Bloggers

Mamma mia

Jul 09, 2016

I woke up the other day with a rather original thought.

Christ yelled out loud in Aramaic on the cross soon before dying: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? This is usually translated: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

But what if what he actually said should translate: My Divine Mother, my Divine Mother, why hast thou forsaken me? I was so excited about this proposition, that I wanted to share it with Robyn, my wife. But alas she has no interest in Christ. Yes, but she is interested in feminism. And if my discovery is valid, then it shows that for Christ, God was not just Father, but God also included Mother. And Christ then was so close to Her that in his dying moments he missed most of all her Life force withdrawing from him. But Christian doctrine makes no mention of divine mother and places mother to a lower status than Father, ‘The God’. Maybe if I shared this briefly with Robyn, she would stay interested. So I went into the lounge room and said to her.

‘I discovered something that I find really interesting. Can I share it with you briefly?’

Robyn was reading a book and looked up from it without words, but she put her book down, as if saying: ‘Well, if you must.’

Encouraged, I began and put to her my Christ-Mother thesis. Then I continued: ‘I wonder why men rejected women as equals even to the point that by the time the Judo-Christian religion arose, God was seen as exclusively male; not a trace of Mother.’

Well, I managed to hear from Robyn now for the first time, as she went ahead to volunteer an answer. ‘Because it is convenient for men to treat women as second class citizens. Just to use them, starting with mother to nurture them, to do the domestic work, to take care of the children, to cook for them and for sex, while they do their own thing.’

‘But’, I continued, further encouraged and agreeing with her: ‘Surely, it would have promoted goodwill and intimacy if men treated women as equals. There seems to have been a time when this was so, in the Golden Age of humanity.’

I noticed Robyn’s eyelids started to droop, as she was clutching her open but presently unread book, nevertheless I persevered. ‘What’s interesting to me is how a tradition changes. It seems to be important for us humans to come up with an ideology or new theology to justify a new order.’

Robyn’s eyelids were drooping even further, however, I was just warming up. The last thing Robyn cares about is theology which, however, fascinates me. And I just ‘had to share’ with her my discovery; how misogyny gained a theological basis in the classical Persian myth when the male God killed the female Goddess, chopped up her womb to bits and appointed himself the single Creator, the only God.

By now, to my increasing chagrin, Robyn was close to being asleep. Here I was sharing these pearls of wisdom with her and she did not even bother to say: ‘aha’ or ‘I see’. I might as well had talked to the wall. I got annoyed and told her: ‘Listen, if you are not interested, why don’t you say so, rather than letting me talk without the slightest response from you?’

Actually, I did get plenty of non-verbal responses from her, if I only cared to acknowledge them. The problem was not her withdrawal, but my lack of considering that she was not interested in theology and in my persisting with the topic.

So I learnt that there was another reason for women’s subjugation: men using them as a sounding board. And here was the irony of my position. I despise misogyny and ‘believe’ in complete equality for women. But it is one thing to believe in something and another is to practice the belief. My male egocentrism is so deeply ingrained that my convictions, reached in my older age, are often sabotaged by the power of my life long misogynistic habits.

Oh, Divine Mother, do not forsake me!