Mary's heresy

There was never any doubt that Mary of Egypt was beautiful, inside and out. Even during her pop queen years of celebrity status, what with one fling after another documented by ancient paparazzi, she had a soul that was not completely depraved. Even at her ugliest, at her most disheveled wear and her states of undress, underwear-less, ribald with any number of partners of unspecified gender heaving at the party, the heart was there, a work of Divine art.

Such is human nature, inherently good, radically free, consummately decadent. So bent on the rehearsal of reversal.

In Egypt, and on the way to the spectacle of the True Cross in Jerusalem, she may as well as have shaved her head … tattooed herself with oriental devices – Shiva, destroyer of all worlds, at the pudenda … birthed fetuses only to abandon them, only to adopt others for a family boutique… played for x-ratings even before ratings existed, even before videos, except the most primitive video of eye-witnesses, who, as usual, were part of the script … performed repertoire of dubious merit but complete sincerity: there was never any doubt that she sang what she thought, because she did, I’m sure, think what she sang:

Oops, I did it again, like the very first time, is what a girl wants, is what a girl needs.

Sing it enough, and you think the world, and the metaphysical universe, sings along with you. Mary did.

So she disembarked at Jerusalem with the crowd of spectaculars, and fell into the procession wending its way to the Church of the Resurrection.

Finding the place, it was (you may say) satisfactory.

Though hardly at first.

Mary tried the threshold for Cross Veneration, and was met by resistance from heaven. It was like the cherubim with the flaming sword at the gates of Eden.

This temporary rejection was really the first of the two signs of the Cross: Le gusta este jardin que es suyo? Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!

Or, taking the accurate translation made by Lowry’s second wife, “You like this garden that is yours? See that your children do not destroy it.” It is interesting that the protagonist of the story translated the phrase, with his mescal-addled brain, in a manner that betrayed his own perdition-besotted perception, “You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy it!”

Mary chose repentance over despair, unlike Malcolm Lowry’s consul. And her repentance, as all repentance must, propelled her deep into the deserts of renunciation, the second signal of the Cross. For fifty years, bridging the fourth and fifth centuries, she sojourned alone, in the desolation of the Syrian wilderness in the haunts of jackals and in the pride of lions. Her prayers were hampered by flashbacks of concupiscence in full presentation (like PTSD), in thoughts, hallucination and feelings. She heard her thoughts, her actions and her words played back to her in excruciating detail, understanding now that everything then was played to the recording cameras and mikes of the bodiless powers.

And yet, she prevailed in this garden of the soul, clinging to the Risen Christ of the True Cross, Whose Mother had directed her, compassionately, into the sexless desert ...

... the desert of renunciation where her salvation was forged: “The desires of thy soul and the passions of thy flesh thou hast cut down with the sword of abstinence; thy sinful thoughts thou hast choked with the silence of ascetic life. With the streams of thy tears thou hast watered all the wilderness, and caused the fruits of repentance to spring up for us: therefore, O saint, we celebrate thy memory” (Aposticha verse for Vespers of her Sunday, Lenten Triodion, Mother Maria and Bp. Kallistos Ware).

Mother Mary’s story is popular in Orthodox circles, especially this week during Lent. But I’m afraid that for many, it is popular because its powerful romance has eclipsed the more important emphasis on renunciation. The romance is undeniable: there is the stained and destitute woman who flees into the wilderness, and is found by a holy man, and is buried by a lion, who walked on water to receive Communion, and levitated, unknowingly, as she prayed.

But the renunciation is uncomfortable. Mother Mary’s story means also, and more importantly, that the Church leads us to struggle against the flesh in the old fashioned way, despite the fashionable euphemistic and ethical dialectic to which we subject our consciences. You may have noticed, as I have, the inverse relationship between the prevalence of the term "ethics" and the appearance of the simple word "sin." You may have also noticed the sudden temptation to dismiss all this talk of struggling against the flesh and renunciation as just another gnostic polarity of soul and body. Don't worry, it isn't.

Mary's story means that Christian faith is a renunciation of all biologically -- rather, "creaturely" -- reductive principles, especially the one called “sexual individualism,” which is the piteous attempt to find "meaning" in sexual experience.

I realize that it might be impolitic to mention this, but meaning cannot be found in sex, even in Christian sex. One might find meaning in childbearing, or in marriage, especially if the kenotic sacrifice of self is involved. But sex itself between a male husband and a female wife (the only “safe sex” there is, “because of the powers”), is to be enjoyed as a sweetening of life, but not as a meaning of life.

