Mary and Ecumenism

My Childhood vision of Mother Mary MacKillop
galloping past the Alpha Convent bringing
more joeys to Central Western Queensland,
by Luke Roberts

Zenit is the conservative Catholic news service - it's "the world seen from Rome."

They've got an online interview with Mark Shea, identified as a former Protestant and now a leading Catholic apologist, who has written a three-volume defense of Mary. Some of his quotes:

Many of the [early Protestant] Reformers had a profound devotion to Mary and, in fact, accepted much of Catholic teaching about her. However, as Protestantism became more remote from Catholic teaching (and as, in English-speaking countries, Elizabeth I found it very convenient to supplant the cult of the Virgin with a political cult of the Virgin Queen), that connection failed and was eventually broken.

Along with that went the loss of a sense of the sacramental, of the senses of Scripture, and of an appreciation for the feminine in the life of the Church. Mary came to be seen almost exclusively as a sort of pagan goddess and an actual threat to genuine Christian devotion: a perception that would have been absolutely foreign to the mind of any Christian in the first 16 centuries of the Church....

One of the earliest slurs uttered against Jesus was that he was a bastard, the product of a liaison between Mary and a Roman soldier named Pantera (probably a corruption of "parthenos" which is Greek for "virgin").

Is the point of the slur to attack Mary? Of course not! The point is to attack Jesus as a mere common bastard and to deny that he is the Son of God or of any divine origin.

Likewise, when the heretic Nestorius demanded that Christians no longer hail Mary as "Theotokos" or "God bearer", his attack was directed not at Mary, but at the notion that the Man Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity were a unity....

When it comes to Mary, the average Evangelical Protestant is in a position analogous to that of a teetotaler terrified that a sip of wine at communion will transform him into a raging drunken libertine.

Rather than be hyper-focused on the question of whether Catholics honor Mary "too much" and are just about to bow down to Astarte and Isis, the Evangelical would find much more spiritual benefit asking the question "How is it we Evangelicals honor her ‘just enough'?"

When honestly considered (especially against the backdrop of historic Christianity and the practice of the apostolic Church), what he will discover is that it is Evangelicalism that is peculiarly fearful of the woman whom Scripture declares all generations shall called blessed.

Aside from pulling her out of the closet to sing "Round yon virgin, mother and child" she is basically never spoken of among Evangelicals—except to say that Catholics are way overboard about her.

But the reality is that the most Marian Catholics (think John Paul II or Mother Teresa) also tend to be the most Christocentric ones. That's because all real Marian devotion refers us to Christ....

ZENIT: Archbishop Fulton Sheen once wrote in an essay about the apparitions at Fatima that Mary was the key to bringing Christ to the Islamic world. What do you think of this proposal?

Shea: I think he's on to something.

I have no idea how it will all play out, but I was struck by a conversation I once had with a man from Turkey who emailed me asking for more information about the Catholic Church. He was raised Muslim but was drawn to Christ.

Looking over the vast menu of Christianities available on the web he was very quick to pare it all down to the Catholic Church. Why? "Because you honor Mary as we are taught to do in Islam."

I think there's something mighty important going on in that, just as I have noticed that, among the various folks I have met who have become Catholic from a Jewish background, virtually all of them have had some sort of mystical encounter with Mary.

It's interesting to tease out meaning from this. It certainly doesn't include the idea that if Jesus had a mortal father he would be just a "mere common bastard." When Jesus' message was that we are all the children of god.

Shea's point is that the veneration of Mary is Christ-centric and conservative. As someone who wrote about the church for 15 years, with all kinds of access to both what you might call the corporate side of the church and its living communities, I'd agree. The most conservative Catholics of all are incredibly devoted to Mary.

But as for the dire lack of the feminine face of god in Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam, I'd second Shea's view: "there's something mighty important going on in that."

Protestants & the Feminine Face of God

Protestants may not define themselves by their "sullen neglect of Mary," as Time magazine put it a few years back, but their message surely lacks the feminine face of god. As Time put it, "[In Mary there is] a central Christian image of love . . . that Protestantism never officially repudiated but from which it has been estranged almost from the start."

Protestants deny it. Protestant speaker and preacher Mark Roberts writes, "I've included Mary in my own preaching at several points. For example, eleven years ago... "

Gee. I guess "underwhelmed" would cover that.

Travel to the Camargue

Thirza Vallois has a great article on the Camargue at France Today. Vallois is author of the three Around and About Paris guides. She's a consummate historian - those books on Paris are the only guidebooks necessary for the traveler who sees life in the context of history.

Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, "the cradle of Christianity in Western Europe" as Vallois puts it, is on the coast of the Camargue region. It's here that one version of the legend of the Magdalene has her coming to shore, with her "black servant Sara" who became patron saint of the European gypsies, and, "Eventually the village became a pilgrim destination for European gypsies, an ongoing tradition that draws thousands of gypsies from all over the Continent for the three-day event, May 24-26, along with huge crowds of spectators who turn up as much for the gypsy music and dancing as for the gypsies' fervent religious pilgrimage. After Mass on May 24, the statue of Sara is carried in procession all the way into the sea."


Sarah, by other accounts, is Mary Magdalene's daughter by Jesus.

The Templars make their way into the Camargue as well:

Paul Ricard (1909-1997) was another of the Camargue's pioneering visionaries. In 1939, by which time his future empire of "real Marseille pastis" was well under way, he bought a sprawling estate with a farmhouse, a former medieval domain of the Knights Templar-a Templar cross still stands on the site today. Called Méjanès (meaning halfway), it was situated midway between the two branches of the Rhône. There he intended to grow the licorice, fennel and mint that go into the iconic drink of Provence, but the war, and the Vichy government's ban on spirits the following year, forced him into alternative planning. Since he couldn't sell alcohol, he would use Méjanès to breed cattle for both milk and meat. But one way or another, the land was a salty wasteland and would need an irrigation system. The Knights Templar had been faced with the same challenge.

Ricard was also among the early pioneers of the Camargue rice industry, which now supplies 25 to 30 percent of the home market. He may have picked up on Henri IV's idea to introduce the staple to the Camargue-in Henri's case, they say it was to complement his favorite dish, poule au pot, although Ricard intended it principally as a means to desalinate the soil. The French associate Ricard's name with the famous anise-flavored pastis he created in 1932, mostly unaware that, if Parmentier taught their ancestors to eat potatoes, Paul Ricard was instrumental in teaching them to eat rice.

Exploring the Camargue by horseback, as Vallois says, is easy to do, safe, and unforgettable.

The young woman who guided us not only explained the local fauna and flora, but also talked about the differences between the French that she spoke and the French they taught in school - which she'd never understood too well. Her French was well flavored with the Provençal dialect.

The Trinity with Mary

Humanity's experience of the sacred keeps bringing back the feminine sacred - and Church dogma just as endlessly has insisted differently. There seems to have been a particularly strong yearning in recent years for the "face of the goddess," but it seems likely that this same yearning has been just as powerful in past centuries. They called it heresy. Paganism. Idol-worship. (The image of the Virgin Mary is from the Mariavite Sodality, a Texas Catholic group that "includes Marian paths of Gnosis.")

Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall Of The Roman Empire, says,

The Christians of the seventh century had insensibly relapsed into a semblance of paganism: their public and private vows were addressed to the relics and images that disgraced the temples of the East: the throne of the Almighty was darkened by the clouds of martyrs, and saints, and angels, the objects of popular veneration; and the Collyridian heretics, who flourished in the fruitful soil of Arabia, invested the Virgin Mary with the name and honours of a goddess. [More on this seventh century "heresy" is at The Chariot.]

That evidently led to the The Qur'an's teaching "And behold! Allah will say: "O Jesus the son of Mary! Didst thou say unto men, 'Take me and my mother for two gods beside Allah'?" He will say: "Glory to Thee! Never could I say what I had no right (to say). Had I said such a thing thou wouldst indeed have known it. Thou knowest what is in my heart, though I know not what in Thine. For Thou knowest in full all that is hidden." (Qur'an 5:116)

Which has in turn led to Christians reacting in horror at the thought that anyone would think that they worship more than one god - and in particular include a feminine god as part of the trinity. After all, the early Christian fathers spent centuries arguing, killing and excommunicating one another over how to explain Christianity as monotheistic - despite the trinity of the father, son, and holy spirit - all of whom were always relentlessly masculine, of course.

And yet even today a Presbyterian website reports, "Muslims and Jews have presumed, as have some Christians, that Christians worship three separate gods. An African Muslim once said that the main difference between his religion and Christianity was that he had several wives and one God, while Christians had one wife and several gods. Muhammad thought Christians believed in three different deities, one of them the goddess Mary, who was impregnated by intercourse with the father God."

There is one essence of God," say the Presbyterians (and the Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, etc.). "The emphasis is on oneness, not three-ness.The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God -- but they are one God."

Gotcha.

The Mormans don't buy it.

