Thursday, April 24, 2008
Choice
I was in Fieldwork last week, and there was a conversation concerning marriage. A man in the group said "The woman I choose..." My immediate thought was "why are you doing all the choosing? Doesn't the woman have a say in the matter?" It really offended me as a feminist...I had always thought of marriage as a mutual decision. As I am still thinking of the conversation a week later, my thoughts are now drifting to the annunciation...Mary was the "chosen" woman, but yet she didn't have a choice at all. Not being a religious person, I had never projected my feminist ideals into the story; I suppose Christianity wasn't important enough to me to really think about how it did or didn't fit into my life. I'm needing to think on this some more...try to reconcile it in my head...if it is reconcilable. How does Mary not having a right to choose affect the rest of humanity? The story was created around a patriarchal Greco-Roman society. We don't live in that world anymore...How is this story of Mary applicable today? Much of the Bible has been reinterpreted to fit the current beliefs of a society. Why has this particular story stayed the same?
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But as I wrote to Celeste, Mary did have the right to choose! I was told that years ago by a priest.
ReplyDeleteChristian theology claims that God respects human free will, so if Mary said "no" Gabriel would have had no choice but to say "Okay."
The question that occurred to me when I wrote this was whether there was another candidate waiting in the wings who never knew that she was second on the wait list because Mary accepted the job offer.
i think for women there is "choice" and there is "Choice". i think suzanne went to an interesting place thinking about choice. which was inspired by our discussions about just the saying of "no". in the actual piece i am working on, we never get to the issue of whether she has a choice or not - because in this piece she goes ahead and does say "no", which is what sends the piece (through Gabriel) into action.
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