Mary: The Unachievable "Ideal Woman"

“Well, that’s serious Catholics for you.  All women should be both virgins and mothers if at all possible.”  In this line of dialogue, fictional character Nate Spencer echoes something that confused me from the time I was old enough (about 11) to understand what being a virgin meant and put that together with the gospels.

In mass and in hymns, Mary was often referred to as “ever virgin.”  My parents and religion teachers told me Jesus had no brothers and sisters because Mary stayed a virgin her whole life.  I couldn’t find anything in the New Testament that supported these claims.  To the contrary, the gospels of Mark and Luke refer to Jesus’ brothers.  Mark 3:31-35; Mark 6:3; Luke 8:19-21.  The gospels of Mark and John don’t state at all that Mary was a virgin.  And the Gospel of Matthew says that Joseph married Mary, despite her being pregnant, because he was told by an angel that her child was begotten of the Holy Spirit, and that Joseph “did not know her till she brought forth her firstborn son.”  Matthew 1:25.  This suggested to me that Mary did have sex with Joseph after Jesus’ birth.  This interpretation made sense to me, as I thought the point of Mary being a virgin was to show Joseph was not Jesus’ father, but rather was conceived in a divine way.  If that were true, it didn’t matter if Mary had sex later or not.  (Apparently, I was already preparing for a career as an appellate lawyer where I would parse out words and argue various meanings.)

The Catholic Church insisting Mary remained a virgin forever strikes me as having many potential ill effects for women.  For one, “virgin” is often paired with “pure,” suggesting sex is impure.  Also, Mary is held up as the ideal woman and, as Nate Spencer notes, she is both a virgin and a mother.  A nearly impossible ideal for a real human woman to achieve, even if she wanted to.  So women begin the Christian Bible by literally leading men into sin (Eve) and end with the unachievable “ideal” woman (Mary).  Not only are women bad to begin with, there is no hope of redemption.

And why should a human woman want to be both a virgin and a mother?  To venerate this version of Mary is to deny women’s sexuality, as well as to deny the deep emotional connection with another  human being that can accompany a sexual relationship.  Plus, this vision underscores that a woman’s value and purpose can be only one thing – to be a mother.  For those who either cannot or choose not to fulfill this role, there is nothing left.  And for Mary, if in fact she lived and was both virgin and mother, what was her life like?  The New Testament tells us little, other than that Joseph stood by her after an angel spoke to him.  At least one passage suggests Jesus himself regarded her role as his mother as not that important.  When a woman praises to Jesus “the womb that bore thee,” he says, “ ‘Rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.’ ”.   Luke 11:27-28.  Only one gospel even mentions Mary being there when Jesus was crucified.  According to Catholic dogma, Mary was assumed bodily into heaven for her troubles, rather than dying, but that appears nowhere in the Bible.

And so I wonder, what might happen if a real young woman today found herself in Mary’s situation, a pregnant virgin.  Who would believe her?  How would she react, especially if no angel from on high showed up to explain it all?  And would people who were traditionally religious be more or less apt to believe her?

Lisa M. Lilly

Author of The Awakening

How will Tara Spencer deal with her sudden, mysterious pregnancy?  And what will that mean for the world?  

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http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-awakening-lisa-lilly/1104252756?ean=2940012849618

What I Learned About Religion From The Prince Of Darkness (Spirituality, Religion, and Philosophy, Entry 10)

I recently read Prince of Darkness by columnist Robert Novak.  In part of the book, Novak talks about converting to Catholicism.  In passing, he mentions how people “hostile” to Catholicism sometimes say “I was raised Catholic” when asked if they are Catholic. 

It never occurred to me saying this would be viewed as hostile.  Saying “I’m a recovering Catholic” strikes me as a little hostile given that alcoholics use that terminology.  But saying I was raised Catholic to me only says my parents were Catholic and I was raised in that tradition, but now am not Catholic.  I’ve said this often because it seems accurate to me.  Often when people ask “Are you Catholic?” it’s because they are leading into a story or point that might need some lead in for someone who is not Catholic.  For instance, something about going to confession as a child, or a comment about the Cardinal, or a viewpoint on the Church’s stand on birth control.  So when I answer that way, I am letting the person know that I understand the background about the Church, even though I’m not now Catholic.

