Column: Original Beauty

The Potter knows what He has made

by Katie Lovett

Becoming a big sister was a major deal for my younger sister. For her, the day the new baby came would be a momentous occasion. She even had a list of demands.

“It has to be a girl,” she said.

“You don’t get to choose,” my mother replied. “It is what it is, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“You can,” my sister insisted. “If it’s a boy, just put it back in until it turns into a girl!”

My mother threw her head back and laughed. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“But why?”

Our culture struggles with the same “why.” And just like my sister, there are demands. Choice! they cry. Gender is too important to leave to nature or chance! They even have a solution: surgically removing their gendered body parts and reconstructing other parts to replace them. (And you thought shoving a boy back in until it becomes a girl was drastic!)

Biology tells us that no man-made procedure can change a person’s sex. But the culture’s transgender obsession seems here to stay, so it’s prudent to answer my sister’s question. Why can’t you remake a human person into the gender you please? Why can’t time and human hands wrangle nature into what we desire it to be?

The answer is simple, really. Processes devised by finite human minds cannot alter the Infinite’s wise and beautiful plan for human nature. Time, no matter how much passes, cannot turn boys into girls. We are not formed by the hands of time. We are formed by the hands of a Divine Potter shaping clay.

A potter knows what he has made. He has given it a purpose, fusing function and beauty out of what was once formless clay. It is no use for the apprentice to wish for a cup instead of a plate. The apprentice cannot put a plate back in the kiln and wait until it becomes what he desires. The potter has a plan, and woe to any apprentice who believes himself wiser than the master!

And wouldn’t it be a tragic waste for the apprentice to smash that plate to smithereens and glue its pieces into a cup-like shape? No matter how hard he tries, that plate will never be a cup, but a misshapen dish—a plate re-constructed in a way the potter never intended.

Our God is a master Potter, and He knows what He has made. Yet our culture asks us to disbelieve Him and reject the Biblical revelation. We are asked to believe that when enough time passes, a boy can become a girl simply by desiring it. We are commanded to call “normal” these misshapen re-constructions of the Potter’s masterpieces.

Time and human intervention, the culture claims, will give us the perfection we seek. And somehow, we are willing to try it. But women do not shove their children back in the womb until they become the desired sex. Of course that sounds ridiculous. It sounds like what it is—a 21st-century attempt to be “like god,” determining the very nature and shape of the clay on our own.

But we cannot determine anything for we are not the potters.

We are dishes formed by a Master who hollows out in us a space into which He pours his grace. We are made to hold the love, life, and breath of God—to be signs of that love, life, and breath in our male and female bodies. It is not a choice...it is an honor.

(And just in case you were wondering, the new baby turned out to be a girl after all.)

Katie Lovett

Katie Lovett works for the Angelico Project, a Catholic arts organization that seeks to evangelize through beauty. She lives in southwest Ohio with her husband and four children.