Sticks and Stones (© 2008 Eileen Baker)

Sticks and Stones may break my bones but calling names won’t hurt me.

You might remember this from your childhood times. It is probably one of the greatest misconceptions in history, along with ‘I think, therefore I am’.

Calling names does hurt. The power of the word and its original intent – (where it comes from inside the one directing it) is as powerful as anything else to cause hurt and harm.

The pen is mightier than the sword. Is it? It depends really on which end of the pen or the sword you are at! But both can be either lethal or without guile. The instrument is at the behest of and utilised at the discretion of, its user.

Descartes’ famous, beloved and enjoyable statement is simply an expression of our ego-mind (I think) controlling the core of our being (I am). In itself, ‘I am’ suffices without the need to revert to thinking words. The core of our being is the ‘I am’ and most certainly, ‘You are’. You exist with or without thought.

The stick, the stone, the sword, the pen and the word and the thought can be as beautiful or as vile or political as the intent makes them. Should the intent come from the ego-directed thinking part of us, it can have the guile and cleverness of the devil himself and it can do great harm to ourselves and others. Should the intent come from the ‘I am’ at the centre of our being, then it can be without guile and cleverness and its delivery will do great good to ourselves and others. If we can encourage our being to control the thinking part, then we can bring even our ego under the control of the centre of the universe. We can shine the light of our being into the core of our ego and we can take back the control. This, in effect, is shining the light onto our shadows (from Jung) or pain bodies (from Eckhart Toll). We can shine the light into those parts of us that Heineken can reach but that we tend to want to hide because we are fundamentally (at our soul level) ashamed of them. But by hiding them we give them much more control over us as they can work out of the shadows, unseen and unchallenged.

Could we or Should we develop our speech and our writing skills?

Individual ways of expression are definitely encouraged in our modern societies wouldn’t you say? I mean, we can dye our hair pink or green, ladle massive lumps of wax or shiny stuff into it and then have it cut like a feather duster; or we can shave our heads completely if we want to, and we can say, with confidence: this is who I am. This is an expression of myself.

We can enlarge or diminish our mammary gland areas, we can have fat deposits sucked out of our thigh areas and we can have a huge circle of pure fat taken out of our abdominal area and we can say, with confidence: this is who I am. This is a much better expression of myself.

We can have our nose structure changed, we can have our teeth made to look like pearls in straight rows, we can change the colour of our irises with stick-on lenses and, if we feel so inclined to do, we can have our lips puffed out with some liquid which will make them pout at all times of the day or night, and during any kind of chore and we can say, with confidence: this is who I am. This is a tightened-up or puffed-up expression of myself.

We can have our faces injected to stop expression lines forming, we can have our whole face and neck lifted up, have a bit lopped off and then stapled into our head and even if we lose our front ear-flaps in the process, that is a small price to pay for our being able to say with confidence: this is who I am. This is a much enhanced model of me.

We can have our whole bodies painted and tattooed with pictures and words if we like, and we can have rings and studs inserted in almost any place and we can say with confidence, this is who I am. This is a better view for you to have of me.

We can say what we like and live as we like as long as it doesn’t materially or apparently affect anyone else. We can swear, mumble, be incoherent and be incapable of putting a complete sentence together and because this is what we have been taught to do or led to do, we can say with confidence: this is who I am. Take it or leave it.

And everyone should allow us to have this free expression of who we think we are and who we so desire to be, because this is what self-expression is all about. Self-expression is really the individualistic expression of our times, self and ego can have complete control and free range. And woe betide anyone who attempts to deny us our rights to do this. What right do they have to stop us doing as we so desire? It’s a free country and we have a right to our own expression and we can do as we like, so there.

Yet, should we seek to develop our speech so that the tempo, the sound and the actual vocabulary will develop and change over time, is that equally allowed its expression?

Amongst all of the fashion-led ideas to do and to be as you like, the actual fundamental facility to speak, which separates us from all other living things on this planet, is the one most likely to be subject to social and prejudicial control. In other words, you shouldn’t do it, unless you have an excuse. The excuse will relate to whether the social background or school you went to allows you to speak well. Speaking well, allowing the muscles to form the words properly through applied thought (that is being aware of what we are saying) will necessarily change what comes out of our mouths. It can even change the way we breathe, in the way that if you exercise your back, arm and thigh muscles it will change the way that you stand and the way that you walk; it will do this because the muscles are being stretched and they are correcting the skeletal framework by pulling it upright again, if gradually. Without exercise and stretching, the vertebrae in the back will have nothing to hold them up against the force of gravity, so they will drop, sometimes into each other (known as the slipped disc). Similarly, not exercising the mouth and facial muscles and incorporating control of our thoughts, many words are likely to be dropped altogether or damaged.

