Elizabeth Cunningham

Author of The Maeve Chronicles

I wrote a blog yesterday in response to a contest invitation from Redroom.com, a writer’s website I seem to belong to but can never figure out how to access. The challenge from Joyce Maynard was to write about obessions, passions, and fixations. I could not figure out how to enter my blog, so I decided to create my own. My first blog follows:

obsession: god

My first memory from the age of three is a theological one. I had worked out a plan (call it an obsessive fantasy) for killing God and Jesus. They would be floating along the desert floor, and, from a pinnacle, I would tip a huge boulder onto them and flatten them. The always boinged back to life (just like Road Runner) so I had to kill them over and over.

I have now spent eighteen years re-writing the New Testament in a series of novels that I believe balance devotion and irreverence. But a friend of mine felt that I had finally succeeded, theologically, in killing off god—or at least orthodox, monotheistic Christianity.

passion: passion

My method for carrying out my obsession is passion. My narrative character is Jesus’s lover. (I became rather fond of him over his years, though I still refer to his father as The Terrible One.) She never becomes his disciple, and she has her own apotheosis. (I like to say that she puts the erection back into resurrection even though it doesn’t quite scan as a pun.)
fixation: writing about religion and sex, obsessively and passionately. They belong between the same covers—of my books.

www.passionofmarymagdalen.com

One Response

  1. It's sure a quite old post. However, I'd love to comment on it.

    I was born and grew up as a Catholic guy in Ecuador, when I come from.

    The female image I was educated with was the so-called Virgin Mary, the sexlessness in person. And now I see your post here on Jesus, New Testament, sexuality and so on.

    When did you perceive yourself as sexual being?