The Virgin Mary's Purity...Hurts a Rape Victim and Makes Her Feel Bad

If you want to see how deep and how far the wolves in sheep's clothing have infected main stream Christianity....I have an article here that will literally make you say, Please!  Come Lord Jesus!"

Of course its in the Washington Post....so it MUST be valid!  And liberals everywhere will embrace it!

Our culture of purity celebrates the Virgin Mary. As a rape victim, that hurts me.

This opinion piece is by the Rev. Ruth Everhart, a pastor and the author of two spiritual memoirs.

Church culture tends to be fixated on sexual purity year-round, but during Advent, I’m tempted to blame it on the Virgin Mary. After all, she set an impossibly high bar. Now the rest of us are stuck trying to be both a virgin and a mother at the same time. It does not seem to matter that this is biologically impossible. Can you at least try?

I’ll speak for myself. I was raised in the church and taught to be a good girl, by which I mean obedient, quiet and sexually pure. That worked reasonably well until I was 20. During my senior year of college, my housemates and I were the victims of a home invasion. The intruders held us for hours and took turns raping us at gunpoint. The next year of our lives revolved around the criminal-justice system.

Of course, I was traumatized. But what was harder to describe — and more long-lasting — was how the crime became bound up in a sense of sexual shame. I wondered constantly: Did I somehow deserve to be raped? Had the rape ruined me irreparably? Both questions seemed inevitable. After all, what is the opposite of being sexually pure? Sustaining irremediable damage. Being ruined.

I’m not blaming my sense of ruin on the Virgin Mary, not entirely. Protestants do not claim Mary in the way Catholics do, but every Advent I feel a sense of kinship. I know what it’s like to be a good girl whose life got upended by what someone did to her body. Of course, her story plot was good and mine was bad. Plus she was, well, a saint. And I’m not.

Still, I study her this time of the year — always dressed in blue with downcast eyes — and want to ask: “How was it really? And how do you feel about what the patriarchy has done with you?”

I’m convinced of this: Mary is not responsible for what we’ve done to her story. Church culture has overfocused on virginity and made it into an idol of sexual purity. When it comes to female experience, the church seems compelled to shrink and distort and manipulate.

Maybe that’s why, more than a decade after I was raped, I became a pastor. I had to face down the demons. To do that, I had to live inside church culture. I had to come to terms with Mary’s story, and so many others. What is the gospel call for women? I believe it’s more than being a good girl.

For starters, I believe it’s impossible to be a good girl — meaning unblemished and pure — and also inhabit a body. It’s certainly true if you’ve been sexually assaulted, and may also be true if you are fortunate to not have been.

I could say more about living in a female body, but it might be helpful if you just checked in with your own body right now. Is your body feeling quiet and clean and pure at the moment? Or is it hungry or noisy or smelly? Does it have needs?

That’s what I suspected. Bodies are like that. Even bodies that don’t bleed or ovulate or lactate. Bodies have needs.

If you can bear it....read the rest here;  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/12/16/our-culture-of-purity-celebrates-the-virgin-mary-as-a-rape-victim-that-hurts-me/?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.dc8d82bec7c6

The fact that this woman is a Presbyterian Minister should speak volumes about where this woman is leading her flock.

Remember, here in Minneapolis if you go into the front door of the Presbyterian church in Downtown...you will see right in the foyer a table with 3 books on it and a sign above that says "The Sacred Texts".  If you look at the biggest book right in the middle you will discover the Koran....Islam's holiest book which is the exact polar opposite of the Bible.

Nuff said?