“So the LORD God cast a deep sleep on the man,
and while he was asleep,
he took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.
The LORD God then built up into a woman the rib
that he had taken from the man.
When he brought her to the man, the man said:
‘This one, at last, is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called ‘woman,’
for out of ‘her man’ this one has been taken.’
That is why a man leaves his father and mother
and clings to his wife,
and the two of them become one flesh.”
This is from the second story of creation from the Book of Genesis, which is a bit more earthy than the first. To our modern sensibilities, the first story is a bit more palatable, “Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness...God created mankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:26-27). While this first story is a bit more abstract and categorical, both stories are in the category of myth. For Catholics, myth has something of a technical definition in relation to scripture. It does not connote fantastical imaginary content, but does point to a deeper meaning, reality, or truth behind the story. It may not be scientific truth or historical truth, but it is divinely inspired symbolic truth.
The first story is more palatable, perhaps, because we see the equal creation of male and female at the same time. The second story can seem to us to place “woman” in a derivative relationship to “man.” In its earthiness, the point is not that woman came from man, but that the two are of the same substance. They are, in fact, the same humanity: differentiated as male and female, but equally essential to the meaning of humanity. Adam recognizes, even exults, in the woman their common humanity and a “second self.” He is no longer alone. The second story shows that the two are one flesh. Both stories point to the same reality. Man and woman are the image of God separately and in unity.
One way to understand that to reflect on the meaning of sleep above. In some sense, the solitary man goes into a God-induced sleep in order to wake up as male and female. In physiological and psychological terms, we often view sleep and dreams as connected to the subconscious. We move from the conscious to the subconscious. To move to the symbolic, Saint John Paul II uses the idea of the analogy of sleep instead of the physiology of sleep. Sleep isn’t just the move from conscious to unconscious, but represents a move from existence to non-existence. For him, “sleep contains an element of annihilation of man’s conscious existence.” In the second creation story, then, sleep represents a move from existence to non-existence, or a move back to the moment before existence. In God’s creativity, he takes man back to before he existed as a solitary person so that God’s creation may emerge in the unity of man and woman.
In the gospel, Jesus calls us back to the beginning. A woman is not the property of a man to be disposed of, nor is she subject to the whims of her husband. On the contrary, she is equal in dignity and of the same essential meaning for God’s creation as the man. “In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”