But should you decide that you would like to develop your vocabulary for expression and your speaking, it can imply that you have to go outside of your social norm, your group and your family, if they decide that they cannot accept that you would want to develop this side of yourself. It is the greatest excluder and subject of non-discussion and, when discussed, it can bring out deep-seated prejudices and deeply-felt inadequacies. It is the most hidden yet the most damaging facet of a modern polarised society, as in Britain, where ‘class’ is determined often now by income not by how you speak, and it doesn’t actually allow people from certain geographic areas (the Chav expression being a derisory one related to this) to develop this side of themselves. Disregarding high society’s often affected, short-breathed, high-class speech where the need to distinguish the aristocracy from the plebs is still in vogue or is still required by our social structure, there remains a whole area of society where being able to articulate and speak well, is now definitely considered a thing that we should not do. Which is rather interesting when you consider that the BBC generally has news readers who are able to be understood by any one, not just those from specific regions. No wonder they often plump for readers with educated Scots’ accents to get around the regional accent ‘issue’ for national news! Whilst regional accents do not mean that good articulation is not possible – of course it is possible to articulate well and with accents and emphasis – there is a general tendency towards incoherent speech and uneducated utilisation of vocabulary – the more incoherent and uneducated the better. This, in itself, is an expression of ego-led fashion which controls and inhibits so many people and condemns them to a life of ever-diminishing circles. Even acting, which used to be a socially allowed ‘escape’ route for those who sought verbal and physical expression and development, nowadays brings us very often into the ever-thinning substance of the popular soaps where the more basic and narrow vocabularies take precedence, thereby reflecting and underpinning the social norms. Soap and real life integrate perhaps, and those programmes exhibiting the fly on the wall facet of watching people’s behaviour from a low desire to gape at the exposed shame of the participants is all part of the same ‘language’. Poking fun at and seeing people in indignities is part of the language of demeaning a person. This is not something new of course. Every age has had its opportunities both to develop or lend no dignity to its members and certainly malicious gossip and low intentions is documented well in plays and in historical circumstances alike. What distinguishes our modern age, however, is the fact that we can in no way blame lack of money today for a social and education system which actually desires that some people not aspire and therefore, not develop and, crucially, language is a key factor in keeping people in and out. It’s not a government directive to do this, it is a shadow social psychology of the group and we are all part of this.

Words and how you say and formulate them matter as much as it matters how you approach yourself and others. The intention behind whatever it is that you are doing will be driven by your own ego unless you actively become aware. This is part of the discipline of developing into the person that you really are and this is at the root of some of the greatest religious teachings of the world. The stark contrast of gradual development and discipline in a modern context of immediate gratification and passivity in that we do not have to engage to receive ‘fast food’ other than consume it, or where we do not have to use our own imagination when passively consuming television, is something that is so at odds with our everyday lives now, that even considering it as a notion can be met with genuine incomprehension. The notion of development or education as an end in itself, not as a means to a lifestyle where money flows and we can consume without hindrance seems to have gradually disappeared; and this is at great cost. The cost is to society as a whole but also to ourselves. Instead of reflecting inwards and becoming educated (which simply means to bring out what is already there in the context of the soul and the being) . Training courses are not educators, they are about developing skills. We reflect outwards; hence the massive focus on external expression to the degree that we will indeed change our material selves, in order to attain the material vision that we wish to project, including training to achieve the right income for our lifestyle as opposed to education as an end in itself and not for income and lifestyle reasons. All of this could be compared to the Dorian Gray portrait; whilst we are busy engineering our shells, our bodies, what is happening to our souls?

Yet it is internal focus which lies at the root of intent. Without developing this, every object we use and every facet we have including speech, will come under the control of the shadow in the ego. The intent, therefore, has the power to change our whole lives and our world, by taking the control out of the hands of the ego and giving it back to the being. It is a gradual process so we can expect still to live with all our faults; we can fall down often too. There is no need for immediate perfection. We do not have to panic and screech towards the goal, we just have to move forwards in the knowledge that our light, our being or our consciousness is now beginning to permeate our ego; our intent will change.

Winston Churchill once said that he would spend just a few minutes preparing a six-hour speech and six hours preparing a two minute speech. That’s how much words matter.

The Word became flesh.

When Jesus was in the wilderness and had fasted for forty days and nights he was hungry. “And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made into bread. But he answered and said, It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”. (Matthew,III,IV)

What does the Da Vinci Code have to do with the Church, Sex and Spirituality? (© 2008 Eileen Baker)

the book excites a great deal of interest including many tourists to Paris. People are genuinely interested in its central subject: that Mary Magdalene and Jesus had a child. Why are people so interested in this?

The spirit, the soul and the discipline of a teaching or a way of life fall nowhere central within the context of our ‘modern society’. Anything outside of the material state is generally not well-represented in our environments where we follow our daily life patterns. Other than pursuing an academic or theological route, there is little evidence, if any, of a spiritual engagement on a daily, practical basis.

Our civilisation was built on Christian values and yet we do not give it much contemporary airing other than ‘religion’ in its institutionalised format and ‘thought for the day’ type programmes. Yet, the flood of publicity, magazine and newspaper articles, provoked by Dan Brown’s novel and feature film “The Da Vinci Code” opens up, once again, society’s interest in the story of Christ.

Whether there is a desire to ‘disprove’ the gospels or just the plain curiosity as to whether Christ had a sexual union (the stuff that soap operas are made of), it excites enough interest in the public. Enough interest that not only reflects a desire to dismiss the Church’s perceived teachings (insofar as people are aware of what they are), but perhaps also to scrutinise what it was all about. I mean, what was it all about?

