A Man in the Sky, Part 2
More from Marjorie Corbman …
Q. How would you share your faith with someone involved in goddess worship?
A. If someone who practiced goddess worship came up
to me and said, let’s say, “I don’t understand how you can believe what you
believe—isn’t what I believe better?”—I would advise them simply to seriously
look at Christian history and spirituality—not as an enemy but as a tradition
that contains within itself much of what they themselves hunger for: the vision
of a loving, caring God who sets the earth on fire with love (cf. Luke 12:49)
and, as Jesus said, longs to gather us together like a mother hen gathers a
chick beneath her wings (Matthew 23:37, Luke 13:34).
I would also advise them
to see what it has to offer to them (as, even if they do not accept the
fundamental beliefs of Christianity, they still can appreciate it as more than
a source of bitterness), particularly in the figure of Jesus as the very human,
very personal, very present—and not at all distant or authoritarian—ultimate
communication of God’s love, love even to torture and death. I would ask them
to see Jesus’s love for nature (his constant use of plants, flowers, seeds,
trees, and so on is his parables) and understand that indifference towards the
earth is not rooted primarily in Christian history but instead in the
industrial revolution and its effects.
I would additionally invite them to see
the gospels’ refreshing portrayal of women as perhaps the most devoted of
Jesus’s followers: in fact, the only who did not desert him when he was
crucified. Far from perpetuating “the patriarchy”, Jesus, as Elisabeth
Behr-Siegel pointed out, “never speaks to [women] as a separate group,
characterized neither by vice nor by specific virtues.” He simply treated
everyone, male or female, as a human being and as a child of the living God.
I
would advise them to read the gospels with an open mind, and to read some of
the works of the great lovers of God from our tradition: say, Thomas Merton,
Julian of Norwich, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Madeleine
L’Engle, Anne Lamott, Simone Weil, Dorothy Day, Mother Maria Skobtsova, and so
on.
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