The search for meaning from Cupid is the chief stupidity of Romanticism, and is the etiology of the brain drain that takes place on the hit parade, and the white (and black) slavery that now proceeds on glossy pages and computer screens. Separated from the Trinity, and grace-splendored agape, all eros proceeds in an unbroken continuum toward self-absorption, with its attendant rituals of pornography and masturbation, to the point where even intercourse becomes a parallel soliloquy.

Even in the precincts of Christianity do we find Cupid’s fervent arrows in flight. At any given festival, workshop or youth event this summer, some handsome dude, after the music set, will announce to thousands of relieved pubescents that “going to second or even third base” does not necessarily qualify as “sex.” Their parents, in another auditorium, will hear breathy presentations (on PowerPoint, you know) on positions, techniques, and sophistic defenses of why certain acts are “okay” now that weren’t “okay” before: these will be this week's Christian version of last week’s hot stuff in Cosmo. In my day, these presentations were done by Ed Wheat, Tim (Left Behind) Bev LaHaye, and those R-rated Penners. I shouldn't have had to hear, in church, things in a decent age that would have been kept out of the church hall, whilst perched on wooden chairs with styrofoam cups, and kept instead in the precincts of reticent art, euphemism (a sorely missed word), and private conversation.

It might even be worse today. Happily, I don't know. You might disagree, but I rather think that the bleak and clinical sort of sex education, where everything is displayed, is not all that necessary for the nurture of chastity in children and youth. (When we used to do drug prevention seminars, we showed junior high kids exactly how roach clips and bongs were used, so that they could, you know, "tell the signs" ... we ended up training them.)

Mother Mary, the ex-party girl and present-day saint and intercessor for our salvation, prays for our chastity, and renunciation of all the lesser modes of being into which our souls may fall. Christian asceticism aimed, as Max Scheler once said, “at a liberation of the highest powers of personality from blockage by the automatism of the lower drives.”

Only the saints are thus free. Libertines are, so to speak, not at liberty.

You will not find manuals on sexuality in Orthodoxy proper, just as you will not find anything of the sort on Orthodox sports or Orthodox wealth management or wealth creation. They are certainly not wrong in themselves, but they cannot be isolated as sources of meaning or logos. Our entire aesthetics and (even) “romantic vision” are haunted through and through by the Holy Trinity, particularly by the “energy” that proceeds everywhere from that Essence, which is above all names.

Harnack, of all people, said this nice thing about primitive Christianity. I don't agree with all of it, but certainly with most:

Renunciation of the servile yoke of sin (servile peccati iugum discutere) was the watchword of Christians, and an extraordinary unanimity prevailed as to the meaning of this watchword, whether we turn to the Coptic porter, or the learned Greek teacher, to the Bishop of Hippo, or Jerome the Roman presbyter, or the biographer of Saint Martin. Virginity was the specifically Christian virtue, and the essence of all virtues; in this conviction the meaning of the evangelical law was summed up. (History of Dogma, p. 128).

I say this to emphasize that Christianity, especially Orthodox Christianity, is without question a society of renunciation. It is why we have treasured virginity (perhaps not as the "essence of all virtues"), even at risk of being called nasty things by neo-Freudians and liberationists whose consciousnesses have been raised. It is why we have cherished our monastic tradition, despite the fact that historically, they’ve oft been a cranky sort. It is why sometimes, husbands and wives have taken to living together simply as brother and sister, long after the childbearing years have passed. Sex was no longer seen as necessary. It was something, in season, to be embraced and enjoyed. But after the season passed by, then it receded, and was replaced by higher things.

There, I said it, a heresy for this day and age: that there is something higher than sex. If today were perhaps a decade from now, I could be prosecuted for religious intolerance (on the Left Coast, sooner than that) or for crimes against diversity.

What’s more, Mother Mary of Egypt said it. She renounced the world, and what more severe modern heresy could there be?, and for that, her feet left the ground when she prayed.

Comments

[axegrinder]

My theology professor in seminary used to insist that the saints should be observed, hearkened to and emulated. He told us that they dare not be relegated to a distant, irrelevant past (and this at an Evangelical seminary).

You have provided a window for us to look back at St. Mary of Egypt. She is certainly looking through her own heavenly window at us. When I look away from the window I see a world in which she would be ready to do battle, and that gives me hope.

Jason Kranzusch

[Grumpy Old Man]

I respect the mind of the Church, which knows things that I never will, in this life.

However, some saints, like Mary of Egypt, have stories that seem rather extravagant to me. Are we all called to feats of ascetic athleticism like hers?

I fail daily at being patient with my teenagers and showing kindness to and not judging the homeless and the ostentatious I run into every day. Mary's desert seems a long way off.

[Julio C. Gurrea, Jr.]

"Mary's desert seems a long way off."

Mary's desert saved her. Your desert will save you.