting that they are called to push back the darkness because someone else hasn’t already taken the first step. I am compelled by a vision of us, men and women both, leading together in our God-given strengths and gifts and abilities and differences.