It seems to me that ‘blind faith’ is a pre-requisite of Catholic ‘acceptance’ of the Gospel and the Mysteries in the context of a church’s approach to delivering the message; it is not usually linked with a spiritual aspect or exercises to develop that side of the person. It is more about behaviour and doing than internal reflection and growth; this from my own experience at schools and at various churches. Often, I have found that the general feeling from the hierarchy is that the masses couldn’t understand these things, as they require theological education, so keep it simple.

I believe that there is not one facet of the Truth that cannot stand scrutiny and I do not believe that we have to go to college and study theology before we can pronounce any opinion or feelings on this. People are frightened of questioning. No wonder; we can be very quickly ‘put right’ if asking about any of the central core ‘beliefs’. Questioning seems somehow or other to ‘threaten’ the central pillar of the Church, yet it is the very key to its survival.

If the massive interest in the Da Vinci code and its apparent dismissing of the central foundation of the Church, is the notion of sex between a man and a woman, that which is the most normal human act of procreation or just consumating a union, then you have to wonder how base our needs are or our curiosity is. Perhaps it is the notion of an ‘original sin’ which seems inextricably linked with the sexual act. Therefore, these questions below form my thoughts and this essay.

What on earth is Original Sin?

What was the fall of man?

What is an Immaculate Conception? What is being without sin?

Is original sin the act of sexual union?

Is being born in sin relating to the sex that preceded it?

Is sex within marriage not sinful or just less sinful than sex outside of marriage?

Is the child born out of wedlock more sinful than a child born in wedlock?

Why is the act of sex between a man and a woman so sinful, if it is sinful, that is?


Mary the Mother of Jesus

I am starting from Saint Mary, as her story is at the core of the ‘re-uniting of Man with God’ through Christ, this being his reason for being on earth. And it raises the very same question that the ‘fall’ of Adam and Eve does: namely what about the sex thing? Mary was chosen to become the Mother of God because apparently, she accepted the full unity of the flesh with the Word, hence the Immaculate Conception.

To accept full unity of the flesh with the Word is core to Mary’s disposition. In the beginning was The Word then The Word and the uniting of the flesh through Adam. Then there was the fall or the disunity. And here we have the second uniting of the two.

This is heady stuff and without knowing the mystery of God presumably, we have to accept that because Mary was ‘without sin’ she was able to conceive a child from God without having to have sexual union with a man and, after the birth, she remained without sin which implies that she never had sexual union with Joseph. Where does that leave Joseph? In Alan Bennet’s book, Untold Stories he writes in his chapter about art, this:

“The character and situation of Joseph interest me partly because in most paintings of this period, and until the end of the sixteenth century, he has to take a back seat, particularly in paintings of the Adoration. He’s often so much in the background that one wonders if his role in the Holy Family, which is in any case ambiguous, isn’t made more so by his persistence in keeping out of the limelight. It must have been very puzzling. One can imagine a conversation between the Wise Men:
‘Who’s the guy with the grey hair?’
’That’s the husband.’
‘Oh my God!’
And so it must often have been with Joseph, his situation not helped by his always being represented as getting on in years. This is possibly because he’s not mentioned in the New Testament after the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, Jesus then being twelve, and so is presumed to have died before Jesus’ ministry began.

“Even when Joseph is not depicted as old he is often made into such a pathetic and eccentric figure as almost to reflect discredit on the Virgin, who picked him out in the first place. But I suppose that to portray him as an old man or a bit of a fool bolsters the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. After all, there is a sense in which Joseph is cuckolded by the Holy Ghost, a notion which is easier to accept if he fulfils the familiar role of the elderly and foolish husband of a much younger wife. Indeed, in some mystery plays he was presented as a cuckold.

“It’s hardly fair and one feels that he’s rightly a saint, if only because, having to play second fiddle, he needs to be. It’s a situation one sometimes comes across in show business, the famous actress with the supportive spouse; and while Joseph hasn’t quite had to sacrifice carpentry to the demands of his wife’s career, he’s definitely No. 2 in this marriage, a male wife in fact.” (pp481-482).

And you’ve got to have some sympathy with this view. And it is funny. And again, we come back to the ‘sex’ snigger, snigger thing.

Historically, even to innocently question these things would bring shocked looks, blushes and hushes along with a clear indication that you just accept that story as it is at face value or else you can’t be a Christian and most definitely not a Catholic. Probably that approach hasn’t changed much from the Church teachings, or even dealt with outside of the Catholic Church where Mary has a special focus, of course. And indeed, the Archangel Gabriel’s arrival and message to Mary and the Christmas Story is told over and over and is enjoyed and delighted in as part of the Christian psyche and society. We love it. Of itself, without deep analysis, it brings great interest, focus and a consideration of what the story really means to us, even if just once a year. It is surviving, whatever the criticisms or attempts to play it down and it is surviving because it seems that the cumulative psyche is keeping it here. Perhaps we want to know that God hasn’t abandoned us, just in case.

