Culture Shock
People say they remember things a lot, and while it’s not a lie – it’s not the truth either. I can’t remember the first time I saw pictures of a black Santa Claus or a black Jesus … but I can remember the shock of seeing a very clear depiction of something other than what I had always internalized as something like myself – like myself to a degree that it likely was (and is) false.
Today, I think I found myself on the opposite side of that coin. Some protestant friends of mine were asking me about the perpetual virginity of Mary – which means I implicitly have to give an account that dismisses the full-blood relation of “the brethren”. To be honest, I didn’t do very well, and I am disappointed in myself.
But what struck me was the … pure alien thought that married people would remain celibate. It’s not Mary’s perpetual virginity that gets them, really. It’s the Mary and Joseph abstaining part that really gets them. And they think they have a clincher of an argument that trumps, well, pretty much the entirety of Christian history minus Protestantism that says otherwise, in prooftexts of brethren and James and Thomas/Jude. Even with solid arguments rooted in language, translation, etc that satisfactorily argue the half-blood relation or cousin relation, in the end, it’s the abstinence between man and wife that really confounds them.
I’m not one to make the argument that it’s usual. But then, I’ve also never been one to argue that much about the Holy Family was usual. And, really, it’s their peculiarity that really sets them apart and makes them all the more beautiful.