Our Lady's Lamp

While meditating on what makes Women different from Men, I found myself returning back to the beginning, and I realized that all of our differences can be found in the first few chapters of scripture. Man was made from dust, from the earth - an entity of order, rule, and structure. Woman was made from bone, from living flesh taken from another - a creature of choices, changes, and growth.   Man was made to rule the world, to name the creature, to impose order where it was needed, to bring structure. He was made to protect the garden from outside forces. Woman was made because Man was incomplete without us. They needed something more than just order, something more than duty. They needed an equal to love and be loved by. So, Woman was crafted from the bone of his bone, the blood of his blood. We were made to bring change - life - into the world, to be conduits of love. Woman was made to complete Man. Without Woman, Man couldn't be a complete image of God. Man's fai...

"We have a mission! We can't save everyone in this war! It's not what we are here to do!" "You're right. But it's what  I  am going to do!" So, Wonder Woman came out! And I was very, very hesitant to see it because I usually hate how strong women are portrayed. But Wonder Woman was excellent! If I could take only one scene from Wonder Woman, it is the scene titled No Man's Land. If you have seen the movie, well, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't seen the movie yet, trust me, you'll know the scene. Diana - a woman raised to be a strong, powerful, and confident warrior - is seeing war for the first time. She doesn't understand how men can be so cruel, so vicious, and so heartless. She has a mission: Get to the front lines, stop the biological attack that is about to occur. But when she hears of the village just beyond enemy lines that is full of slaughter and slavery, she cannot just stand by. She sees tha...

And no, I am not talking about some Femme Fatal. I'm talking about the ultimate Deceiver. I think we sometimes don't think of the Trial in the Garden properly, largely due to the limitations of English, largely because all the artwork is rather cheesy. We tend to think of Satan being this little garden snake that sits and talks to Eve, hissing in her ear that God was unjust and selfish. But Scripture does not tell us that he was like Sir Hiss, but rather much more like Maleficent. "The another sign appeared in the sky, it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on its heads were seven diadems. It's tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky and hurled them down to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman about to give birth, to devour her child when she gave birth.... The huge dragon, the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, who deceived the whole world, was thrown down to earth, and its angels were thrown down wi...