It seems to me that at the very heart of both unions with God we have this issue of sexual intercourse and its implied ‘dirty’ connotations, so it is hard not to notice. But what if these questions are valid, healthy and most certainly not sinful? Why should sex be considered as sinful and dirty and why do we have to extrapolate the central theme of God’s union with man well away from anything as ‘vulgar’ as sexual intercourse? What has sex and being an immaculate conception (i.e.: without sin) got to do with each other? Are they incompatible?

Mary herself was the Immaculate Conception. At a rational level, this implies lots of questioning.
If Mary is the Immaculate Conception, then what about her Mother Saint Anne? If, in order to be pure enough to become the Immaculate Conception one has to be totally untouched and unsullied through the Original Sin and certainly a physical virgin, then it requires some suspension of the fact that Mary’s Mother was married to St. Joachim and bore Mary.

Let us consider the notion of, if St. Anne were absolutely pure enough to accommodate the Immaculate Conception of her daughter, then what about her parents? Saint Anne must have been very pure in Spirit to have borne the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and she still had normal unions with more than one man, although not simultaneously. In fact, Saint Joachim is the Father of Saint Mary. Or was he only her Father on earth, as in Saint Joseph being the Father of Christ on earth? It is the kind of consideration that has throw-backs to each, previous generation in a purely physical sense. Afterwards, St. Anne had two further husbands. This could not have affected her daughter, Mary’s holy status as being the Immaculate Conception. Therefore, why would the fact that Mary might have had a normal, physical, married union with Joseph even after the birth of Christ be so unpalatable? Why would it or could it rock the foundations of the Church’s teachings?

If we know the story of Christmas, we know that Joseph was spoken to by an angel to dispel his fears about Mary having had sexual relations with a man, before their union. I wonder what was said or conveyed to Joseph.

There appears to be a direct implication that if Mary is accepted as having had a normal marriage with Joseph, even after the birth of the Christ, then her status as the Mother of God and Christ’s status as the Son of God is threatened.

Why is this?

St. Augustine is rather clear on his view that Mary is absolutely ‘pure’. He is equally clear that Mary remained pure after the birth of Christ and by this he means that she never had sexual intercourse with Saint Joseph. Augustine uses the word “concupiscence” which relates to desire. Apparently, she and Joseph lived together as Man and Wife in a purely spiritual union.

Why is it so important that the Blessed Virgin Mary is proposed as having always been a physical virgin during her entire life on earth, whilst being married to Joseph and having her own family?

In some reflections of the saints in a compilation by John Rotelle, on the Virgin Mary, it is abundantly clear that they all perceive Mary to have been and to have remained a physical Virgin for the rest of her life, even after Jesus was born. These writers are all men I should add and I add this for good reason. St. Thomas of Villanove (1486-1555) an Augustinian bishop encapsulates the conception of Jesus with: “I beg you, Virgin: tell us yourself how you conceived with your virginity unimpaired and gave birth with your virginity intact.”.

And John Rotelle (compiler of the saints’ views) encapsulates the continued physical virgin state of Mary with this: “Mary was truly the spouse of Joseph, and she is therefore proposed to all married people as a model. Her marriage to Joseph did not indeed involve bodily union, but it did involve the far closer union of souls. God arranged things in this manner so that Christian spouses might realise that ‘the more they learn to imitate the parents of Christ, the closer will be their union with the members of Christ’. Thus, while never tiring of exalting Mary’s ineffable privilege of virginity combined with motherhood, Augustine sees in her transcendent vocation an exhortation to those Christians who are called to marriage: Let them, like Mary, aim at what is noblest and most exalted in that state!”.

Mary’s ‘other children’ were not hers, they were cousins, apparently. As the word for ‘brothers’ can be used in its wider sense of ‘cousins’; consider the family of Jesus who are concerned about their ‘lost son’, they thought that he was mad. (Mark 3.21). So, sometimes we are asked to believe that Jesus had no brothers and sisters and that he lived alone with his parents in Nazareth with parents who had no physical intercourse, but existed in a subliminal state of spiritual union if that is what is implied by St. Augustine’s “..exalted state..”, and that the other relations were the issue of his Mother’s and Father’s families.

For all our contemporary worldliness and acceptance of so many things not long ago rejected as bad and even illegal, we still somehow have the same mediaeval, narrow, archaic approach to the notion of a woman who has had sexual intercourse being somehow ‘dirty’.

In our modern, worldly sense, the purity of a woman is still perceived to be that of a physical virgin and the notion that once she has been sullied by having had sex with a man, colours our view of the status of women anywhere in the world. In our modern world, a ‘loose’ woman is considered a ‘slut’. There are more disparaging words to describe women than there are for men. Any woman who has had sex outside of the holy estate of marriage is considered sullied. More readily acceptable is a man “sowing his wild oats” but if he does so, then there are women with whom he sowed his oats who are now sullied and cannot be ‘pure’, ever, if we follow this logic. These notions might be more to do with pride and primogeniture and the man knowing that the child a woman bore was his, rather than a sober view on the status of the woman. The word for a man whose wife has committed adultery is ‘cuckold’, which is highly ignominious. But there is no word for the woman whose husband has committed adultery. This is no argument for or against feminism it is a recognition of the status of men and women.

