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Notes
from the PMZ (The
Post-Modernism-free Zone)
Valerie
Kane
. . . Last fall,
when The National Catholic Reporter
announced its contest in search of a new image
of Jesus for the third Christian millennium, yours
truly predicted that the winning portrait would be,
politically correctly, of a black woman. Now that
the winner has been announced, I humbly admit to
having been wrong. The "New Jesus" is an adolescent
black male whom the artist only modeled on a
woman. Looking something like Michael Jackson
before his many rhinoplasties, this new Christ
appears barely able to rescue a kitten from a tree
much less redeem the world from sin. According to
The Daily Record, a London newspaper, the
creator of "Jesus of the People", a Ms. Janet
McKenzie of Island Pond, Vermont, said that her
goal "was to be as inclusive as possible." Might I
remind Ms. McKenzie that Christ Himself beat her to
a now-fashionable multiculturalism when he
commanded the apostles to "go ye forth and teach
all nations"? Sister Wendy Beckett, the British art
expert turned BBC and PBS superstar, selected the
winner from a juried shortlist, calling it a
"haunting image of a peasant Jesus . . .looking out
on us with ineffable dignity, with sadness but with
confidence." Since Jesus Christ was not a
peasant but a skilled laborer, a craftsman, a
CARPENTER!, and was also so learned of Scripture
that he held temple-goers in His thrall, we can
only assume that Sister Wendy doesn't know history
as well as she does art. On the other hand, in
light of her mistaking a certain pique in the New
Jesus' expression -- my guess is for being depicted
against a pink background for "confident sadness",
can we hereafter believe anything she may say about
the Pietà? Ms. Pattie Wigand
Sporrong, a jury member, claims that "Jesus would
have liked this contest. It didn't have a lot of
boundaries and
barriers."
It also didn't have a lot of truth, Ms. Wigand
Sporrong, such as the fact that Jesus Christ was
not some allegorical Everyman but a Jew who lived
in the time of the Roman occupation of the Holy
Land. By removing Christ from His historical
context, you have moved Him one step closer to
myth. (There, where one need not accept the
fact of Him, one need not grapple with
whether or not He was who He said He was, the
Messiah; ultimately, one, sighing relief, need not
wrestle with faith.) However, I'm grateful to you
for giving example of one of the great afflictions
of contemporary Christianity -- the
notion that is entirely malleable. You advocate
dispensing with "boundaries", which will
render
the
faith indefinable by dogma and revealed truth. In
their place, you enshrine one's personal freedom to
believe or do as one chooses, worship one's Higher
Being -- or
the moon, for that matter -- and
retain the right to call oneself a
Christian.
Finally, I would
ask Ms. McKenzie, Sister Wendy, and Ms. Wigand
Sporrong to consider whether the Reverend Martin
Luther King, Jr. ought to be depicted as say, an
Asian to oppressed peoples in China? Surely, the
African-American community would be outraged, and
justifiably so. Indeed, now might be a good time
for these women to recall the Reverend King's
eloquent plea that a man be judged "not by the
color of his skin but by the content of his
character." For lo these two millennia, Jesus
Christ has managed to change lives around the the
world without your help, ladies. Moreover, He's
done it as a white male. Deal with it.
Speaking
of contests and feminized depictions of the Savior
of the World, Jonathan Petre reported in the
Electronic Telegraph last year that
the fifteenth annual international "Tough Guy"
competition was slated to be held in the UK on
January 30, 2000. Some seven thousand men and women
had signed up to carry crosses weighing up to fifty
pounds over a two-thousand yard course. Billing the
event as the "Year of the Jesus Warriors", the
organizers proclaimed that "Jesus Christ was not
meek and mild. He is the toughest Tough Guy of all
time." (Take that, Sister Wendy.) But Monsignor
Kieran Conry, identified only as "a spokesman for
the Roman Catholic Church", criticized the
competition for "exploiting and trivialising the
Christian story. They are associating Christ with
ideas of masculinity and aggression, when He was
far from the ultimate 'tough guy'. He never
resisted arrest or tried to defend Himself during
the trial." Oh, I don't know about that, Monsignor
Conry. I happen to think that that was an
extraordinary display of grit, especially when He
knew the torture that awaited Him. And considering
the manly way he toughed it out, Monsignor, given a
choice of braving a dark alley with you or the
Lord, I would choose Him every time.
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