Dr Orville Taylor will be celebrating the real Marys.
IT MIGHT sound like an oxymoron, but Christmas is about true womanhood. Yet, it has turned into a big falsehood, characterised by reindeer, snow, mistletoe, sleigh, a fat man sliding down chimneys, and all other things that are alien to the average Jamaican.
This is just a ridiculous season, and it has nothing to do with reality. Well, jingle bells is relevant to the present administration, and if you stretch it, the prosperous in New Year, too. However, on a very serious note, there is so much disconnect between the birth of Jesus, who His mother was, what He stood for, and the modalities of the celebration, that I am literally afraid of espousing anything based on what He stood for.
It is bad enough that it is really an extension of an older pagan tradition celebrating the winter solstice and has nothing to do with Him being born in December, in a stable, with three wise men.
Some Christmas traditions vaguely point to Jesus’s teachings. These include giving, which, contrary to the instructions of many pastors, means the day-to-day acts of kindness and not the slavish handing over of tithes, which actually is not required under His instruction. If the only time that you are going to be kind and generous is Christmas Day, you are simply a one-day wonder and a hypochristian.
One doesn’t have to be Christian, nonetheless, to accept that Christmas is a time for family and the centrality of the mother to all of this. And for all the holier-than-thou who cringe over those 80 per cent of us born out of wedlock and thus the products of ‘fornication’, let us recognise that Jesus Himself was a ‘bastard’ and seen by many as a child of sin, just like the majority of Jamaicans. In fact, Mark 6:3 has the villagers describing Him as the Son of Mary, which, according to some scholars, is a clear indication that he was known to have been ‘illegitimate’.
NO ABANDONMENT
What is important, notwithstanding this, is that there is no notion of Joseph’s abandoning her or the child despite him likely being horrified by the implausible tale that the Holy Spirit impregnated her. Most men, even the most religious now who are often slain in the spirit and who get direct revelations from God like pop-ups on their phone, would never hug up a modern-day Jesus, even if it had been prophesied and the entire church got the revelation beforehand.
Faith requires that we accept that Mary was a virgin (same word for young woman). However, the anti-woman early church and some modern Christian sects perpetuate the nonsense that she remained chaste throughout the rest of her life despite being married to Joseph. This manual worker, who lived by his hands, is purported to have never touched her flesh. Of course, this is not biblical and a selfless Joseph was never self-loving.
Mary was like many Jamaican women: having a child for the first ‘baby father’ but then formed a lasting union with another ‘minister of minding’. Add to the fact that Jamaica has one of the highest incidence of men failing DNA paternity tests, and she is really representative of what a real woman is.
God’s choice of sending Jesus to be born and raised in the most humble of conditions, and being anchored into a family, says something about the primacy of a biological unit, with some social underpinnings, but importantly, the core entity that produces and raises the next generation. Chat and posture all you want, but nothing on this earth trumps biology. Unless we protect the basic dynamic about how we continue as a species, all our colourful institutions will come to naught if we become genetic dead ends.
Here I am saying two things. First, we must treat as a priority our ‘breeding stock’ inasmuch as all persons of colour, creed, race, sexual orientation or identity, matter equally. This is no fundamental Christian diatribe. Rather, like the United Nations, I am trying to not make us kill off the species, and to those of us who actually are part of the stud farm, we must not make it seem abnormal for people to be heterosexuals.
For the selectively blind who look for sexual orientation and gender identity among the fundamental human rights, it might surprise you, but it is not there. No, it is absolutely wrong to discriminate against someone who likes to have intra-gender sex or who feels that God erred and put them into the body of the wrong sex. However, until we can find viable alternatives for male-female procreation, we must protect real women and mothers.
Article 25 (2) of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises that “motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.” Moreover, hardly ever pushed by human-rights advocates, Article 16 (3) reads, “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.”
So when the organisers of the Miss Universe pageant require that “a contestant should demonstrate authenticity, credibility, and ... embody the modern, global aspiration for the potential within all women”, how does a person born as male become eligible to enter?
And, is there no global aspiration among the average woman to marry and have children? Nevertheless, “contestants may not be married or pregnant. They must not have ever been married, not had a marriage annulled nor given birth to, or parented a child”.
It is bad enough that the typical winners are meagre, with rear ends looking like flat patties rather than a piece of jerk thigh, and generally not too melanised. In a world where some of the very supporters of this farcical contest militate against Caster Semenya competing against women, I celebrate and honour all the nonvirgin Marys this Christmas.
Dr Orville Taylor is head of the Department of Sociology at the UWI, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline @hotmail.com.
We must treat as a priority our ‘breeding stock’ inasmuch as all persons of colour, creed, race, sexual orientation, or identity matter equally.