But these notions can certainly serve to alienate the vast majority of modern men and women from the idea of a life with or in God, because of our more forward thinking modern values and principles; in our cultures we are relatively rather ‘free and easy’ about the way to live our lives and tend to accept multiple partners, marriages or not. No wonder then that many of us feel isolated from the narrow interpretation of the relationship between a man and a woman, from the Church; we are breaking the rules all the time and we are becoming even more isolated and distinct from the Church’s ‘way’.

Yet our culture tends also to be diverse and easy going or accepting in terms of couples living together without getting married and homosexual unions at a state legislature level and this consideration is a modern debate within the Church of England itself, so a contemporary ‘soul searching’ is going on in the Church and is followed by Government and media to derive our modern values. Yet still we have not moved forward on the concept of a woman’s purity being utterly related to her having had sexual intercourse. Without sexual intercourse we cannot exist and yet it is treated as some kind of ‘necessary evil’ or ‘sin’ because we are too ‘sinful’ to conceive without the aid of a man and a ‘dirty’ act. We know that rape cases in courts tend to look to the woman who has been abused to defend herself first; she should not have dressed in such a way, etc.

We are rather astonishingly narrow in this regard whilst able to allow for equal rights for homosexuals and we won’t even go to the issue of that physical sexual union here; yet people are honest enough not to trudge to Church and offer their participation in their ‘sinful’ states being clearly impure and having neither notion nor desire to follow the examples apparently set by St. Mary and St. Joseph. Such honesty and yet left out of the Church. It seems a contradiction; excluded for being honest.

And now we come to the central subject of the Da Vinci code.

Saint Mary Magdalene had been a prostitute, according to Pope Gregory, or she was ‘the woman who was a sinner’ and she became a disciple of Christ. She was with Saint Mary, His Mother, at the crucifixion. When they went to the Garden of Gethsemene to anoint his body with herbs they couldn’t find his body, but Mary Magdalene became the first human witness to his physical resurrection. As to why it was important for Mary of Magdala to be portrayed as a prostitute by Pope Gregory or as to why she had to be ‘the woman who was a sinner’ we would have to look at the political and social infrastructure of Palestine at the time of Christ and in later centuries in relation to the treatment of women. Whether Mary of Magdala was or was not a prostitute is to me utterly outside of the scope or needs of our understanding here. In other words if Mary was a prostitute or if Mary was not a prostitute it makes no difference whatsoever to understanding the truth of the Immaculate Conceptions. Where it does help us is in again witnessing the apparent need to label a woman not only of Christ’s time but one who was his and his other disciples’ peer, with a role and or disparaging term and which is equally used in modern times as the name of a woman who solicits sex and as a derisory term for a woman who is judged to be loose with her favours. And it helps us in examining the relationship between the two Marys. Therein lie the real issues.

Mary Magdalene and Mary, the Mother of Christ were two women so close to Jesus that it would be begging a suspension of belief if they did not communicate and go about with each other. Especially the visit to the garden to anoint the body shows that they were together in their intent; they went there together in their urgent task to do what was required. Imagine for a moment these two women in our modern, soap opera orientated world which thrives on gossip and spectacular happenings with ‘ordinary’ people, who have their own cult ‘celebrity’ status almost as soon as they get in the popular soaps.

Imagine a woman, Mary the Mother of Christ, so far removed from the real, material world then if she had lived only in a spiritual union with her husband, having just one child to care for in a working class town where large families would have been the norm. They would have been not only ‘odd’ but clearly utterly different from their neighbours. It beggars belief, but if we allow for this and see Mary as having had this slightly elevated, dreamy life on the streets of Nazareth because she was so ‘above’ everyone else, can you imagine her discussing, grieving and planning things with Mary of Magdala, a woman of the world, perhaps of the street and with perspectives so based on the hard facts of life on earth and the reality of relationships at an intimately physical level? I suppose that you could argue that Mary of Magdala had become so spiritual and enlightened by this time that her whole perspectives on life had changed and that she had changed so fundamentally that she could go about with Mary the Mother of Christ. But I wouldn’t argue this. Rather, I would argue that both women were women of the world in the very real sense of understanding the social context, the politics, the human condition as it really is, the consequent emotions including fear and disbelief and the ultimate betrayal leading to the trial, the humiliation of and the death of Jesus. The women remained whilst the men fled. They were constant and they did not go away; rather, they faced the consequences. And the two Marys faced the consequences together.

