Role models for today

While working towards my doctorate, and during subsequent on-going research with an inter-faith seminary in the States, lots of questions have been posed. Here is my response to (another) one of them.

Question: If both the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene had been honoured as Goddess role models and not seen as “man’s continuing temptation”, how would it have affected women throughout history until today? How might modern women think and behave differently?

As I wrote in response to an earlier question (see blog post 'Of deities, avatars, and incarnation'), I think that the honouring of Mary, mother of Jesus, as goddess per se would in fact invalidate the theology of Incarnation – which is pretty basic to Christianity. However, honouring her and Mary Magdalene as role models and exemplars of the feminine aspect of the Divine is rather different, and certainly right and just.

Mary, mother of Jesus, was called by God to a particular purpose which she accepted, despite all the dangers it involved and the vulnerability it created for her. After giving birth, possibly in a location away from her home, she had to flee from Herod in order to ensure the survival of her baby. During her son's ministry she had to accept his apparent rejection and the risks he exposed himself to. Ultimately she saw him crucified, and, by his words, was passed into the care of one of his disciples. Hard, hard, hard.

Mary Magdalene may or may not have been a penitent 'sinner'; she may or may not have been the one from whom Jesus cast out demons – but she certainly was among the closest circle of Jesus' followers; she certainly did anoint him at Bethany, see him die, and go to the tomb; she certainly was the first witness to his being alive after death ('resurrection'); and she certainly was initially a leading member both of Jesus' disciples and of the early church, only subsequently to be marginalised, and, perhaps, felt forced to leave her country of birth and, eventually, to make a new home here in France, possibly with her young child Sarah. Again: hard, hard, hard.

If these two women were given their due, and honoured not as goddesses but as role models, then we would long ago have understood that it's ok to be a woman, it's ok to have a sex life, it's ok to love, with love's joys and pains; and that being such a woman, it's still ok to speak your own truth, it's ok to challenge the status quo, it's ok to move on and make a new future; and, most of all, that it's ok to live according to your own understanding of God, and God's relationship with you and demands of you; and that being a woman is as much being made in the image of God as any one or any thing else.