writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

After years of grief, Mary becomes Sophia, “wisdom,” so named for the aspect of the godhead
that has been subsumed by the mythological tradition of the Holy Ghost: Hagia Sophia. A senior
citizen, Mary determines to go to Ephesus (with MM and Jesus’ daughter, Priscilla) and give Paul a
good finger wagging. Historically, Mary and the goddesses Artemis/Diana merge at Ephesus “where
one pagan goddess was supplanted by the Christian mother,” 47 and where her fictional adventure is
not over:
I roll up the scroll. Will I open another? Take up the stylus again in the city of Ephesus
in the shadow of the Temple of Artemis? I wonder about that goddess. So reviled by the
Jews and the Movement. What are they all so afraid of? Her many breasts? I’m told she
has hundreds, but men have always loved breasts. So why should they fear a multitude?
Perhaps they are afraid they will drown in her milk, in her mother power. What do I
know? I look forward to looking on her face, even if she is a graven image. I like the idea
of a she‐god. Yahweh, you should take a wife. Maybe you would soften towards us, your
children. Israel could use a mother, these days. 48
Ultimately, Mary’s choice to go to Ephesus is to once again lead by example, “creating conditions
of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in
their lives to be actualized.” 49
Conclusion ‐ Revelations:
Why did I write The Book of Mary?
In the novel, historical realities of 1 st ‐century Jewish women are in tension—deliberately so—with
21 st ‐century notions of feminism, and are coloured by revisionist depictions of Mary and the
feminine god. My narrative explores the paradox of the possibility and the impossibility of knowing
the truth about Mary of Nazareth. This historical albeit fictional (auto)biography of a subject situated
as human rather than theotokos, is an invitation, in Cheryl Glenn’s words, “to think of truth outside
the confines of a mythical objectivity, or, at the very least, to decouple the link between ‘objectivity’
and ‘truth,’” to recast a “deeply contextualized” narrative in an attempt “to bring a fuller, richer—
different—picture into focus.” 50 My Mary is not a frozen portrait of an iconic woman who is
simultaneously irreproachable and vapidly passive. In the pages of my novel she lives in defiance of
an historical life that was all but erased and speaks with a voice that was all but silenced. It is a life
lived actively in the political and personal, a life of free will. Her story—uncensored—underpins the
exploitative and dominating powers of both her time and our own.
That said, however, it is crucial to emphasize that The Book of Mary is a product of its time and
place, at once an historical and anachronistic 21 st ‐century construction by a Canadian feminist
author, evoking questions of my own knowledge, ethics and power. My words are contingent,
“produced from a particular viewpoint, that of the busily inscribing author. Authors are ‘dead’ only
in the sense that subjects are—we are none of us unique great minds, all of us are social beings
whose ideas derive, acknowledged or not, from particular socio‐political milieu.” 51
In attempting to make meaning of Mary’s life for the modern reader, I sought to infuse this
revisionist tale with the spirit of hope and compassion and the sacredness of life, to encourage the
reader to identify with other human beings, and not simply those who share our ideologies and
cultural perspectives or our positions of privilege. The Book of Mary is a challenge to the reader (and
to the author) to look up from our lives and our insular solipsism. There is a world in need of a
mother, speaking words of wisdom. A myth writ anew.
While we will likely never know the true history of Mary of Nazareth, as an artist I believe that
“poetic truth and literal truth are interdependent,” 52 equally valid, equally illuminating. As an author
and a feminist, I am certain of the value in writing a truthful fiction, to borrow Mary’s words, “to
keep alive the spirit of woman and of being a woman in a man’s world.” 53
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