To Mormons, the Godhead consists of three separate and distinct beings:
* God the Father
* Jesus Christ
* The Holy Ghost

That takes them completely out of the supposedly monotheistic Christian tradition, which hammered out back in the first few centuries after Christ how it was that there could could be 1) the Father, 2) the Son, and 3) the Holy Spirit, and yet the three were one. The Mormans, saying that they're going by the Bible alone, think that's bunk.

In fact, the entire discussion of the trinity from both the Mormon and the Presbyterian links are primary exhibits on how analyzing faith turns it into dogma and strips it of its transcendent power.

One thing that all varieties of Christian dogma have in common, though, is that god is male, whether he's one or three.

For their part Muslims insist that any god more than one male god is too many.

That eliminates, however, the "ah moment" many women - including myself - feel upon testing out these words: Our mother, who art all around me, hallowed be thy name.

There's a rush of rightness there even for an agnostic such as I.

Inexplicable religion

The Guardian has a Simon Blackburn review of Karen Armstrong's new book, In Defense of God. The book's thesis is that religion at its essence uses "devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music."

Armstrong evidently posits that the worst perversion that can happen to religion is intellectualizing it: "This makes it into a matter of belief, argument, and ultimately dogma. It debases religion into a matter of belief in a certain number of propositions, so that if you can recite those sincerely you are an adept, and if you can't you fail."

So what should the religious adept actually say by way of expressing his or her faith? Nothing. This is the "apophatic" tradition, in which nothing about God can be put into words...

The mystery at the heart of religious practice is ineffable, unapproachable by reason and by language. Silence is its truest expression.

Blackburn disagrees, saying that silence is no more than the lowest common denominator, the mind idling - and that, "As David Hume put it, in human nature there is 'some particle of the dove, mixed in with the wolf and the serpent.' So we can expect that some directions will be better and others worse. And that is what, alas, we always find, with or without the song and dance."

Silence is of course often the mind at idle, especially when it comes to intellectual endeavors. But isn't that Armstrong's point? That religion, despite Aquinas' labors, is in no way suited for intellectualism?

Prehistoric Cave Artists Were Women

National Geographic reports that scientists have measured the myriad handprints (including the one shown, from the Pech Merle cave in southern France) that are part of prehistoric cave art and come to the conclusion that they are the hands of women.

Bien sûr...

Leonard Cohen's always right

These lyrics are from "Light as a Breeze":

It don't matter how you worship
As long as you're down on your knees
So I knelt there at the delta
At the alpha and the omega
At the cradle of the river and the seas
And like a blessing come from heaven
For something like a second
I was healed and my heart
Was at ease

Ahh.

Religion as Entertainment

And entertainment as religion...

We all know how seriously entertainers and artists can take ourselves - and how amazingly seriously the public takes celebrities as well (all the while claiming not to...).

As someone who worked for the Catholic Church for 16 years, let me tell you that those guys also take themselves very seriously, and as far as I can tell, so do the Protestants, Muslims, etc. The only religious celebrity who doesn't take himself seriously seems to be the Dalai Lama.

Now we all know why religious leaders take themselves seriously - their raison d'etre being our very souls. Artists of every stripe who take themselves seriously often consider their vocation similarly. When you find yourself weeping to a piano sonata, isn't it because your soul has opened to recognize beauty and love? And isn't the same true when we read a novel that awakens us to feelings and thoughts we hadn't yet known, or a piece of art that reawakens our childlike thrill to beauty?

The connection between religion and entertainment is ancient. Here's one take:

I have this theory (in the prosaic, not scientific, sense of the word) that religion is what people did for entertainment before mass media. The history of theater (the tragedy né tragōidia, or "goat song") rising up from religious ritual suggests the same, and the development of theater into other dramatic forms like satire roughly corresponds with the decline of myth evolution in Greek culture...

We know the printing press, print being the advent of modern mass media, turned out rather badly for the Catholic Church, which found its traditional standing as interpreter of scripture (and, by extension, intermediary with God) demolished by the sudden easy availability of bibles to a hoi polloi quickly becoming educated enough to read them. Literacy was a cornerstone of the Protestant Reformation, but the Protestants pretty quickly discovered what the Catholic Church learned the hard way some 14 centuries earlier in the heyday of Gnosticism: when you let people do their own interpreting, they go off in all sorts of unexpected directions; soon you've got sects denouncing royalty as the usurpation of God's rightful place and condemnation of private property as sin. Mix all this in with literacy, a smidgen of disposable income and the printing press, and voila! The novel is born.

It's no coincidence that The Novel, as birthed in the era of the printing press, was denounced by churches of all stripes as roadmaps to the Devil, because certainly that's what they were, commemorating all manner of human vice and depredation; that's drama, baby! Churches also continued their longstanding feuds with theater and art, frequently condemned as idolatry, while simultaneously employing both, absolving them of their sins where they served religion's purposes.

