Today, we welcome Christina of Reflections of a Catholic in Formation.
??She reaches out her hands to the poor, and extends her arms to the needy.?? ??Proverbs 31:20
As young women in university, my friends and I have often been exhorted to ??be a Proverbs 31 woman??. For most of us, this seems like an okay proposition, except that nobody tells us what that means. It??s a confusing imperative because there are so many ways to be a ??Proverbs 31 woman?? and many of them don??t even apply to us yet. We don??t have husbands to trust our counsel or children to praise us, we can??t weave clothing or buy fields, so we??re left wondering what we can do to model ourselves after Proverbs 31 other than fearing the Lord. It is a wonderful thing to discover, then, that verse 20 applies to every woman and is relatively easy to emulate.
Proverbs 31:20 says of the ideal woman, ??She reaches out her hands to the poor, and extends her arms to the needy.?? It is simple, straightforward, and perfect for a woman my age. During one??s university years, there is a mixed sense of mature responsibility and juvenile desire to enjoy as much leisure as possible, the latter is made easy by the large amount of free time students enjoy being away from home and, to a certain degree, masters of their own universe. However, if one attends university in a city, he or she is not shielded from seeing that there are many people in the immediate vicinity who are in need, and for young Christian students it is the perfect opportunity to emulate the Proverbs 31 woman.
Unfortunately, universities like mine are fast paced, high expectations kinds of places which leave students little free time to enjoy leisure or dedicate time to much other than work if they want to do well. Service to the poor is often restrained to weekend mornings or giving what little cash or change a student carries to a person who asks for it. The school runs alternative break trips, but they run into the thousands of dollars, which is not always easy money for a student to get.
The cheapest of these alternative breaks is the one sponsored by the Newman Center, and it is usually filled with women in spite of the fact that we are always doing manual labor. The destination is typically in the rural South, and the project is usually helping to rebuild and renovate a house that is either falling apart or was destroyed by a natural disaster from which more affluent areas have long recovered. Students wear old, ratty clothes that only get dirtier as the week wears on, and generally do not look or act in a way which portrays a conventional sense of femininity.
I would argue, though, that doing work like this for others is not only proper in the sense that we should be helping people who need it, but that it is also inherently feminine, as per Proverbs 31:20. For young women to whom time is valuable and reflects how successful we could one day become, taking a week to go to an unfamiliar place to help someone who needs that time more than we do is a perfect expression of what Pope John Paul II referred to as the ??feminine genius??. Our instincts for care and kindness are manifested in ways that are not traditionally feminine, but the expression of them is inherently so. Perhaps, then, it is better that we are not told how to be a ??Proverbs 31 woman??, but that we are allowed to start on the road to becoming one with the opportunities which are presented to us now.
Christina is a junior at The George Washington University studying History and Latin. She is a revert to her Catholic faith, and enjoys reading (and occasionally teaching) as much as she can about it. She is fascinated by nuns and loves decidedly un-girly things like archery and contact sports. Christina blogs about her life and Catholicism at Reflections of a Catholic in Formation.