The French have a saying from the 15th Century: “Fleuris là où tu es plantée”, which means, “Bloom where you are planted”

It seems to me, it is an odd thing for something which does this by it’s nature, to criticize the soil it grows in.  That’s not it’s duty, or it’s penchant.  Can the pot say to the potter why have you made me like this?

Study of Tulips. Jacob Marrel.

And it seems to me the glory of woman is that she blooms where she is planted, even when she is they, the church or all men.  Chesterton said that women are more elemental than men.  They are fruitful and fill the earth like all the boundless energy from each wave of creation, on those first six days.  But that task is not all there is.  There is a seventh day made for man, or perhaps men.  Martha is blooming, while Mary seems to have gotten this male truth, at the feet of The Male.  The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks “What is the chief end of man.” and answers “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.”  I think also of John Piper’s Christian hedonism, very appropriate to a culture which often worships work.  But do you think a woman would come up with these concepts?  Certainly not, it’s the men lounging in the pub over a beer, or the same men as a committee of elders looking over their Bibles.

It seems to me that feminism is the rebellion of fertile soil, even clay soil become pottery.  I suppose if you break the end off of a pot you get a sort of megaphone for shrill rebellions.  No less so than other rebellions, but more apt for us.  We shouldn’t make our work too serious, and we shouldn’t pretend that broken pottery is fruit.  Chesterton also said that it is funny when a man falls because he is a man.  He walks about on two legs with a certain dignity, not possessed by the other animals.  You can’t mock something which is not serious and has no dignity.  And so it makes sense that men are the butt of ridicule and not women.  A man falling down is a joke, a woman falling down is pitiable.

And so what have our men made?  They have made these women around us, blooming where they were planted.  Exchanging natural relations for relations with one another. The obvious cosmic joke of two electrical outlets trying to get it on.  Exchanging natural relations for a task, a desk, a job, a doctorate of doctorates.  Or simply selling their bodies in various forms online and on the street, and calling it empowerment.  But the fruit is withering, sucked out by Planned Parenthood and sold to the highest bidder.  The soil really is bad.  They are in no position to criticize their own soil, it’s just silly, but we are. One potter may tell another potter that his work stinks.  I think in some ways this is being remedied.

Men are leaving academia, the source of much bad soil, and trying to build another world.  Most women haven’t gotten the memo yet.  It takes time.  They are still stuck in that soil from the last generation which said college and career are all that matters. There is nothing more heart breaking than watching a liberal, feminist transplant trying to survive in the new rich soil of full quivers.  That’s not where they were planted.  They are a bird of another feather, or a flower of a different petal.  Fathers can begin to break this trend, by encouraging daughters to be lovers of husbands and lovers of children, as Paul said, rather than lovers of graduate programs on graduate programs.  They can encourage them to be feminine, instead of living it up in hunting camp with the boys.  They have set this old agenda we now find ourselves in, and it is diseased soil.  We need to repent and purify it.