Tag: Marcia Mount Shoop

Painting Guadalupe and Mary by Angela Yarber

As we feminists struggle to elevate Mary and Guadalupe, we sometimes forget that speaking of birth and gestation is not always empowering or even essential to womanhood. 

It is early morning on the Hill of Tepeyak on December 9, 1531 when a wondering peasant named Juan Diego first caught a glimpse of her presence.  Diego sees a vision of a teenage girl surrounded by light; the young girl asks that a church be built on the hill in her honor.  After hearing her speak and seeing the light emanating from her presence, Diego recognizes her as the Virgin Mary.  He rushes to the Spanish archbishop who insists on a sign as proof of Diego’s vision.  The young girl instructs Diego to gather flowers from the top of the hill, even though it is past their growing season.  Upon climbing to the top of the Hill of Tepeyak, Diego discovers Castilian roses—a beautiful flower otherwise unheard of in Mexico—which the glowing young woman arranges in his cloak.  When Diego returns to the archbishop, he opens his cloak to reveal the miraculous flowers and they fall to floor; in their place was an image imprinted on the fabric of his cloak.  It was the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Guadalupe is one of Mexico’s most popular religious and cultural images and her icon, now on display at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, is one of the most visited Marian shrines in the entire world.  On December 12, countless Christians—particularly Catholics—celebrate her feast day.  Her feast day occurs within the four week celebration of Advent, which is the period of waiting, expectancy, and gestation before the birth of Jesus at Christmas. Continue reading “Painting Guadalupe and Mary by Angela Yarber”

The David Syndrome? By Marcia Mount Shoop

Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like we’re all in Junior High or High School again with the Petraeus scandal?  There is drama at every turn with boundaries crossed and accusations slung across every lunch table there is.

When I was a teenager we didn’t have emails, Facebook , and Twitter (thanks be to God).  We passed notes.  I remember getting a really mean one scrawled in deliberately messy handwriting to maintain anonymity about how annoying I was to the “populace” (yes I remember that word was in there) because I didn’t wear make up and I thought I was “so smart.”

Just like today’s cyber detectives who figured out Paula Broadwell’s identity from the fingerprints we all leave behind in the online lives we lead, I traced this note back to its source.  I did it the old fashioned way—I asked around.  Unfortunately I found out it was from a “friend” and teammate of mine.  When I went to her house and confronted her she admitted it.  Turns out she was envious about a boy.  Little did she know at the time that the boy she wished for was abusive and I was living in my own secret hell.  I remember thinking to myself “you can have him.”   The stakes seemed so high back then—friendships, acceptance, one’s whole sense of self were hopelessly tangled up in tenuous, even dangerous, relationships. Continue reading “The David Syndrome? By Marcia Mount Shoop”

Living Liminality: Of Thresholds and Dwelling Places by Marcia W. Mount Shoop

Sometimes I think it happened gradually.  Other times it feels like sudden change.  Either way I find myself in an in-between space that is my life.

With apologies to Victor Turner and his cultural anthropological appropriation of liminality as a threshold space, I have come to view my liminal living as a more permanent dwelling place these days.  Turner’s category of liminality locates subjects in the betwixt and between as they move from one manifestation of identity in community to a new kind of integration or role in community.   I am starting to wonder, however, if the thresholds are actually dwelling places for some of us in this world.

I don’t know if that means I am actually more marginal than I am liminal.  The margins are margins because they remain on the outskirts and they help define the boundaries.  Margins are permanent.  Am I marginalized if I live at the edges of the communities and identities I use to occupy, perhaps never to return to the bosom of the center? I hesitate to make such a claim mostly because I still occupy privileged spaces not the least of which are those constructed from how whiteness grants access and authority in this world. Continue reading “Living Liminality: Of Thresholds and Dwelling Places by Marcia W. Mount Shoop”