Now that I read Novak’s comment, though, I can see where it could seem hostile because it goes out of the way to emphasize that though raised in the Catholic tradition, I am no longer Catholic or, in stronger words, I rejected Catholicism.  Also, I don’t say “I used to be Catholic” but that my parents raised me that way, suggesting I never really wanted to be or never really was Catholic in the first place.  Which probably does reflect some of my feeling about how I was taught religion and particularly about the confirmation process (which I’ll write about some other time).

I don’t see anything wrong with expressing negative feelings about a religion, but I generally try to refrain from commenting on others’ beliefs unless they’ve invited the discussion.  Also, saying I’m not Catholic is not only more neutral but more accurate.  At this point, I’ve been not Catholic for a longer time than I was Catholic.  So I’ve decided that from now on, if asked if I’m Catholic, I’ll simply say that I’m not Catholic.

Lisa M. Lilly
Author of The Awakening

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CDXXY0

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/the-awakening-lisa-lilly?store=ebook&r=1

Yoga, Life and Stretching (Spirituality, Religion, and Philosophy, Entry 9)

I find routines comforting.  If I’m behind on my bookkeeping, or a client is unhappy with me, or I’m working 11 hours a day – or if all the above are happening at once – it helps me to eat the same kind of oatmeal each morning with a glass of the same kind of orange juice while I read the same newspaper (Wall Street Journal) for 10 minutes.  Then I walk the same way to work and make the same type of tea (Earl Grey) when I get there before I sit down to start the stress/work wheel all over again.

When things are going well, routine feels good too.  I savor my orange juice, add a little extra cinnamon to my oatmeal, inhale the steamy, lemony scent of my tea before I drink it, and take an extra few minutes out of my day to enjoy the morning. 

Like a lot of people, I sit in front of a computer much of my day, and no matter how often I remind myself to sit straight and shift my position now and then, at the end of the day my neck and shoulders ache from reaching forward and sometimes hunching (really, I try not to), and my knees and back feel a little stiff and sore from sitting.  So part of my morning routine is yoga.  The poses that feel wonderful are those where I pull my shoulders back, where I arch my back, or where I straighten my legs completely.  Basically, where I move my body just the opposite way that I usually do.

This morning as I moved through poses that opened my chest and shoulders, and straightened my knees, I thought about how I might like to do more things that are different from what I usually do.  Try to stretch my mental and emotional life the way I do my body.  I didn’t decide to go to the extreme – try skydiving, for instance, when I find driving risky enough.  But I signed up for a seminar in the U of C continuing education series on religion and the brain, even though none of my friends were interested in taking it with me.  And I said Yes to an evite to an event hosted by someone I’ve only know for a few months, even though I don’t know any of the other women who RSVP’d.  Maybe I will learn about a topic I’ve never thought about before, get an idea for a short story or a poem, make a new friend.  And even if none of those things happen, maybe it will feel good, the same way stretching my arms and legs does.  But I’m sure I’ll still have my orange juice and oatmeal – and Earl Grey tea – the next morning.

Lisa M. Lilly

Author of The Awakening

Will Tara Spencer give birth to the first female messiah?  Or trigger the Apocalypse?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CDXXY0

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/the-awakening-lisa-lilly?store=ebook&r=1

Queen of Heaven (Spirituality, Religion and Philosophy, Entry No. 8)

When I was in second or third grade, my parents attended church every Tuesday night for a novena.  The service focused on prayers to Mary, the mother of Jesus.  I remember this going on indefinitely, but a search of the Catholic Encyclopedia and Wikipedia tells me novenas usually involve prayers for nine days in a row.  We didn’t go every day, so maybe it was every week for nine weeks and only seemed endless because when you’re seven or eight years old that's how time passes. 

At the service, I loved inhaling the scent of incense and listening to the almost mystical chants.  The priest intoned many titles for Mary.  The congregation repeated “pray for us” after each.  One title was Queen of Heaven.  I heard Mary called that often as I grew up, and the cemetery where my relatives on my mother’s side – and also my niece and my parents – are buried is Queen of Heaven.

I was surprised as an adult when I bought a book of goddess illustrations and saw one for Queen of Heaven.  I was even more surprised when I read in a book on women and religion (I wish I could remember which one) that the Queen of Heaven is mentioned in the Old Testament.  Not as a precursor to or foreshadowing of Mary, but as a goddess who should not be worshipped.  Jeremia 7:18 says the children are gathering wood, their fathers are lighting the fire, and the women are kneading dough “to make cakes for the queen of heaven while libations are poured out to strange gods in order to hurt me.”  The version I have of the Bible contains a note that the Queen of Heaven is the Assyro-Babylonian Ishtar, the goddess of fertility, and that cakes like stars were offered in her honor. 

