Put Down Your Paintbrush and Step Away From the Rose-Bush

Peter Kreeft said once that an archetype is a picture in the mind of God that humans catch onto. An archetype is what Plato called a ‘form’. It is the essential ‘flower-ness’ of all flowers that enables you to recognize a flower, even though they differ in shape, or height, or color. Be very careful who you let define what your goal should be as a person. Most women, have been edited their whole lives to fit an arbitrary model that was never meant to define them. Femininity is like being a flower; you may be a rose, and your mother, a daisy, and I am an orchid. But we are all women, and the archetype of femininity should enable and inspire us to become more fully who we are, instead of editing us into an unnecessarily narrow standard.

It is a tragedy that women today are asking the church how to be more beautiful, more feminine, and they are so often put through an assembly line of doctrine that spits them out on the other side pinned up, stuffed in, and talking funny. The process of ‘growing in godliness’ is in some ways narrow, for there is only one path to life, and in some way limitless, as the God who we pattern ourselves after is limitless. I have often found myself disturbed at how alike women in the church are. I feel as though I am Alice, from Lewis Carroll’s tale and I am sure that this rose bush was at one point white, and not red like every other rose bush in the Queen of Heart’s garden. And then I smell the stench of paint. Some one’s been painting the roses red again.