When Jesus is the hero

The Christian World Magazine has an article on novelists who make Jesus the main character. Author Nancy Tischler says such novelists "find many ways to answer the question, 'Who do you say that I am?'" Tischler seems to take a pretty dim view of the enterprise, however:

This is sacred material and must be approached with fear and trembling. Our discovery of truth may be enhanced by the creative imagination, but the Christian reader must be aware above all of who Christ is and how we know. The writer of biblical fiction can hardly expect us to "suspend our disbelief" and enter into the spirit of the story when that spirit violates our faith. The novelist may help the reader to see the truth "slant" and therefore enliven it, or discover a deeper meaning based on individual experience. But the Christian reader knows that truth is not changing. This truth is beauty—without any need for twisting or embroidering.

She doesn't include my favorite, The Secret Magdalene, by Ki Longfellow, (OK - the Magdalene is the main character in that book) but here's her list:
The Life of Jesus, by Ernst Renan (1863)
The Nazarene, by Sholem Asch (1939)
The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis (1951)
The Gospel According to the Son, by Norman Mailer (1997)
Jesus: A Novel, by Walter Wangerin (2005)
Christ the Lord, a trilogy by Anne Rice (2005)
The Magdalene Gospel, by Mary Ellen Ashcroft
I, Judas, by Taylor Caldwell
The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple, by James Carse
The Thomas Jesus, by Steven Fortney
The Fire Gospel, by Michael Faber
Quarantine, by Jim Crace
The Crown and the Cross, by Frank Slaughter
King Jesus, by Robert Graves
"a trilogy" by Marjorie Holmes
The Greatest Story Ever Told, by Fulton Oursler
The Man Who Died, by D.H. Lawrence

I'm intrigued by the Lawrence book, which has, according to her, "a post-crucifixion scene, in which Jesus reconsiders His mission on Earth and has an affair with a priestess of Isis."

I read one of Marjorie Holmes' books when I was in high school and have fond memories of it; I've read part of the Graves' book, all of Rice's Out of Egypt, and seen The Last Temptation of Christ.

I'd recommend all of them - the Graves' book only if you're seriously able to devote some time to a book.

Anyone else?

Historical Novel Society Conference

The Historical Novel Society Conference ended yesterday - a rather amazing get-together with celebrity historical novelists wandering around acting just like regular people.

I was reminded that Elissa Elliott has two books I want to read - Eve, A Novel of the First Woman, and her memoirs, about finding her own way to a spirit-filled life.

I embarrassed myself with Anne Easter Smith, saying how much I'd enjoyed her book about Richard II. Doh! Richard III is the love interest in A Rose for the Crown, a wonderful read.

Margaret George was there, author of Mary, Called Magdalene, in which she brings to life the Magdalene - and in the process makes a reader think about fundamental questions of the spirit.

Anne Chamberlin, author of an underrated and magical trilogy called the Joan of Arc Tapestries, which begins with The Merlin of St. Gilles' Well.

These writers and literally dozens of others were generously accessible - despite being outnumbered by aspiring writers like myself. Actually, although the conference was geared towards writers, it would have been a great time for nonwriting readers as well.

Mark Jarman's Kuan Yin

To the Green Man, a book of poetry by Mark Jarman, is, as the Powell's description says, a book of poems that live in "the dangerous currents where poetry and religion meet." Kuan Yin, whose name means "One who hears the cries of the world," is the feminine aspect of the Buddha.

She is Isis, the Virgin Mary, the Magdalene and all the other goddesses who embody compassion.

Kuan Yin

The blanc de chine porcelain many-armed goddess offers us
Something held loosely in each of her many hands.
It may be a key or an axe, a tongue or a flower,
But whatever it is, it is ours for the taking. That’s clear.
She herself, so the story goes, gave up arms and eyes
To save the life of her father who hated her goodness.
And when he was saved he asked the name of the donor
(It was 7th century China, but donor’s the right word)
And learned from his doctors that his daughter had saved his life.
She had given her arms and eyes, and they ground them up
Into a paste which they fed to her ill, estranged father.
(How many fairy tales can you remember, fables and myths,
Involving the irony of eating your own flesh and blood?)
Restored he went to her, but it was too late for forgiveness.
And instead of an armless, eyeless stalk of pity,
He found the new goddess, a dazzling wheel in the air,
Her radiant spokes the thousand arms of compassion
And her eyes multiplied, too, like the eyes of heaven.
As she faced him for the last time, she was like a mandala
Where he glimpsed the inch of his life, her gift to him,
Just as she left him, just as she disappeared.
And now, here in a glass museum box,
Aesthetically lit to show she’s a work of art,
She lives in her glazed gestures beyond her sacrifice,
Beyond hatred, suffering, and goodness, beyond her story,
Although it’s the story that makes us understand.