The story of the Da Vinci code is that Mary Magadalen bore a child to Christ and that there is a huge puzzle to work this out. It is a novel and it is well imagined. As it happens, Dan Brown might well have got some of his resource or ideas from a book published in 1996: “The Tomb of God. The Body of Jesus and the solution to a 2000 year old mystery” by Andrews & Schellenberger. This is a factual account of their searching for the implications of the mystery of a place in France and who might be buried there. They use archaeology, theology, geometry, mathematics and the clues through the centuries to pursue this aim which ultimately includes Leonardo da Vinci (but not the painting The Last Supper). Its valuable contribution to history, politics, mediaeval notions and the story of what might have happened to Mary Magdalene and to Jesus after the crucifixion is extremely interesting and, they conclude, absolutely proven. The book asserts as fact, as does Dan Brown in fiction, that there was a physical union between Jesus and Mary. I wonder if our inability to perceive a close relationship between a woman and a man without some kind of sexual union lies at the basis of this too. I have met in my life both women and men who do not seek a sexual union with someone of the opposite sex. The Dalai Lama is completely absorbed in his role on earth to take care of Tibet, Tibetans and his own spiritual development, he seeks no physical union. Christ’s mission on earth was all consuming and he had much work to do, and his message had to be delivered to the world. The trial and the crucifixion took place at an early stage in his life and like any great teacher or mystic, it is likely that he was completely absorbed in this. Also, amongst his followers he was loved, adored and respected and it is highly unlikely that a relationship with a woman in which they were engaged in a physical sexual union would have been conducive to this, let alone the social prohibitions of the time. If our narrow human view is that there must have been ‘something’ going on then we are again back to the base feelings which drive our media and soap operas. But, whatever the truth of the situation, the personal relationship between two people is between them and perhaps our constant need to find the weakness and desire in others to gape at, ridicule or bring down to ‘our level’ or a ‘base level’ or just ‘down to earth’ as the common saying goes, is to find the human tendency to debase and deride that which is inherently beautiful. If we accept that the modern soaps are written to appeal to the lowest common denominators in people, by actively stirring gossip-orientated narrowness and base instincts, we can really understand how such plays as ‘The Crucible’ and stories like the film ‘Ryan’s Daughter’ deal well with the baseness of man and document that sad, narrow and ignorant state without inner reflection and enlightenment.

Years’ ago, Scarlatti’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” was considered so sacriligious that it was widely condemned, even with opposition from the Houses of Parliament in England. This story examined what might have happened if Christ had survived the Cross and married and so on; I found it a harrowing film to watch but never found its content remotely sacriligious because it was a story about ‘what if’ and it examined this very well and managed, I thought, to bring the human experience so close to God that it was extremely holy in its approach.

So what am I talking about and what is the real issue? The real issue is that the focus is on sex and whether Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene and, indeed, whether Mary the Mother of Jesus had sex with Joseph, her husband.

It seems that if Mary, the Mother of Jesus, did have a normal, married life also in the physical sense with St. Joseph, then the church will ‘fall down’. I do not understand why it would fall down though, but it seems that great lengths are gone to, to preserve the absolute ‘purity’ of Mary, the Mother of Jesus in a physical sense over the years since the birth of Jesus within the teachings of the Church. Apparently, if Mary did have a normal married relationship with Joseph this would imply that she was no longer pure. In contrast, Mary Magdalen’s background is easily given a singularly apparently ‘impure’ slant in order to welcome the masses of sinners we can surmise as being not beyond hope. It is a nice political way of giving hope to the masses by using Mary Magdalen in this way whilst securely keeping Mary and Joseph well and truly out of the normality on earth sphere, and we can admire its intent.

But, whether Mary of Magdala was or was not a prostitute, it is important to realise that there were prostitutes in the time of Christ as there are today and what I am implying is that they – or anyone else - is equally worthy of the love of God irrespective of whether they change their ways or not. If I equally assert that we owe each other simple respect, this means that whoever you come across in life, irrespective of his or her situation, you should afford them respect. The modern context then, is the same as the ancient and through this clear commonality, we can ably draw strands and comparisons to consider the fundamental truths.

If the intent of the Church is to defend the physical purity of Mary, the Mother of Jesus then this leads us to a very important and in my view, sinister, reasoning. Why should we or anyone reject the notion of Mary having borne Jesus as the Son of God as the Immaculate Conception, be incompatible with leading a normal life on earth and having a proper, married union with Joseph, afterwards? Why would this equally detract from Mary herself being the Immaculate Conception?

The very root of the teachings of Christ is with the ordinary, everyday lives of people in their various social hierarchies and jobs. Married or unmarried, tax collector, house wife, prostitute or fisherman or even Samaritan or Roman soldier, no one was beyond the scope of Christ’s teachings and message about the reality of God and the Kingdom of which he spoke. He embraced the very soul of man by speaking to him of very ordinary, every day things and within the context of women being subjugated in the social structures of the day. He ignored the social conventions of the day by attributing equal respect, status (call it what you will ) to women and to men. He was not constrained by the social directives of the day. The story of his asking the crowd wishing to stone the adulteress who amongst them was without sin is extremely enlightening. Would an adulterer be willing to place himself in the same position as the woman?

Similarly, in our modern lives we are unfortunately witnessing not the increasing respect of men for women, as a whole person, but its opposite in its tendency to be more highly focused on the one facet of physical, sexual intercourse for its own sake. I am not inferring that this is an issue exclusively about male values, it is an issue about the cumulative social values of men and women.

Recent articles (see bibliography below) in the news suggest that the attitude of men to using women for having sex, by paying them for this service, is increasing. The number of men paying women for sex has nearly doubled in a decade, UK research suggested in December 2005 published findings on surveys of 11,000 British adults between 1990 and 2000. Rising divorce rates, sex tourism and increasing availability of commercial sex are blamed by the Sexually Transmitted Infections journal.

