A Rant!

Coptic-speaking Jean-Yves Leloup argues for Jesus' sexuality in The Sacred Embrace of Jesus and Mary: The Sexual Mystery at the Heart of the Christian Tradition (Inner Traditions, Mar.). An Orthodox Christian, Leloup has translated the noncanonical gospels of Mary, Philip, and Thomas for Inner Traditions. "What Jean-Yves is doing is restoring the feminine context to Christianity," said Jon Graham, acquisitions manager. "Christians have felt their religion doesn't have the same feminine component that other religions have."

This is a rant. I read this just this afternoon in PW religion section - and the last sentence got my blood boiling - not a good thing as I have too much to do now, and don't want to waste Father's time in confession tonight for stupid stuff like this - however.

"... doesn't have the same feminine component that other religions have."

Since when did we start keeping up with the Joneses? It does have a very strong feminine component, thank you very much - in spite of the fact that God revealed Himself to the Israelites as a Father figure, and we have seen him that way for not only their entire history, but ours too - at least until recently - still in Orthodoxy. God transcends our definitions of male and female - He encompasses and transcends them. I'm no scholar, but for crying out loud - He made us in His image - male and female created He them. If God was only male, then why did I end up with the biology and accesories I have, instead of a bass voice, a beard and even hairier legs than I already possess?
Go find out what we say about how feminine God is - He compares Himself to a mother hen, sheltering her chicks under her wings. The Holy Spirit, Holy Wisdom is "Sophia" - that's feminine! We have saints out the wahzoo who are feminine - and not just virgins or harlots, either - St. Macrina, the Elder & the Younger; St. Catherine; St. Anna the Theotokos' mother; St. Anna the prohetess - remember her - waiting patiently in the temple for God to show her His Salvation?; Olga - the matushka of the Aleuts in Alaska; Mary of Egypt, whose feastday we celebrate this Sunday, who spent ages in the desert glorifying and worshipping God; St. Emmelia, Theckla, Tatiana, Alexandra, Helen, oh, and let's not forget the cause of all this - Mary Magdalen, Equal to the Apostles, who, we have always maintained wasn't a whore - she had seven devils, which is quite a different thing.

We aren't feminine enough?

(It doesn't help that this guy is a Coptic Orthodox, either!) Is it the fault of God that we can't get it right, and insist on casting our instiutions in a partriarchal, totally masculine mode, that emphasize God's fatherness, instead of His total and encompassing love for all, in both a feminine and masculine way?

This smacks of the smorgasborg(d) new age approach to religion - if there's something in it you don't like, then just delete it and find something else from some other tradition, then go trolling through our history and cut and paste to fit, distorting what was put down in the past at will. Everybody else is insisting that Jesus was either married and sexually active, homosexual and sexually active, a feminist (and probably sexually active, if not outright promiscuous), so we should too now? Let's not pay any attention to the fact that the scholarship of the recent books that purport that Jesus & Mary Magdalene were married (and probably had kids) are in serious question, or that the author of the book that began this article (Baigent) was a BBC journalist - nope, we'll just accept that because the Church (Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican or take your pick) is an institution, they're automatically as devious and untruthful and cloaked and daggered as the Bavarian Illulminati, and so what this jouranlist has written MUST be true. (Which also totally disregards the fact that the entire premise his Holy Blood Holy Grail was based on has since proven to be a 19th century fraud perpetrated by a French con man of monumental proportions (the fraud and the man) - nope, we'll just assume it's all true, and thereby rewrite our entire theology to keep up with the Joneses.
Grr. See my other complaints about that quote on the conciliar blog . And now I am not going to get much done on my Prayer Rope story becuase I fulminated about this, and I still have to do my examination of conscience. Grump.