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Posted on 12/16/2016 3:47:17 PM PST by nickcarraway
This opinion piece is by the Rev. Ruth Everhart, a pastor and the author of two spiritual memoirs.
Church culture tends to be fixated on sexual purity year-round, but during Advent, I’m tempted to blame it on the Virgin Mary. After all, she set an impossibly high bar. Now the rest of us are stuck trying to be both a virgin and a mother at the same time. It does not seem to matter that this is biologically impossible. Can you at least try?
I’ll speak for myself. I was raised in the church and taught to be a good girl, by which I mean obedient, quiet and sexually pure. That worked reasonably well until I was 20. During my senior year of college, my housemates and I were the victims of a home invasion. The intruders held us for hours and took turns raping us at gunpoint. The next year of our lives revolved around the criminal-justice system.
Of course, I was traumatized. But what was harder to describe — and more long-lasting — was how the crime became bound up in a sense of sexual shame. I wondered constantly: Did I somehow deserve to be raped? Had the rape ruined me irreparably? Both questions seemed inevitable. After all, what is the opposite of being sexually pure? Sustaining irremediable damage. Being ruined.
I’m not blaming my sense of ruin on the Virgin Mary, not entirely. Protestants do not claim Mary in the way Catholics do, but every Advent I feel a sense of kinship. I know what it’s like to be a good girl whose life got upended by what someone did to her body. Of course, her story plot was good and mine was bad. Plus she was, well, a saint. And I’m not.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
WTH?
Vacuous...
I’d almost LOL at the idiocy except at the liberal disrespect they never show Muslimism.
WTF? How low is the left to equate these two?
And most likely she is white and was raped by black thugs in a gun free zone city.
And it is the Virgin Mary’s fault...
Presented as a Public Service
Certain FReepers may need this
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Sh*the*d. Mary’s acceptance was voluntary. Invaders are asses. No linkage at all, f**l.
It only hurts, Ruth, because you want it to. If I wanted, it could hurt me too in the sense that I am not as good as Mary. The accounts of Mary in the Scripture show her as an impeccable person in my view. God chose her for a reason. Oh no, more hurt, why didn’t he choose ‘Pastor’ Ruth.
Lucky for her her family was not Muslim.
For reference for those who do not know how Mary handled the news she was pregnant:
Luke 1:46-55
Mary’s Song
46 And Mary said:
“My soul glorifies the Lord
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
holy is his name.
50 His mercy extends to those who fear him,
from generation to generation.
51 He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
52 He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
53 He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel,
remembering to be merciful
55 to Abraham and his descendants forever,
just as he promised our ancestors.”
Revvie Ruthie obviously can’t recall Mary’s response to the angel:
“Behold the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done unto me according to Thy will.”
I read this and don’t understand what she is trying to say. I fully understand that being raped and then being involved with prosecution of her attackers was traumatic.
But what any of this has to do with church or the Virgin Mary or any cultural norms about women and sex, is just beyond my comprehension.
Reverend Ruth studied theology at the Buzzy seminary in Berkely.
For everyone else Mary had normal relations with Joseph and gave birth to Jesus’s brothers,
“But what any of this has to do with church or the Virgin Mary or any cultural norms about women and sex, is just beyond my comprehension.”
WaPo Publisher: “Our circulation numbers a dropping like a lead balloon. I have no idea what’s wrong with people these days, they’re rejecting the best news and opinion pieces we have to offer in droves.”
The Magnificat! How beautiful was her response!
She is saying that there is no God, and thus nothing supernatural; therefore, Mary was sexually violated, and rather than live with the great stigma of rape, she invented a fantasy to hide her shame.
I pity this anti-theist both for the violation she suffered and for the cynical hatred that motivates her.
Yes, I do. Lady, get help.
I understand that being raped traumatized you. But you are no less "pure" for that. It was something done to you against your will. It was out of your control.
You are not "damaged goods" or anything else.
But you are allowing your rapist to ruin something holy. And that is totally with in your control.
This story is a little too pat, and a little too conveniently seasonal. Is there documentation of what Ms. Everhart claims happened to her?
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