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If You Cross Over The Jordan, You Will Find Rest

  • aptitudeforemptine
  • Apr 1, 2021
  • 5 min read

- Sexual abuse is a particularly sinister form of trauma insomuch that it simultaneously blames and shames its victims. This affects the victims, their acquaintances, their families, and all of society. Children are three times as likely to be sexually abused than adults. Sexual abuse is far more likely to be happen at the hands of someone known to the victim than by a stranger. Child sexual abuse happens across national, ethnic, social, economic, educational, religious, cultural, and geographic lines.

Hyper-sexualization is one possible outcome of sexual abuse at an early age, as are issues with promiscuity, as well as lowered self-esteem. Substance abuse is yet another common outcome. Specific symptoms of sexual abuse may include: difficulty relating to others except in sexual ways, unusual knowledge of sex for their age, self-injurious behaviours, refusal to go home, withdrawl, unusual aggression, neurotic behaviours, prostitution, and forcing sexual acts on others.




- In the fourth century and at the age of twelve a child named Mary ran away from home and wound up homeless on the streets of Alexandria in north Africa. For seventeen years she supported herself by both being a sex worker and using a simple drop spindle to spin yarn. At age twenty nine she fell in with Christian pilgrims heading for Jerusalem for a religious festival. And while there she had an epiphany, namely, that she had self-worth and that the manner in which she had been living was self-destructive. She realized that she no longer had to live that way and took steps to remedy that.




- The longest and most detailed story of this Mary was commissioned by Sophronius some two hundred years later. Over the course of late antiquity and then throughout the Middle Ages this story took on an unfortunate cultic following in the church. Mary of Egypt became the liturgical icon of repentance. April 1st is St. Mary of Egypt’s feast day. In Sophronius' version Mary did what she did motivated by sheer venal sin. His version is itself brutally shaming of her. It is clearly written from an unsympathetic, misogynistic perspective. In doing so it highlights the worst that certain men like to believe that women are capable of being.


I have personally liked the legend of Mary of Egypt, but for a very different reason. As someone trained as a clinician I have read between the lines of this version for a very long time. For me I am amazed at the creative manner by which this Mary remedied what is overwhelmingly likely the abuse that was heaped on her from childhood. In a time and culture when resources were not available she forged a solution to what I suspect was indescribable childhood abuse and found peace.

And consequently as far as I can tell she had no need of repentance. At age twenty-nine she found advocacy and healing and stopped blaming herself. And that is always a beautiful story. But as I already said, in order to get there you need to read between the lines.




-The narrative passed down to us through Sophronius was written hundreds of years after Mary lived. Penance in the Christian church has had a convoluted history. There is no doubt that the experience of the risen Christ was the proof for conversion in the biblical witness, in the church's early formation, and in the lives of countless people ever since. However, over the first several centuries this standard of experience came to stand along side of a notional, populist, confession-based faith. People without the direct experience of God, or who were even incapable of direct relationships, were welcomed into what became a blessed social institution as the Roman empire became Christianized. Penance for bad social behaviour replaced the genuine experience of the risen Christ; a form of state-sponsored social control replaced the freedom of loving direct relationship. The ultimate threat of eternal damnation is a weighty social control mechanism. This structure of the church welded to the government was used to enforce this. And in spite of the strongly psychological character of directly relating to God open to all people (YHWH, correctly translated as I AM) found in the resources of the Jewish tradition, social control is much easier to implement in the church through what became a state-run monitoring system. Seeing the story of Mary of Egypt through this lens, why would the proponents of state-sponsored penance not want to embellish it to these ends?




-There is history in both Judaism and Christianity of misogyny - the hatred of, fear of, mistrust of, and contempt for women. Eve is blamed for the origins of sin, menstruating women are considered unclean, and while women play major roles in the story of Israel, Jesus, and the early church, their stories are repeatedly told as background at best. To that end Sophronius’ text is no different. In a word, the story selfishly begins with a rich embellishment of the life of its male narrator which is quite outside of the real story of Mary. It focuses on the organized life of men as they seek to climb a socio-religious ladder based on external, measurable works of moral exactitude. It fits this woman into that schema and starts by shaming her for living a non-ascetic life, but makes her acceptable in the end for winding up there. It veritably salivates over the lustful details of how low this woman had descended into what it self-righteously judged to be base behaviour. You could not shamelessly invent more details. And I find it highly unlikely that anyone would immediately open up to a complete stranger about one’s sordid history as Mary supposedly did.

In the end Sophronius’ narrative of the life of Mary of Egypt contains in a veiled form almost all of the characteristics of a woman who in childhood had been sexually abused. There is certainly nothing to celebrate about this. This form of her story (which while the most popular is only one version among many) is certainly not an appropriate model of penance. Instead, it is a model of coming to value oneself (quite outside of the threats of the church), and in particular of doing so through the eyes of a loving other, namely God (which is how self-worth happens). And while social avoidance in later life may be a symptom of sexual abuse earlier on, it may have been the only legitimate social option open to Mary for her healing, that is, avoiding those who would continue to seek to exploit her. I believe that if she is anything, then she is an icon for the seclusion needed to gain perspective on the punitive nature of society, the church, and a whole misguided theology of blaming and abuse. God bless her.

That is what I most value in the life of this lovely woman and celebrate today, this, her feast day. St. Mary of Egypt.



 
 
 

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