The lead author (The study authors are from Imperial and University College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the National Centre for Social Research) Dr Helen Ward said there were many reasons why more men were paying for sex. "There has been a more liberal attitude towards commercial sex and increasing commercialisation of sex. Lads magazines are bombarded with images. There are more men with money and more women looking for this type of work." Peter Baker, of the Men's Health Forum, said that "Many people will be surprised by the relatively large numbers of men who are willing to pay for sex. But it's not so surprising in the context of social trends - women are increasingly sexualised in the media, sex phone lines are routinely advertised in the back of magazines and phone boxes...and divorce and separations are on the rise."

The modern world, let’s take our own UK as a start, distinguishes between the Church goers and those who don’t. It is as if those of us who go to Church accept ‘blindly’ the faith and therefore must act accordingly and make jam for the bazaars and do charity work etc. and those of us who don’t go to Church, simply take our chances elsewhere and perhaps embrace other teachings of spirituality or not, and a ‘good’ life can be led without going to Church anyway. People might have a ‘healthy respect’ for the holy in that they keep their reverent distance or they might openly disregard the teachings of the Church considering it out of date and not related to current life, an important one being the current debate about sexual behaviour in the less developed world and the AIDS crises and the use of condoms, or not and the Catholic church’s stance on this important issue.

It seems to me that underneath the insistence that Saint Mary remained a physical virgin all of her earthly days or at least for the time before marrying Saint Joseph, is the despising of ‘ordinary’ women. There are so many phrases related to the damning and hate of women including the astonishing, but hilarious, American “Mother Fucker” and “slut” and many more of course, that we need to look more carefully at our human, ego-driven facet of damning any woman who has had sex whether inside of our outside of a marriage. And then anyone borne of a woman is immediately in sin because of the sex. Good grief.

There has to be something missing. We are unable to go to Church for guidance and education because we know that we do not meet their stipulations for entry; we cannot meet their ‘ideals’ we do not make the grade and, anyway, services can be boring, cold and strained and there are many other things we could be doing, rather than standing in front of an altar with some faint hope that we will be ‘let off’ if we just turn up at the appointed time on a Sunday. The spiritual life, as an integral part of our being perhaps equally needy of development is mostly ignored in our general media and it is often ignored inside the Church too.

So how do we account for the fact that Lourdes is one of the great pilgrimages of the Christian world in a secular age? Whilst Catholic congregations decline across Europe the number of people going to Lourdes is actually increasing. Six million people go per year which is said to be more than visit Mecca. What on earth can these seemingly mutually exclusive indicators be telling us? It is telling us that people are seeking help, love and forgiveness from God and that their souls and spirits are stirred enough to make the journey, the inner and outer one. They are seeking the development of their spirituality in the context of their real lives not in the context of some ideal that they cannot possibly match.

Why are the Churches so unwelcoming, why are we not compelled to go there for the purpose of development, meeting other like minded people and learning more about what the messages, the gospels actually mean to us in our lives right now? What is it about the formula offered in mainstream education or Church sermons or structure that is so unattractive? It doesn’t go forward, that is what. We are stuck in a staid, ritualistic exercise and it has become not only boring but it is ignoring the central focus of Christianity: the spiritual being in all of us. Yes, you have the Christmas story, the Communnion, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascencion around which pivots the Church calendar but the point of the calendar and the sacraments are reminders and for the development of our spirituality; these activities and sacraments are not ends in themselves.

If the Churches do not grasp the contemporary desire, need and thirst for the spirituality of Christianity, then why even be surprised that people just stop attending Church as part of their lives? In the past, it has perhaps been sufficient for societies that were focused in their cottage industries or post-revolution industries as it provided a central and different focus on life from the very dreary working conditions and harsh, difficult living. It was enough to offer the Church assembly,the family life, the colourful ceremonies, the groups of bands and crafts and the wonderful stories for reflection which might be then pursued by those wanting or able to read more in their own time, indeed developing their own spirituality then, because there were no other distractions in their lives. In our time, people are far more sophisticated, not necessarily better educated, are aware of the entire world through the media and the internet and absorb concepts and notions from other cultures, ideas that are out of the ordinary. Even if not so sophisticated, we dwell on soap operas and game shows for excitement and entertainment.

There are not only innumerable distractions to take away any focus on the Church life but there is really no competition from it at all. Should the Church wake up to the contemporary reality of having to address life as it is, not as it should be? Remember that Christ told Peter that he had come for all people, at Peter’s exasperation that Christ should mix in ‘undesirable’ social circles.

Does the Church shun the idea of spirituality? The core elements of all of the key stories including the Christmas story and the life of Christ are utterly spiritual.

The church does not address spirituality and it doesn’t address the notion of virginity, sex and the virgin birth. It is so closely linked to the purity of the flesh that it is not explored. If the aspects of virginity, sex and the virgin birth are not explored, we cannot embrace the spirituality inherent here. The question is why these aspects seem to be singularly related to the physical and sexual intercourse. What if these aspects are actually related to the deepest part of our being; the soul? What if they do not relate to the physical at all?

