The Magdalene Moment: A Vision for a New Christianity , by Joanna Manning
In 1975, feminist theologian Sheila Collins noted that it was only five years earlier that women “began to take their own experience seriously as the basis for doing theology.” By her reckoning, half the human species has had roughly thirty–six years to play catch–up with the other half in this business of theological reflection—or at least the sort of reflection that emerges without compunction to adhere to male forms. In the realm (an unabashedly ”male” word) of such reflection, thirty–six years is the blink of an eye, and yet it has produced a rich chorus of voices. What began as faint chants from the edge of belief have swiftly been swept to the center of the congregation and sound with a sure voice. One such voice belongs to Joanna Manning, perhaps best known for her first book, Is The Pope Catholic?
One of the most significant contributions of feminist theology is the conversation that has emerged about how we do our theology in the first instance. At the risk of a dangerous generalization, most feminists tend to view theology, not as a body of knowledge to be explained (in the manner of a pope offering doctrinal statements), but as a process that may or may not have a resolution (in the manner of friends telling stories by the fireside). This makes the personal narrative central to doing theology. Instead of making extrapolations to a grand scheme, we get down to the particular, to the heart of the story, to the heart of the story–teller. The Magdalene Moment begins in precisely this manner, with a story of dancing with Daniel, a panhandler on the streets of Toronto, and it is story which gives the book its continued impetus. Joanna Manning shares her personal story and shows clearly how it is a small part of a much larger story that draws in the modern struggles of women everywhere, the two thousand year arc of church history, the longer arc of all believing, and enfolding all of these, the billion–year story of life’s emergence on our planet.
Joanna’s adult spiritual development began with the decision to enter a convent. She describes the oppressive environment, including the “Chapter of Faults”, a weekly opportunity for communal confession and public humiliation. But with the heady times of Vatican II, university life, and the affection she felt for a Jesuit named Roger, she left her order and was married. Marriage, too, had its challenges, and failed after many years. Joanna expresses little personal bitterness, but notes that broader structural forces placed an impossible burden upon a couple intent upon maintaining two careers while raising a “traditional” family. Through all this journey was a personal sexual awakening which seemed to pit experience against the received wisdom of the church. It is from this story of the discovery of herself as a sexual being that this book takes its power.
Joanna Manning’s primary argument is that our theology must heed the woman’s experience, particularly the woman’s experience as sexual being, not merely because our theological reflections might be graced by new insights, but because our survival as a species may well depend upon the woman’s perspective. Sexual expression as the fulfillment of a loving relationship demands of us an intimacy, an empathy, an honouring of the other which ripples beyond our simple dyadic relationships and affects the way we encounter all creation. Traveling this path, Joanna finds herself coming face to face with environmental destruction, unbridled consumption, rampant disease whose pathology is more political than biological, antiquated economic structures which drive a growing wedge between rich and poor, and an androcentric religious hierarchy which is complicit in all the west’s greatest evils. How can we draw our behaviours into check before we destroy ourselves?
In answer to this challenge, Joanna proposes the “Magdalene Moment,” which begins by recovering Mary of Magdala. She suggests that we must deconstruct the church’s traditional feminine pair—virgin and whore—and set in its place a more honest account of the feminine which neither shies from nor denigrates female sexuality. A more honest account of the feminine can be grounded in a more honest account of the Marys, one that engages the history of Israel at that time, that weighs “competing” sources such as the gnostic writings, and that accepts the likelihood that Jesus the man was Jesus the sexual man who, as rabbi, would likely have taken a wife, possibly Mary of Magdala. With the full participation of women in the life of the early church, there is no reason to have excluded them through subsequent centuries down to the present. In fact, the marginalization of women in the early church was probably inevitable. The church emerged within the paternalistic culture of the Roman empire, and so the organizational forms it knew were those which gave little voice to women. But while history may explain how we came to this point, it by no means determines what is to come. Magdalene Moments are those often tiny instants which grace our lives with signs of a Magdalene femininity working upon the as–yet unformed future. It is in these moments that we find hope.
I find one fault with this book: on occasion, Joanna Manning strays from her greatest gift – her ability to produce startling images which remain present to us long after the book is finished. One such image comes from the account of a “Mary with brass knuckles.” You can read an earlier version of this story in the Lilith Gallery. These images belong to the story–telling which so powerfully conveys the woman’s perspective. However impassioned Ms. Manning becomes in detailing the evils which have arisen from the traditional hierarchical forms of church and in calling people to rework the way their believing plays itself out in their living, nevertheless her language sometimes assumes a rational tone that sounds altogether “manly,” running at times between polemics and persuasion. She might do better to teach by the example of her feminist approach than to trouble herself with laying down the facts. Writing as a man, I believe persuasion is a waste of time. Those men who can’t already see for themselves the harm that their world–view inflicts are a lost cause. And those who can are already alive to the value of narrative. Let us remember that one of the best story–tellers, and a first–rate feminist as well, was the man who started all this trouble two thousand years ago.