It fascinates me that the Catholic religion comes closer to worshipping a goddess than the other Christian religions I know of, despite the transformation of the goddess to Mary, and the strict doctrines that saints, including Mary, are not divine and are not to be worshipped.  Mary is supposed to have been conceived without sin (see more on this in the previous post) and also to have been assumed bodily into heaven without dying.  Seems very close to a deity.  My limited understanding is the Church was trying to bring in people who worshipped goddesses.  But despite all this, at the same time, the Catholic Church offers less of a role for women than many other Christian churches, including not allowing women to serve as priests, or, obviously, in any of the roles priests can aspire to, such as bishop, cardinal or pope.  That was my first major disagreement with the Church -- I couldn't see donating to any organization that would never allow me a role in governing it solely because I am a woman.

The people who inspired me most in the Church, and who seemed to have the closest connection with the community, were nuns.  I wonder how many amazing people’s skills, talents, and connections the Catholic Church loses day after day by insisting its leaders must be men.

Lisa M. Lilly is an attorney and author of Kindle occult bestseller THE AWAKENING, short story collection THE TOWER FORMERLY SEARS AND TWO OTHER TALES OF URBAN HORROR, and numerous poems, short stories, and articles.  

Follow her on Twitter:  @lisamlilly

Check out The Awakening on Amazon:  http://amzn.to/pFCcN6

Does God Get Angry (Spirituality, Religion and Philosophy Entry No. 7)

When I was in junior high, a priest asked me during confirmation preparation why people shouldn't sin.  I said it made God angry.  The priest corrected me, saying God did not get angry -- that God is in heaven and is always at peace and does not feel human emotions like anger.

This struck me as strange, given the Old Testament, with example after example of God getting angry.  I thought first of the story of Noah and the flood.  Now that I look at the verses, nothing literally says God is angry.  But Genesis says God saw that man's every thought was evil, and God "was grieved to the heart" and regretted he made man.  Genesis 6:5-8.  This is why God decided to destroy humanity with a flood.  Genesis 8:13.  After the flood, God promised Noah, "I will never again curse the ground on account of man...."  Genesis 8:21.  Then there is God pouring down "sulphur and fire" on Sodom and Gomorra.  Genesis 19:24.

The priest's statement that God didn't feel anger reflects, to me, the conflict in many Christian churches between the old and new testaments.  While Jesus does get angry (like when he throws the money changers out of the temple), it's hard to picture him sending fire or flood to destroy a city or all human beings.  Also, it's unlikely he'd have a lot of sympathy for a God that does things like killing all the first born sons of Egypt (Exodus 12:13).  Yet, the Christian religions don't toss out the Old Testament and only focus on the New, at least the Christian churches I've been to read from both books.  Many politically conservative Christians don't hesitate to hearken back to the Old Testament to support views on topics such as war and the death penalty.  When I was growing up in the Catholic Church, on the other hand, I got the impression that the Old Testament was viewed as more allegorical.  While it contained some historical events, was not meant to be taken literally.  In contrast, I thought the New Testament was historically accurate and was written by the disciples who followed Jesus. 

The difficulty reconciling or even understanding varying parts of the Bible is what makes religion both so frustrating and so interesting.  How two different people view even the same translation of the same text fascinates me.  Despite being a non-believer, if I ever went back to school just for the fun of it, theology would be high on my list.


Lisa M. Lilly
Author of The Awakening

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CDXXY0

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/the-awakening-lisa-lilly?store=ebook&r=1

The Immaculate Conception And Cashing In (Spirituality, Religion, and Philosophy, Entry 5)

In 1854, the Pope declared that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was conceived without original sin -- the Immaculate Conception.  In Catholic doctrine, original sin means the stain all humans inherit from Adam, whose first sin was disobedience.  This sin supposedly is part of the human soul from the instant of conception.  Only Mary, according to the Catholic Church, was conceived with no original sin.

Popular culture, though, misunderstands the phrase Immaculate Conception to mean instead Mary conceiving Jesus without sexual intercourse.  Songs, jokes, TV shows, all use the phrase this way.  So reproduction is assumed to be “immaculate” only if it takes place magically without sex.  Somehow that type of reproduction is cleaner, purer.  In the same way, women (and occasionally men) who are virgins are thought of as pure.