Was that also the theme of Pan's Labyrinth? The blood of an innocent?

Iain Pears and Neoplatonism

I finished The Dream of Scipio last night. It's a spectacular book; Pears brings in philosophy and scholarship. He convincingly portrays the zeitgeist of the fifth, fourteenth, and twentieth centuries, in particular how they see virtue, the human soul, humanity's relationship with god, and Christianity's relationship with Judaism.

All three protagonists, in particular the fifth and twentieth century figures, are confronted with utilitarianism's "greatest happiness" principle - that is, you can figure out the right thing to do because the greatest good will come of it - or the least harm.

And so the fifth-century bishop turns his back on the defunct Roman Empire and parlays with the Burgundian barbarian king, who will do less damage than the Goth barbarians at the gate. And so the twentieth-century scholar works for the Vichy government as a censor, allowing himself to be convinced that he will cause less damage than someone less sensitive.

And always there are the Jews, to be used as scapegoats for whatever is wrong with Europe, like sacrifices to be fed to the gods of ignorance and hatred.

And always there is love.

A few gems from the book:

• A thirteenth-century painter's apprentice is amazed when he sees that the figure of Christ at the Last Supper echoes a man they both know. "Our little secret," the painter tells him. "But observe it well. Something of God is all around us, perhaps. All we need is eyes to see and a hand to capture."


• A fifth-century philosopher's despair: "... she could not but be aware that each newcomer to her door, however curious, knew less than the one he replaced. The ability to argue diminished; the grasp of basic concepts weakened; and the knowledge that comes from study grew perpetually less. Christianity, which spread over men's minds like a blanket, put faith above reason; increasingly those brought up under its influence scorned knowledge and thought. Even those with a spark given to them by the gods wanted to be told, rather than wanted to think. Getting them to accept that the goal was thought itself, not any conclusion at the end of thought, was hard indeed. They came to her for answers, and all they got instead were questions."


• About the few Cathars left in the the thirteenth century: "They claimed to be gods themselves, they denied the resurrection of the body, they claimed the world was evil and man a prison rather than something created in God's own image. That God Himself, the god of the Bible, was but a meddling demon and had nothing to do lwith the true deity from which we all come. There was, of course, no mention of Our Lord, and they plainly believed in reincarnation..."


• The fifth-century bishop thinking about Sophia, the philosopher: "Was he... fighting against the gods in trying to fend off disaster?
  "No, says Sophia... The question is a false one, for the concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine.... Faith means nothing, for we are too corrupted to apprehend the truth...
  "Rephrase the question then: Can Manlius Hippomanes, trudging northward with his small entourage, reverse the decline and restore tranquility to the land? Possibly not, nor does it matter. The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nevertheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; success or failure is secondary."


• A couple pages later: "The spirit seeks the light, that is its nature. It wishes to return to its origin, and must try forever to reach enlightenment."

The Dream of Scipio

I'm reading Ian Pears' The Dream of Scipio, a complex novel about a fifth century pagan bishop, a fourteenth century poet, and a twentieth century scholar, all obsessed with beauty and how to preserve civilization against the forces that would destroy it: "Civilization needs to be nurtured, cosseted, and protected from those who would damage it.... It needs constant attention," says the twentieth century historian.

Pears is a historian who can write - although the book is complex with neoplatonism, not at all dialog or action driven, it's still a compelling read.

It's Sunday, so Sullivan's thoughts are on God

Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish has three nice links today on the god gene:

• the first, on how apes might see cause and effect, and could therefore be a whisper away from attributing unknown effects to a unseen, god force;


• a lovely podcast of Sullivan in conversation with Bob Wright, a conversation that ranges across Buddha, weeds, Philo of Alexandria, and what the true goal of religion should be - to break down the walls behttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.giftween each of us individually to where we see we are all one - part of the body of Christ, as Sullivan says;


• a good paragraph on abortion;


• a link to an article on how development increases religousity;


• and a link to an essay about how of course the earliest examples of human art would be obsessed with sex. And anyone who doesn't think that art and sex have to do with religion... hmm.

Sunset to the East

Behind the wall of dusty Russian Olive trees at the eastern edge of the yard, the sky is lit up with a mauve fading to salmon light. To the east. The world is full of magic, is it not? And now, just in the time it took to write this, it's turned to a pearly lapis lazuli, edged with amethyst.