Joyce Zonana – Page 5 – Feminism and Religion

To Know Her Is to Love Her by Joyce Zonana

“As my mother passed from this life, she was surrounded by a great matrix of love. As she died I began to understand that I too am surrounded by love and always have been. This knowledge is a great mystery.”— Carol P. Christ, A Serpentine Path: Mysteries of the Goddess (forthcoming, FAR Press, 2016)
Joyce Zonana head shot

It has taken me 66 years—my entire life—to learn to love my mother, and, even more importantly, to accept her love for me.

When I was younger, I could not distinguish that love from control, and I felt smothered by her constant attention, care, and what I took to be criticism. I felt overwhelmed, stifled. I resisted, fighting to assert my autonomy and freedom, my difference. Our relationship become one of painful, sometimes ugly conflict, extending well beyond my adolescence and into my adulthood. For too many years, it was almost impossible for me to be in the same room with her.

Today, I happily sit on the floor at her feet, holding her hand, basking in the glow of her love, offering what I can of my own. Continue reading “To Know Her Is to Love Her by Joyce Zonana”

Rosh Hashanah and the Goddess by Joyce Zonana

Joyce Zonana head shot When I was growing up in the 1950s in my Egyptian Jewish immigrant home, each of the High Holidays was imbued with sacredness, thanks largely to my mother’s commitment to a creating a harmonious and memorable gathering of family and friends. Around a long table, covered with an embroidered white cloth and set with sparkling silver and delicately fluted china, she served at each season the festive meal that made manifest for us the presence of the Divine.

My father, an Orthodox man who prayed each morning and went regularly to the local Sephardic synagogue in Brooklyn, privately followed the tenets of his faith. But it was my mother, unconsciously devout, who brought the public rituals of our religion to life. As a child, I longed to be at prayer with my father and was envious of the men and boys who studied and recited the sonorous ancient Hebrew; I did not want to be confined to polishing the silver and setting the table. But today, as an adult, I am grateful for the silent teachings bequeathed to me by my mother. Continue reading “Rosh Hashanah and the Goddess by Joyce Zonana”

The Flesh Made Word: Colm Toibin’s “The Testament of Mary” on stage and in print By Joyce Zonana

Before the play begins, the audience is invited on stage; we walk around, not quite knowing what to do, gazing at the props, uncertain. A few chairs, scattered jars of honey, jugs of water beside a free-standing waist-high faucet, a tall ladder, a long table, a stripped tree trunk with a wooden wheel at the top suspended from the rafters, a menacing roll of barbed wire, and a live turkey vulture occasionally spreading wide its iridescent blue-black wings: such is the set for Deborah Warner’s searing production of Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary, a one-woman show currently in previews at the Walter Kerr Theater in New York. In a large open-sided box, stage left, the actress Fiona Shaw, draped in blue from head to toe, arranges herself, then sits perfectly still, holding a lily and an apple. We know this woman. The Virgin Mary. The Icon. Incarnate.

Fiona Shaw rehearses for her role as the Virgin Mary in The Testament of Mary. Irish novelist Colm Toibin's one-woman play opens April 22 at Broadway's Walter Kerr Theater. — Shaw in rehearsal. Photo by Hugo Glendinning

But when we are all back in our seats, Mary casts off her robe to stand before us in a simple black shift, flowing easily over narrow brown pants. Her hair is cropped, her face haunted; wearing short leather boots, she fumbles as she searches for a hand-rolled cigarette to steady herself. “I remember everything. Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones.” No longer an icon, hardly a virgin, this Mary addresses us with the piercing directness of the passion she has suffered: to have seen her only son crucified despite her efforts to save him. Now, interrogated by two unnamed apostles (John and Luke?) who want to fix the story of her son’s life and death and resurrection, Mary insists on reporting only what she knows: “I was there. I fled before it was over but if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.”

Continue reading “The Flesh Made Word: Colm Toibin’s “The Testament of Mary” on stage and in print By Joyce Zonana”