A goddess by any other name ...

... is still a goddess, and feeds our collective hunger for divinity. Here's an email exchange I had with Dave today--

Dave wrote: Here's a headline I saw on Yahoo: "Oprah wept at learning of school assault." That woman is fetishized in the weirdest way. This is like some sort of archetype or mythological figure. She exists through a narrative of gestures strung together.

I wrote: No, not some sort of archetype--a very specific one: "Jesus wept."

Dave wrote: That was my first thought, and then I started to think of other possibilities, like some myth you haven't heard but would sound familiar when you were told about it -- when Great Mother saw what had happened to her children, she wept, and where each tear fell it grew and formed a kettle pond...


Very perceptive, that Dave. I knew he was a keeper. He's got Oprah right, of course. She is our mother goddess. She is absolutely an icon of maternal wisdom, strength and generosity. The fact that she has no children of her own only perfects her status as a goddess. She couldn't be the mother of us all if she had actual bratty offspring running around making her look too human.

I'm sure this observation has been made before; in fact, it wouldn't shock me if Oprah herself makes it on a regular basis. The important question is whether we think Oprah as Great Mother is a bad, good or indifferent thing. My own inclination is to think it's a good thing, or at least an inevitable thing. People will have their gods and goddesses, and they want to keep them close by--like, say, inside their televisions. The church and the mosque offer grand manifestations of holiness, but they don't provide the intimacy with divinity that humans crave. You can't count on the Virgin Mary showing up in your living room Monday through Friday at 4.

This is why Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. should stop wasting their time and ours preaching against religion. Humans are hardwired to seek a god, and trying to talk that away is about as likely to succeed as the endless clerical campaigns against fornication. True, some people do seem to be completely free of the need for gods. Some are completely free of lust, too, but it's not currently fashionable to run around bragging about it. The spiritually frigid person is as freakish in his way as the relentless prude, just as the god-obsessed fanatic is as abnormal as the sex addict.

Sex and religion are both potentially dangerous. Pretty much every pleasure is, here on planet Earth. I don't know why that's so, but if you don't like it, emigrate or take it up with Oprah. Meanwhile, indulge responsibly.


Photo from Wikimedia Commons