Mary, Mother of God and my joyful faith in person queer

Testimony of emma Cirslik* Published on the sojourners Website (United States) on June 16, 2023, freely translated by Marcella

Although the Roman Catholic Church may not agree with me, my Catholic faith does not revolve around a man, but rather a woman.

Her hair is covered with an opaque veil and wears a long white capacity wrapped in a blue mantle. He has his hands stretched and from the tip of his fingers, rays of light start who hires along his hips. Her name is Mary, Mother of God, and the foundations of my Catholic faith and my joy queer are in her.

It was only around my twenty years that i started seeing her as the prophetess queer who had challenged the gender beliefs of her time.

As a child, when I lived in a vast suburbs of Chicago inhabited mostly by Polish and Italian people, I always felt it close. I recited the rosary every night, passing and going over the fingers on the grains of my grandmother's crown to feel painful.

Maria was behind the scenes of every church I visited, smiling kindly, even when I stumbled in the nave, irritated and with the book of the psalms in my hands. It was a consolation, a maternal guardian angel, which followed me until the years of my middle school.

At that time I participated in a spiritual retreat organized by a church of the diocese for the Catholic girls of the middle school.

The event had been given the title "True beauty". It was the beginning of 2000, years in which the cultural movement of purity reached the peak, which equated abstinence and sexual purity to salvation.

After hours in the church, we put in line along the central nave, muttering and pricking each other. Each of us walked alone and brought a white rose to the altar, which symbolized our promise of purity.

Maria was on the altar to represent the model of woman to whom we had to inspire us.

Even if not intentionally, the ritual left me from Mary. While as a child I felt her walk with me along that nave every Sunday, encouraging me to cross my arms and close my eyes in prayer, that retreat and my middle school itself made me feel alone.

During that retreat they taught me that Mary was the ideal Virgin, heterosexual mother and wife, embodiment of sexual purity, thus transforming her into a symbol of pure hyperfemmity and making me feel extraneous to an image that I saw as the only representation of the female divinity.

In the following six years, I committed myself to transforming myself into the model of a woman I believed she was, but in the end I collapsed.

To college, while I was working as a researcher for the lGBTQ+ Muncies oral history program , during an interview with the only supporter of Indian's Queer wedding, I heard about Purity Culture (culture of purity).

I remember that I was doing at the same time research on velo traditions among young Catholic women: a practice strictly connected to sexual and gender purity.

When I wrote the conclusions of my research, someone encouraged me to analyze my experience of faith and in what way it involved my genre and my sexuality.

As a result, I paid attention to Mary again. She was still in the corner of every church I visited, but for years I avoided her gaze, in fear that judged the person I had become for not having transformed myself into one of her version.

It was only when I started the Queer and Catholic: A program of oral history at the Pacific School of Religion, where I learned the importance that Maria to Catholics Queer gave.

It was their mother, as was the Mother of God; Precisely for the person that Mary was, he loved and accepted them for those who too were. For many LGBTQ theologians and lay people, this perspective of Mary is what connects them to her and legitimizes their belonging to Catholicism.

The Bisexual and activist pastora Elle Dowd he claims that Mary is prophetessed for the fact that the history of the Annunciation coincides with that of Zaccaria (Luke 1, 8-23, 26-38). Although both have been visited by the Archangel, only Mary believes in her words and is by virtue of this trust that is transformed into the temple that has given the world the Messiah Jesus Christ.

Although, for the traditions of her time, Mary would have been forbidden to enter the innermost and more sacred part of the temple of Jerusalem because of its kind, her womb has become a higher temple, for bringing Christ.

Luca also gives a critical version of the Adjunction episode, noting Mary's perplexity on the conception of a son without knowing man. The archangel Gabriele replies: "The Holy Spirit will descend on you and the power of the Most High will cover you with his shadow (1, 34-35).

The pastora queer Rev. Angela Yarber the idea that Mary, Joseph and Jesus represent the heterosexual family prototype. Referring to the theology of feminist liberation, he claims that the Holy Spirit is female and the story of the Annunciation is decidedly queer, being women the two parents of Jesus. Yarber says: "God is the one ... Mary and the one who is (God), and have given the world Jesus. Jesus has two mothers!".

Recalling the theme dealt with by Sojourner Truth at the Women's Convention of Ohio of 1851, according to whom Christ came to the world by the work of God and a woman, Yarber says: "The man has nothing to do with him!".

Yarber writes: "I believe in the potential of a Maria Queer to encourage, strengthen, revive and pride the queer community to be what it is, to make honor and celebrate the beauty of the families that we can create despite the many threats of the world".

For Yarber, it is ultimately of trusting the theological interpretations queer and their potential to create an affirmative and welcoming Church. Mary can therefore be considered the liberator queer with traditional genre and sex roles.

The version of Mary that was given to me in the years of my middle school does not exist. It was the creation of cultures and institutions that aimed to support the traditional role of the genre, the sacredness of patriarchate and sexual purity.

The theology of liberation queer gave me proof that Mary shares the orientation and will of my Christian faith.

*Emma Cieslik is a religion scholar and a disabled queer person, museum operator in Washington (United States).

Original text: Mary, Mother of God, Help Me Find Queer Joy