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Blood, Sweat, Poop And the Theotokos

Blood, Sweat, Poop And the Theotokos

Last updated on: July 28, 2016 at 4:31 pm by Mary Pezzulo

Blood, Sweat, Poop And the Theotokos 2016-07-28T16:31:07-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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Henrique_Bernardelli_-Mater(detalhe_2)

I just had to share another wonderful conversation I had lately with my talented friends on facebook. My rather fiesty friend who’s always getting into arguments came back from one of them victorious with the following:

“Speaking of the glorious dignity of demure womanhood and the eternal feminine purity of motherhood, I just got back from rescuing the baby, who had pasted herself to her bouncy seat with an epic load of poo that leaked out all over her new white summer dress. With beautiful feminine dignity, I stooped over the bathtub and was coated with a fine mist of digested breastmilk as I blasted poo off her bloomers with the showerhead. I then was found stooped over the seat scrubbing poo off of it while the older girls ran around screaming “EW EW EW EW EW!”

If your theology can’t accommodate the Theotokos tucking her skirts into her girdle and slapping a bright orange stained diaper against a rock in a wash bin while little Jesus wails and pulls up clumps of grass nearby, then you may be an actual heretic, and I for one find that quite amusing.”

“Absolutely,” I replied. “And remember that three decades later she stood there crying, smeared with flying blood and lung fluid and filth while her son was lynched. That’s the Theotokos.”

Now, maybe Jesus was the type of baby who sucked His fist and stared into space while His Mother did the washing, rather than the kind that ripped up grass. But Jesus was indeed a baby at one point; this we know by faith. And we know by biology that all babies poop.

When I was growing up, on the Planet Charismatic of which I’ve written so many times, we never met a private revelation or a pious legend that we didn’t like, especially if it was borderline heretical. And at one point I was told that there was a sizable group of faithful who believed that Jesus and Mary never had a bowel movement. They were too perfect for things of this earth; nothing smelly or ugly ever passed through their intestines and ended up in the Nazareth latrine. When Jesus Himself spoke about what entered the body passing through into the latrine, apparently he wasn’t speaking from personal experience.

It wasn’t until I was a young uppity feminist college student home on break that I told my parents I didn’t believe that Jesus and Mary never had a bowel movement. I believed they actually did sometimes squat to that level.

I don’t think my parents believed it either, but they weren’t going to let an uppity feminist college student get away with telling them about Jesus and Mary.

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