Scandalously irreverent and theologically imprecise briefs on heroines of the faith, written by a recovering Protestant agnostic seeker with practically no training and exactly zero filter.
As an agnostic, and admittedly a total outsider, I have to say I was a bit caught off guard by the blatant slut shaming of this week’s saint.
Her name was Mary of Edessa, but when you look up her story on Wikipedia you’re redirected to “Saint Mary The Harlot.” That’s not cool, and I’ll explain why in a bit.
So, Mary was born around AD 370, and when she was just 7-years-old her father died, making her an orphan. She was sent to live with her uncle St. Abraham, a monk who basically never left his house. Mary lived with Abraham for 20-years and during that time he taught her all of the psalter (a collection of the Psalms) and the ascetic disciplines (the abstinent and self-disciplined practiced by many nuns and monks) through a small window between their two rooms.
She had mastered these disciples when one day a monk, “in profession only,” came to visit Abraham and immediately started lusting after Mary. After a year of pursuing her and “whispering” to her through her window, she finally gave in (or maybe gave up, we don’t know) and slept with him.
Overcome by shame, she tried to tell her uncle without *telling*–telling him, but he wasn’t pickin’ up what she was puttin’ down, so she fled his house and joined a brothel.
According to the text—a version of her story on the innerwebz here—Abraham didn’t even realize she was gone, which not gonna lie, seems a little sus since they shared a window and all, remember? But anyway, Abraham eventually had a series of dreams that clued him in on something being up. The first was about a dragon who ate a dove. Being a monk, he assumed this had something to do with an attack on the church, but then two nights later he had another dream, wherein the dragon’s gut was now split open and the dove emerged alive. He realized this was about Mary and that he needed to go save her… which took him, like, two years.
He eventually found her and snuck into the brothel she worked at while wearing a disguise. Abraham confronted her and brought her home, where it’s said she lived out the rest of her days repenting and living a pious, abstinent life.
And while all of this is fascinating, there’s also a modern day part of me that’s so heartbroken for what Mary went through… and the title she’s still being given by Wikipedia all these years later. Because here’s the thing, not a lot has changed since the 300s when it comes to the expectations and pressures put on women.
There’s a reading of the dreams that the #metoo thought-revolution suggests, which I believe just might be present in the original legendary accounts themselves. Specifically, I mean how the dragon devouring the dove is a sort of divine revelation-in-a-dream (the sort of thing I think Catholics call “private” revelation), not only of the danger in which Mary found herself, but of its source or cause: male violence and the very same cultural presuppositions that led Mary to internalize a sick society’s judgment, so it became self-loathing.
Sound familiar?
It does to me. It also strikes me that Mary’s pious vs. prostitute struggle is our modern day ‘purity culture’ vs. ‘porn culture’ battle. Both place a woman’s worth solely in her sexuality. I grew up steeped in these two extremes. Fun times, y’all.
At home and in my local youth group, purity culture was all the rage. I remember a pastor one time asking us to imagine buying a very special gift for someone we loved. He said, “Now, picture yourself carving their name on the bottom of it and giving it to them… only to have them throw it away a little while later. You pick it up out of the trash and eventually give it to someone else that you care about just as much. You scratch out the first name and carve this new partner’s name onto the gift and give it to them. Now, imagine doing that over and over, so many times that the gift is all scuffed up with those different names… eventually, it loses its luster, right?”
That’s a toxic ideology and that’s exactly what happened to Mary even way back then. She was made to believe she was an object that had been defiled and defaced, and that she’d lost her value because some perv monk spent a year pursuing her for sex.
So, in Mary’s mind, why not scuff herself all the way up then? Go big or go home, right? I mean, her value had clearly already been lost because she was made to believe it was based solely only on her virginity which is heartbreaking.
So what happens when young women are raised this way? Well, for those of us like Mary, we flip to the “porn culture” side that says, “Nah girl, the more experience you have with sex, the better! You’re probably the bomb in bed now! Sure, we fetishized your virginity for most of your life, but your newly liberated sexuality is your power now – so use it!”
The problem here is that both of these thought patterns get it wrong because both see our sexuality as our number one attribute when in reality we are so much freakin’ more than that.
Women and men alike, hear me when I say this: You are not your virginity. You are not an object with names scratched out all over you. You. were. not. put. on. this. earth. to. be. a. sex. object. for. other. people’s. desires. You have inherent human dignity no matter what journey your life has taken and you are just as valuable and worthy of love as ever. Nothing in your past can ever make you more or less valuable than you already are just by merely existing as you.
To those who look down on the “scuffed,” keep in mind that Mary of Edessa might not have even ended up a saint had she turned down the horny monk and stayed chaste behind a tiny window all her life. Her ‘path to sainthood’ ran through her turn as a ‘harlot’—who later reclaimed her worth and power through her belief that God loved her no matter what … and that’s effin’ powerful.
Destiny Herndon De La Rosa is the founder of the secular pro-life New Wave Feminists organization. She is a frequent op/ed contributor to the Dallas Morning News and a sought-after speaker.
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