A Christian Pastor says celebration of “The Virgin Mary” hurts her emotions as a rape victim

A Christian pastor who suffered rape as a teenager has laid complaints that the annual Christmas time celebration of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, hurts her emotions. Her op-ed was published by The Washington Post last weekend.

Mary, also known by other names and titles, was a woman born in the 1st Century.

History confirms she was a Galilean Jewish woman of Nazareth better known as the “mother of Jesus, the savior of mankind”.

The books of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament describe Mary as a virgin who conceived by an act of God. She was engaged and awaiting the conclusion of her marriage rites when the Holy Spirit paid her a visit.

All said, Rev. Ruth Everhart, an award-winning author, wrote in her published op-ed:  “Our culture of purity celebrates the Virgin Mary. As a rape victim, that hurts me.”

The woman who also published a book titled “Ruined“, a true story of her rape at gunpoint, complained: “Church culture tends to be fixated on sexual purity year-round, but during Advent, I’m tempted to blame it on the Virgin Mary. After all, she set an impossibly high bar. Now the rest of us are stuck trying to be both a virgin and a mother at the same time. It does not seem to matter that this is biologically impossible.

“I’ll speak for myself. I was raised in the church and taught to be a good girl, by which I mean obedient, quiet and sexually pure. That worked reasonably well until I was 20.

“During my senior year of college, my housemates and I were the victims of a home invasion. The intruders held us for hours and took turns raping us at gunpoint. The next year of our lives revolved around the criminal-justice system,” she mourned.

“Of course, I was traumatized. But what was harder to describe — and more long-lasting — was how the crime became bound up in a sense of sexual shame.

“I wondered constantly: Did I somehow deserve to be raped? Had the rape ruined me irreparably? Both questions seemed inevitable. After all, what is the opposite of being sexually pure? Sustaining irremediable damage. Being ruined.

“I’m not blaming my sense of ruin on the Virgin Mary, not entirely. Protestants do not claim Mary in the way Catholics do, but every Advent I feel a sense of kinship.

“I know what it’s like to be a good girl whose life got upended by what someone did to her body. Of course, her story plot was good and mine was bad. Plus she was, well, a saint. And I’m not.”

In Islam, Mary is known as Maryam, the mother of Isa.

Sergei Bulgakov, a Russian philosopher has this to say about the Virgin Mary:

Mary is not merely the instrument, but the direct positive condition of the Incarnation, its human aspect. Christ could not have been incarnate by some mechanical process, violating human nature. It was necessary for that nature itself to say for itself, by the mouth of the most pure human being: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to Thy word.”