Why the link and who first devised it?  One of my guesses is it was meant to push people to marry and stay together to raise their children.  If sex could be made sinful and shameful, at least sex outside of marriage, both desire and reproduction could be more easily controlled so children would be cared for.  The odd thing about that theory is the punishment and approbation mostly fell upon women, when it was, and still is, far more likely that men would disappear on their offspring than would the women who birthed the children.  Also, women already have much more incentive to control their sexuality and reproduction, since pregnancy happens only to women.  It’s obviously much harder for women to hide being a parent, or to be unaware they’ve conceived a child.  All this leads me to believe the shame heaped on women who are sexually active relates more to the society controlling women and making it easier for men to keep more power.  But that’s a topic for another day. 

Another reason I suspect for linking sexuality with sin is it is a way to control everyone, both male and female.  In one scene in Atlas Shrugged, a government scientist tries to blackmail Hank Reardon, inventor of a new metal, into “voluntarily” signing away his intellectual property rights.  Reardon has broken one of many new laws designed to constrain business and innovation.  He naively believes the government wants citizens to abide by its laws.  Floyd Ferris, the scientist, sets Reardon straight.  Ferris explains that the government’s only power is over criminals.  If there aren’t enough criminals, the government creates them by passing laws impossible to follow.  Then the government cashes in on the guilt. 

If an authority can convince people to feel guilty and sinful over sex or the desire for sex – an innate, intense desire to do something that is an imperative for the human race to survive – then everyone needs forgiveness, expiation, a path to redemption.  And anyone offering it can cash in.

Lisa M. Lilly
Author of The Awakening

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CDXXY0

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/the-awakening-lisa-lilly?store=ebook&r=1

Is Confession Good for The Soul? (Spirituality, Religion, and Philosophy, Entry 4)

As a kid, I found the Jesus dying for our sins concepts particularly disturbing.  My parents’ church had a giant crucifix over the altar, with Christ on the cross, thorns in his head, face contorted.  Not uncommon in Catholic churches, though some have a more peaceful looking Christ, or even show him as he is about to rise.  I remember staring at the crucifix as I waited in line to go to confession.  (For those not familiar with concept, in confession a person goes into a small booth, kneels, says some words by rote to open the session, then confesses his or her sins.  The priest, who is on the other side of a screen and, in theory at least, does not know who is confessing, absolves the person.  The priest also provides a penance, often a number of prayers to be said a certain number of items.  When I was older, the church offered face-to-face confession, so you sat and talked with the priest rather than kneeling in the dark.)

The difficulty I had as a kid was finding things to confess.  For the most part, I behaved pretty well.  I rarely told lies, I helped out other people when I could, I shared my toys.  Yet I’d been taught that by virtue of being born, I was a sinner, so I felt deficient that I couldn’t come up with a sin or two every week to tell.  I ended with confessing things like feeling mad at my mom.  (Now there was a topic for a therapy, I believed just feeling angry was a sin.)  I’ve talked to other people who grew up Catholic who said they made up sins just to have something to say, so apparently I wasn’t the only one. 

The sins I did commit didn’t strike me as quite bad enough to warrant nailing someone to a cross.  And I also felt troubled by the concept of a baby having original sin until it was baptized.  The church still taught about limbo at the time.  Limbo was where unbaptized babies went when they died, as they couldn’t go to heaven but hadn’t done anything that warranted to hell.  I pictured all these babies just sort of floating out there.  Kids have a strong sense of fairness, and this seemed monumentally unfair to me.

As an adult, I find the concept of original sin even more troubling.  Why as a culture (or as a part of a culture), do so many people buy into the idea that being human makes us inherently bad?  Some people do terrible things, sometimes unspeakable things.  But by and large, most people go through the day and do their best to treat others well, or at least not to harm them.  Most of the “evil” I’ve seen seems to me to arise from emotional pain, frustration, or ignorance.   And those people who act solely to hurt or torture others, who derive pleasure from that – Manson, Gacy – we recognize as aberrations.  It’s hard to imagine any amount of Sunday school would make a difference.

Confession may be good for the soul because we all need to confide in other people.  And we all find ourselves needing forgiveness at one time or another.  But the idea that before we’ve done anything, we already need to be absolved, saved, redeemed, and the idea that being human means being inherently wrong – that is something else entirely.

Lisa M. Lilly
Author of The Awakening

Will Tara Spencer’s mysterious pregnancy bring the world its first female messiah?  Or trigger the Apocalypse?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CDXXY0

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/the-awakening-lisa-lilly?store=ebook&r=1