© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 99
The Da Vinci Code hits the big screens this week. No doubt it will bring yet more minds to the somewhat lurid but fun controversy of Christ’s wedding: after all, there are people who make a point of not reading, even if it is just a potboiler.
The idea of Christ being married is not a new one. Biblical scholars are fairly silent on the fact that he performed all the ceremonial functions of the groom at the wedding at Cana. And their silence resembles nothing so much as that of a child who hopes that mummy and daddy don’t notice an interesting stain or broken window.
But the idea extends even further back than that. In case you aren’t a big reader, it is also the central motif of the Arthurian grail legend. If you haven’t read the Da Vinci Code, or Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s ‘Holy Blood and the Holy Grail’ on which the Da Vinci Code seems to be based, pick one up. They are equally entertaining in spite of the flaws. Or just go and see the movie.
It is a good time for faith. In the absence of clear and credible facts, faith is all that can remain. Yet the entire matter seems to stem out of too much faith. It is not the divinity of Christ that is ever questioned, even though some trains of thought point to a marriage and a possible bloodline. The faith that is in question is faith in the church; in this case particularly the Roman Catholics as the progenitors of most branches of the church, and to a degree the other churches.
To support my first point, that it wouldn’t shake any belief in the divinity of Christ, consider the very unlikely hypothetical situation that Christ was incontrovertibly proven to have married and had children. I doubt there would be many people who would abandon their beliefs on this basis. No doubt a number of celibate monks would ask certain difficult questions of their superiors. It is quite likely that the marriage rate would pick up substantially for a year or two, until the idea of convenient divorce set in. But the divinity of Christ would be untarnished in the eyes of Christian believers.
If there is any crisis of faith, it must be in the churches, as I mentioned earlier. If there is any obfustication, it must be on the part of the churches. In fact, the only people who have anything to really lose in this whole matter are those who will be hurt by a change of status, for instance the churches.
It has often struck me that the church is not so much concerned with spirituality as it is with maintaining its position. And in order to maintain the status quo, or to swing the tide in a direction that suites them, churches have managed to commit some of the most heinous crimes or at least condone them with the comforting words that ‘God is on your side’.
It starts with the burning of the two libraries at Alexandria, progresses through the middle ages and the various witch trials, heads into the modern centuries with silence on or support to all the newer atrocities, and currently resides with Pat Robertson, leader of the religious right, who appears to have abandoned the scripture to the extent that he made a call for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the current Venezuelan president. So much for “Thou shall not kill.” It won’t end there either. Humanity has a certain obstinacy about learning the lessons of history.
So where does the whole thing of the Da Vinci Code fit into the scheme of things? It’s just another question that hangs over the heads of the churches, disillusioning believers and clouding faith.
For my part, I’m all in favour of faith. Scriptures of any sort are a very useful counterbalance to the violence of our individual and collective natures.
It’s the churches I am opposed to, and the collective judgments and abandonment of moral responsibility that develop out of belonging to a group. And it happens regardless of how well-intentioned the group is at the outset.
Actually there is only one worthy faith, and that is the faith of the individual without the loopholes provided by groups that condone behaviour simply because ‘everyone else is doing it’.
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