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 ...
Ultra liberal PCUSA, of course.
The Washington Post has turned into some kind of weird leftist tabloid.
HUH?
I don’t understand why she feels reproached by virginity. It’s not her fault she was raped, but it appears she has never stopped torturing herself over it, somehow.
But terror and pain, and helpless humiliation, leave scars that resist healing. I will not ridicule her because I can see she is suffering inwardly, and has been for a long, long time.
I just pray that she will accept that she is innocent in this matter of sexual violation, and that God has restored her, is restoring her, and will restore her to radiant wholeness, body and soul, because God glories in the well-being of His children.
And His compassion is drawn to the broken-hearted.
This business of her being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit and giving birth to the Lord of the Universe and then having relations with Joseph is a quite modern innovation.
To me, it';s a little strange: as if God (God forgive me) would say to Joseph, "Here, I had her first and I got what I wanted, now you can have her. Mazel tov."
As if Mary were just some sort of temporary reproductive concubine as far as God was concerned.
But historic Christianity never saw Mary as anything other than the Mother of the Incarnation and thus the ultimate embodiment of the Covenant. And covenant means forever. Forever, this all-honorable union of the Spirit and the Bride.
You just KNOW that a Special Snowflake like this one has a Twitter page over in "Twitter SafeSpacia & Leftie Rage Roomville", the Great Big Giant Progressive Echo Chamber:
https://twitter.com/rutheverhart/with_replies
Aaaannnnd, sure enough - if you go back to her November 8 and following Tweets, there is DELICIOUS pearl-clutching galore over the ascendancy of President Trump, and the triumph of the mouth-breathing Deplorables.
It's almost as if Ruth was violated once again...
Gads! I read through her timeline.
She's a Hillary mini-me.
I’ll need that after seeing a pic of hillary on her twitter attempting to quote scripture.
No...we need a bigger barf bag. This skank is insulting the Blessed Mother.
It almost sounds like she blames the Blessed Mother for her being raped.
I wonder if she really was or just wanted to do a hit piece on Mary.
Religion porn.
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