December 26, Boxing Day: with a consolation prize we know all too well!
The idea behind “Boxing Day” hit me especially hard this year as I thought of us struggling to gain and keep women’s sacred and secular leadership in our Church.
A bit of history about the day may strike you, too, with a certain uneasiness. According to Elaine Lemm writing on a website called The Spruce: “A ‘Christmas Box’ in Britain is a name for a Christmas present. Boxing Day was traditionally a day off for servants and the day when they received a ‘Christmas Box’ from the master. The servants would also go home on Boxing Day to give ‘Christmas Boxes’ to their families.”
It referred also to “a box to collect money for the poor traditionally and placed in Churches on Christmas day and opened the next day – Boxing Day. Great sailing ships when setting sail would have a sealed box containing money on board for good luck. Were the voyage a success, the box was given to a priest, opened at Christmas and the contents then given to the poor.”
What struck me was the idea of the servants who had had to work doubly hard on Christmas Day serving those in charge, getting only “leftovers”: a leftover day off after the “true celebration,” leftover time with their families who had just spent Christmas Day without them after the “real day of joy” had passed. What also struck me was Boxing Day as a time for the poor to open their charity box, not the day of, but the day after Christmas – and then sometimes only after it had first passed through a priest’s hand!
We have these strange traditions, Boxing Day being one of them, in which influential, powerful people think they are doing a great kindness to those who are not allowed to be influential nor allowed to be powerful. Like angels, they think, they bend low and bestow.
It’s like complementarity in the Catholic Church, isn’t it? We women, like the servants and poor of old, get our leftover tributes, our leftover considerations, even some leftover praise for our “feminine gifts,” you know, the ones that constantly ensure our many masters’ celebrations and proclamations and triumphs, will turn out well. They get the power; they get the glory. And in a different way from the wealthy of old, it is we who bend low; we who bestow, not in condescension, but in concession to them, angels that we traditionally are.
Well, the boxing and the “boxing in” of women, of genders period, have to stop. This is our mission: one feast every day for all by all; gifts released from their boxes and available every day, everywhere to everyone. Amen.
3 Responses
What you are describing is complementarianism, not *consubstantial complementarity* as explained, for example, in St John Paul II’s Theology of the Body (TOB).
All human beings, men and women, share one and the same human nature. Sexual complementarity does not cancel natural consubstantiality. For all men and women of good will to effectively contribute to integral human development it is indispensable to sanitize human relations, as much as possible, from the inner disposition of rivalry that is generally manifested as domination/submission struggles. The most universal form of rivalry, succinctly summarized in Genesis 3:16, is the “patriarchal gender binary” of male domination and female submission. But the patriarchal culture, ancient as it is, was constructed by human hands and is not natural. The patriarchal era is passing away, as evidenced by families evolving from male headship to joint father-mother headship. This egalitarian complementarity of man and woman in family and society, rooted in their natural consubstantiality, is bound to gradually propagate to all human communities worldwide. Fostering this transition, away from patriarchy and toward the communion foreseen in Galatians 3:28, is crucial for the future of human civilization.
For more on this critical issue:
Consubstantial Complementarity of Man and Woman
http://pelicanweb.org/CCC.TOB.html#article1
Thanks for this reflection, Ellie Harty. We have this practice in the Philippines although we don’t call it Boxing Day. I remember that we had a Christmas Party with the faithful service of our cook, who then left the next day with her gifts for her family and friends. A similar notion but not publicly recognized in the same way as a Boxing Day declared for Western countries to observe or is it only in the UK? However, parties are held in different ways and way ahead of Christmas Day in many occasions.
I join with many women all over the world knowing that God loves each of us without condition. My hope and prayer is that God will allow the hierarchy, including Pope Francis, to be open enough to see this as well.