Theology of the Body for Woman: The Developing Child in the Womb as the Old Testament Ages

Theology of the Body for Woman: The Developing Child in the Womb as the Old Testament Ages

What if the nine months of pregnancy symboize nine necessary sub-phases of spiritual activiy for the OT unto Jesus?  Sound crazy?  Come and see!

My first theory is that just as an individual saint has to go the ways to holiness—the purgative, the illuminative, and the untive—why not the People of God in a great historical sense?  It does really work if you look at it.  

For, consider that Woman in apocalypse, besides being the Ever Virgin, is also the People of God. Before the birth of the Child, she is the Old People of God, and after the Child is caught up to heaven to rule the nations with a rod of iron, the Woman clearly becomes the Church. Similarly, St Paul describes Our Church as the Body of Christ, an individual person, like the Woman.  This gives great encouragement to our thesis that the Peoples of God, both of Old and New, walk this path apocalyptically, or historically. 

Let us work it out. Now, we need to get technical.  Although there are three ways, nevertheless, if we break them down, they have five sub-parts as follows.  Fisrly, all but one of the ways consists of a primary light, then a darkness, that is, two sub-parts. So these two ways times two sub-parts, makes four sub-parts. The other way is only one part, the darkness. More specifically: the illuminative and uniive ways have each first light, then darkness.  But the purgative way doesn’t have a preceding light, only darkness. So, again, 4 + 1 =5 sub-parts. Here they are:

1) Purgative dark night of the senses

2) Illuminative way of light

3) Illuminative way of darkness. dark night of the soul 

4) Unitive way of light

5) Unitive way of darkness: martyrdom

How do these work out?

Well, 

1) The dark night of sense is whee the flesh doesn't like the Spirit that comes in to bless the body and correct it.  So it lashes out. Similarly, when God created the Jewish People through Abraham, He wanted to bless the world. But Egypt felt threatened, like the flesh feels threatened by the Spirit. Consequently, Egypt enslaved the Hebrews.

2) Eventually the saint beats out the sins and enters the illuminative way, to grow in knowing God and loving Him.  Too, God delivered the Hebrew People through the Exodus and gave them the kingdom and ultimately the prophets to illumine them and call them to love God better.

But the saint has consolations and desolations during this way. For the prophets, the consolations are growing close to God, knowing that He is with them and their messages are true. The desolations come when the Jewish people resist the prophets and become more and more wicked.

 3) Dark night of the soul: the saint enters into a total desolation. All seems lost, despair.  Similarly, the prophets were surely despondent when the wickedness of the Jews was at its peak.  

4) The unitive way of light: nevertheless, the prophets are vindicated in Babylon. Babylon comes down and lays waste to the Temple. The Jews are carried away into exile as God prophesied. But the Jewish people repented and were restored to the Holy Land.  After this, the Temple was rebuilt and the Jewish people had a renewed relationship with God that enabled them to resist pagan influence for a long time until roughly the Maccabees. Similarly, the saint eventually emerges from the darkness of soul and into the unitive way.  Here, they have reached perfection and every step they take is with God.

5) Finally the saint must empty himself body and soul into The Passion of the Christ, martyrdom, whether literal or of the bed.  In the similar vein, the Jewish people went into their ultimate mature experience, the martyrdom in the Maccabees with the blasphemous King, the Seleucid Antiochus 4th Epiphanies. The Jews were horribly persecuted but they entered upon a victory.

The next light was the first coming of Jesus a new age, a new dispensation. Similarly, after martyrdom the saint dies and enters the next age, heaven.

So we have shown that the last phases of Old testament activity are five, the way of the saint for the Old People. But now we need four more sub-phases to make nine like the woman. Never fear. For as I have written before, there are two great reasons that God made us: to know and love Him and others in this life and hopefully forever in the next.

If we know and love God in this life we will not be wicked. And if we live for the next life with God, to marry our Creator forever, we will not be materialistic like Babel, fornicating figuratively with the creation, or world.

So humanity then as a whole would seem to need to try to digest the antithesis of these two principles first before God sends the covenant of the Old People.  And toward that end, God must necessarily chastise this in order to make way for that prefiguring covenant.

Hence, initially in Noah's day, the world was wicked, the antithesis of baptism’s repentance, and so God baptized the world in the flood. And when humanity became blasphemously materialistic at Babel, God broke them up and married a People, the Hebrews. This then enables God to start the covenant where they walk the ways that we have just seen. And these introductory stages make up to four we were missing: darkness, light, darkness, light.

1) Darkness: the wickedness of Noah's day

2) Light: the flood

3)  Darkness Babel

4) Light: the confounding of tongues and the marrying to the Hebrew people, symbolizing the marriage in the next life

So 4 + 5 = 9 total sub-phases of necessary spiritual activity to prepare for the coming of the Messiah, His birth into the world.

So there you have it. God may very well have intended Woman to carry a child in her womb to develop in order to symbolize the Old testament to prepare for the birth of Messiah. Amen God bless you.