We are three parts as reflected in the Holy Trinity: Soul, Spirit and Physical. We divorce our tri-being to suggest that the Church on earth is subject to the notion of absolute physical purity. Surely such narrow reasoning is the inhibitor of the spirit, because the soul is ignored. If the soul is ignored, it cannot inform the spirit. The soul belongs to God. The spirit is who we are and we seek to be led by the soul back to God. Hence the reunion of the spirit and the soul. If Mary’s state of being enabled her soul to magnify the Lord, it means that she was in complete union with God. The implication is spiritual and soulful and the third part, the physical, is our outer shell. The shell can become damaged and worn and used, it can be abused and caressed and its effects will be felt in our souls. But even if you have worked as a prostitute or had five husbands and numerous lovers you are as worthy of the love of God, through the soul, than anyone else who is celibate and prurient. If we believe that our physical actions and encumbrances are permanently damning, then we close the door on proper union with God. Herein lies the guilt and here, also, lies our shadow because we will take evasive action to hide or justify our un-Godly behaviour and so we divorce the physical from the spirit and the soul is wounded.

Healing is the union of the three parts so we can better recognise the role that spirituality has to play in teaching us the way forward, or the way back to God. This is what Mary signified with the conception of Christ. He was the immaculate conception then; it was perfectly balanced. When Mary was conceived, even with parents who had sexual intercourse, she was equally immaculately conceived because the balance of the three parts was in union, communion with God.

So sex really isn’t the issue at all. If the Church is not dispelling that notion it is not helping the spiritual development of anyone and everyone, whatever their state of being.

And it helps to continue the prejudice of male versus female cultures, the notion of 'feminism' and certainly the continual disparaging of women for what? For having led Adam to sin and fall from grace? Why is this taken to mean that she led him astray and therefore, woman is the one to be blamed? But it takes only a superficial look at many of our cultures to see that she is treated as such.

An interesting etymology is of the kerchief: “ KERCHIEF (Triangle Scarf), mentioned only in Ezek. 13:18, 21, as an article of apparel or ornament applied to the head of the idolatrous women of Israel. The precise meaning of the word is uncertain. It appears to have been a long loose shawl, such as Oriental women wrap themselves in (Ruth 3:15; Isa. 3:22). Some think that it was a long veil or head-dress, denoting by its form the position of those who wore it.”

Could it be that the head scarf currently used by Islam and some Jewish women, is a direct reference to the ‘shame’ of Eve? Eve led Adam astray – away from God to the Devil (a self-declared God) so was she an idolatrous woman? Did she really do that? Even Basilea Schlink writes that: “Mary’s Yes is all the greater when measured against Eve’s No. We are indebted to Mary that God was able to use her Yes to cancel the disobedience of Eve, for through Mary the Saviour was born for us.”

Is this why women are subject to restrictions in cultures which ensure that their physical bodies are entirely covered so that their femininity may not ‘tempt’ a man? Inside the privacy of her marriage in ‘tempting’ her man, whilst she is given the ‘respect’ of the culture by doing this only inside the house and the marriage, is she still condemned for having tempted him to sin in the flesh anyway? Why would we believe that the original sin of Adam and Eve was that Eve enticed Adam to have sex ? If Eve was taken out of Adam, from his rib, it rather more implies that the feminine and the masculine reside within and of each other. The fall from grace is the recognition of our own will and the desire to follow it, not that of God’s.

Even without knowing the answers to all of these questions it is clearly a spiritual dimension which is going to bring the kind of reflection, prayer and meditation into the mysticism of these events. Approaching it from the purely physical angle with ritual just a representation of the spiritual, is not enough. We do not have to know all of the answers – how can we if the universe is infinite and there is so much that we are not capable of grasping? But the way we approach it is an end in itself; it will provide our development towards wholeness, or union with God. That is spirituality.

Bibliography

Mary’s Yes. Readings on Mary Through the Ages, edited and compiled by John Rotelle OSA, 1988,first published 1989,
Collins Liturgical Publications, 8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA ISBN 0-00-599170-6

The First Followers of Jesus: A Sociological Analysis of the Earliest Christianity, Gerd Theissen (Professor of New Testament in the University of Bonn), Munich 1977.
Translation by John Bowden, 1978. First published in English in 1978, SCM Press Ltd, 58 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1

The Blessing of the Holy Spirit, J. E. Fison, Bishop of Salisbury. First published in 1950, this edition first published in 1965, Libra books by Darton, Longman & Todd Limited, 64 Chiswick High Road, London W4

Mary, The Mother of Jesus. Basilea Schlink. Maria, der Weg der Mutter des Herrn. First German edition, 1960, First British edition, 1986 published by Marshall Morgan and Scott Publications Ltd, Marshall Pickering, 3 Beggarwood Lane, Basingstoke, Hants, RG23 7LP, ISBN 0-551-01368-0

Untold Stories, Alan Bennett, 2005, Faber and Faber
Internet references:
Saint Anne. http://www.byzantines.net/saints/st%20anne.htm#Brief%20History
“Twice as Many Men pay for Sex” BBC Article, December, 2005: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4482970.stm