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Buddha's trenchant observation was that life is full of pain and sorrow; different traditions obviously have different ways of addressing it. Early Christians had a struggle with gnosticism over this issue: the gnostics held that Jesus transcended his suffering when on the cross, that his spirit rose above his body and no longer felt pain. Other Christians were being persecuted and tortured by the Romans, and Christ's suffering on the cross actually gave their own torment meaning and a greater context. For a variety of reasons the gnostics fell out of the mainstream of religious history, but the question of suffering and the meaning of suffering was one reason: transcendence is certainly a part of the spiritual experience for some people, but to deny the reality of physical suffering will not do for most. When my mother was a parochial school student she was taught to "offer up her pain" to God--she told me this once in context of her childhood dentistry, which was very painful indeed. It is a way of making meaning out of pain, whatever else one might think of it.
Right now what most Americans suffer from is spiritual pain. We are no longer assaulted by the Black Plague, pillaging Vikings, Inquisitors, famine, and high infant mortality. Certainly we will all die, but it's not the same as in previous centuries. What we have is spiritual pain, and we are afraid. We are afraid of terrorists, AIDS, cancer ... some of us will encounter those things, but not the majority of us. We are afraid of the destruction of social order and other things under the heading of "values." This goes for all of us, whether Freeper or DUer, whether fundamentalist or progressive.
Catholic visual art is rich in images of Christ's suffering, and Gibson draws extensively on that. His claim of using only the Gospels as his source is somewhat disingenous, given how closely his imagery adheres to art that goes back centuries but not to the Gospels: the nails through the palms, for instance, exist in paintings and sculptures but are not really feasible in life --the nails undoubtedly went through the wrists, where the bones would support the hanging body better.
We want our suffering to have meaning. Wherever people are deeply oppressed, missionaries find fertile ground. There's meaning, and the promise of a better existence in the next world.
The issue I have with Gibson's Passion is his lack of nuance, and the uses the passions it stirs up will likely be put to. From the sounds of it, two earlier films may offer much more to think about: The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus Christ Superstar. They took a lot of heat because they dared to go beyond simple piety and devotion, and they both took Jesus off the static imagery of the cross and into a fleshly life in relation to other humans, and then asked what THAT meant.
There's another strand though, and it's anybody's guess where it will lead. In the past twenty years devotion to the Virgin Mary has had an incredible resurgance. You know, the woman they built all those Notre Dame cathedrals in honor of? The one whose statues got tossed out of the churches in the Protestant Reformation, and who mostly shows up at Christmas hanging out in the manger scene? Pilgrimages to old sites in Europe have been growing, especially to the "Black Virgin" sites, and in the US there have apparently been uncounted "Mary sightings," images on windowpanes and whatnot. The smallish town of Santa Maria, CA has become important to a lot of people because the name seems to evoke some deep meaning for the future.
This return of feminine energy to our experience of the divine is something experienced by a lot of women in the feminist spirituality movement, and goes by other names. The Mary phenomenon is certainly part of that, but is important in a different way because she attracts both men and women, and is a strand of the mainstream. Her place was always as nurturer (portraits of Mary breast-feeding the infant Jesus), as obedient daughter/spouse ("Let it be done unto me"), and as bereft mother (the Pieta, Our Lady of Sorrows). I'm not sure how that image has evolved, but she's clearly important.
This just now occured to me (I'm going to have to think about this some more) but I think interest in the Virgin Mary in our time certainly looks like a counter-current to the rise of Dominionism/Christian Reconstructionism. Hmm.
Cher, I don't know if I've even come close to what you're talking about! I just got a look at the clock, and it'd clear to me that my brain wanted to go to sleep some time ago. I just hope it didn't do that while my fingers kept typing. Whatever, it was nice to not be raving about BushCo for awhile!
Hekate
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