Nossa Senhora!

Well I finally did it. I read the DaVinci Code. I actually wrote a blog on the DaVinci code about a month ago after my parents´church had a special class on "Decoding the DaVinci Code". I was mostly critiquing the Christian community´s overreaction to this whole phenomenon. But I pulled that blog off a few hours after I wrote it because I thought it was probably not a good idea to speak as an expert on something that I hadn´t even read. So I read it!

This might not make sense if you haven´t read the book or seen the movie, so forgive me if you aren´t in the know.

First of all, Dan Brown wrote a great story. Great as in... entertaining. Very suspenseful and such. Good book candy. But now I can better understand why everyone is in a tizzy over this (although I still don´t think it deserves the hoopla it´s getting). If I were Catholic, I´d be pretty POed about this book. While I´m all for freedom of speech and art and everything (in fact I fall quite heavily on the side of such things), I do believe that this was written with some malice against the Catholic church and Christian tradition in general, whether overt or covert. Anytime you write a "fictional work" about an actual institution or actual people (especially in the world of religion) that paints them in a pretty bad light, you´ve got to expect some anger. It would be like if I wrote a "fictional" book about my beloved alma mater, Oklahoma Christian, and said that it was a lying, murdering, manipulative, oppressive institution seeking to gain only power and glory for itself. I can call it fiction all day long, but people would be rightfully pissed off.

As for the conspiracy theories that the book proposes, I agree that Christian tradition and really the world in general has a rich history of misogyny, and that is an issue that needs to be dealt with. I don´t think it is beyond possibility that there were evil leaders who could have distorted the story of Christ to benefit themselves. I wrote about the book "Captivating" a couple of months ago, and one of the ideas that the book proposes is that the prevalence of oppression of women throughout the history of the world is evidence that there is a greater evil seeking to destroy femininity. I am a firm believer that the traditional Christian idea of God as an exclusively male entity is a destructive lie. At the creation of the world both Adam and Eve were created to embody the fullness of God. Adam alone was not sufficient. So... all that rambling to say that I do think there is some creedance to the idea that Christian history has been destructively oppressive to femininity.

But I also think the DaVinci code takes it way too far into the realm of goddess worship. It´s that darn pendulum I keep referencing. It swung from misogyny to goddess worship! Geez louise people, let´s find the happy medium. :)

I think it´s safe to say that I don´t know if Jesus was married to Mary Magdelene or if he had kids. Perhaps it´s so deeply ingrained in my psyche from years of teaching and assumptions, but I tend to think he probably wasn´t. One of the arguments the book makes is that Jesus would have been an anomoly to be a middle aged, Jewish, umarried man. Maybe I guess, but, Paul wasn´t married. He was kind of a woman hater himself, though. Haha, no hate mail please, that was a joke. :)

The bottom line is that above all, I have faith in God. I have faith in his grace towards me in my ignorance, and his concern for my soul.

Alright, I´ve talked enough about this. In my effort to get Dan Brown more money, I suggest you read it. And I plan on seeing the movie ASAP, too. But my final word on this is that I think Dan Brown and his publishers are marketing geniuses. Get the Christian community in an uproar and you´re guaranteed at least double the publicity and profits. In an effort to cash in on this phenomom, I think I will write a book on the life of Paul called "The He-Man-Woman-Haters Club". Ha! Any other good names for books you can think of?