If... (& Hetero/Orthodoxy)

Sidenote: I made molasses cookies, the recipe of which I will probably post tomorrow.

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If I were a woman, there is very little chance I would attend the vast majority of traditional religious services. Sitting in midnight mass with my family, sans the father figure, with our proudly Polish priest telling us about the holy family, it occurred to me that Mary really gets a short stick. She may be the Reverend Mother of one of the dominant religions on the planet, but she was essentially told to not worry about being made involuntarily pregnant at thirteen or fourteen then ushered into marriage in which she is--according to contemporary Catholic dogma--never, ever to have a sexual experience that would impinge on her immaculate soul. After parenting a young carpenter with, essentially, a significantly older male roommate who ruined her chances with any boyfriends, she watches him die, buries him, and then witnesses his resurrection.

Now, I have read a few comic books now and then, and the character of Jean Grey/Phoenix stands out. As was shown in the recent X-Men film trilogy, this character dies and returns to life not just once or twice, but frequently. So repetitive have her resurrections been, that her family doesn't want to hear about it anymore and just thinks of her as definitively passed on. Mary may have been exposed to a few foreign myths with resurrections and their is the passage that inspired "Them Bones, Them Bones," but a resurrection would be pretty harrowing for a poor, uneducated Hebrew woman getting up in years.

What my thoughts were getting to was that why emulate Mary when you can learn about Lilith and the Furies who are pretty badass female characters. Lilith, one of Adam's pre-Eve wives, refuses to lay down with a man (or just to lay down beneath a man, i.e. strictly missionary) and is exiled by God. Some stories say she went on to mother demons with Lucifer--which plays into some of the Vampire: The Masquerade mythos--while others just give her a sort of demi-divine status as a potent, untarnished, decisive person. The latter shows up in the comic epic of The Sandman where she gets to play the mother figure to a dreaming babe and provides guidance to a struggling young woman.

The Furies come to mind as well--incidentally, they also show up in The Sandman. The Furies are simply sweet. They are embodiments of all those emotions women are generally told to suppress; anger, bitterness, frustration, spite, etc. all get some amount of say in this or that interpretation of the Furies. I want to say a bit more on the Furies than that. I am of the opinion that feelings, even those intensely negative emotions that are given to the Furies, are meaningful. Once, I explained to a friend that the neurochemistry for fear, surprise, anger, and excitement are all very similar, but with the agent undergoing the simultaneous neurochemical and perceptual reality, the event sort of falls into place; that is, by placing our own interpretation on the event, we sort of get to do what we want with it. Something very similar applies to the feelings of the Furies; anger is as much a feeling of creation as of destruction, bitterness can both embrace and repel.

Love, adoration, and magnanimity are potential destroyers as much as hatred, bitterness, and spite. Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love highlights the confusing, even diabolical reality of love for some people some of the time--or maybe everyone some of the time. Or, it can be out of adoration that we can create obsession, that we can smother and ruin the lives of friends and family. It is important to dote now and then on those we care about, but adoration can be confusing and it can manifest in disastrous realities. As for magnanimity, it can become coddling and spoiling, manifesting in greed and egotism if untempered.

So, perhaps participating in a faith tradition I find so... uninspiring if not downright degrading as a male when I would not if I were female is hypocritical. Such a claim is warranted, and I choose to deflect rather than to disagree. My deflection is to the notion of heterodoxy, or non-orthodox beliefs. I was raised Roman Catholic and I am happy for it, though it has weighed on my life stronger than at others in ways I do not now appreciate. The word catholic--lower case, but the root of the upper variant--means universal; the Catholic Church was intended to be the universal, the all-encompassing church. The idea, for me, remains: A faith that covers all. The problem is that such a faith cannot be a dogmatic faith, it cannot be bound by rigid orthodoxy and regulation or even by specific spiritual notions; if we do so, it means that those who find the orthodoxy, regulation, or structure does not describe their reality, then it must not be correct. By allowing for heterodoxy, a universal or catholic faith supports the legitimacy of individual realities in the context of a single pursuit or articulation of our living world. Ultimately, a faith tradition has the responsibility of providing something for its practitioners; with a catholic faith, it allows for everyone to participate in that dialogue of description, experience, and enrichment together.