c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Frederica Mathewes-Green is a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. She is the author of the recent book”Real Choices”and a frequent contributor to Christianity Today magazine.)

(RNS)-My friend Carolyn’s icon of Mary of Egypt is completed, and on Sunday it was leaning against the brass candlestick on the altar. It shows a wild woman, fierce, gray hair flying out around a weathered face, her bony arm raised aloft. An old dull-green cloak passes over her left shoulder and under her right arm; it is her only covering.

Mary was a girl of 12 when she left her parents’ home and went to the city of Alexandria, losing herself swiftly in pursuit of debauchery, according to the 18th-century compendium,”Butler’s Lives of the Saints.”She became a singer, an actress, and a sexual athlete of inexhaustible appetite. At the age of 28 she saw pilgrims embarking on a trip to Jerusalem and, with flippant curiosity, decided to tag along.

In Jerusalem she accompanied the crowd to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but found herself mysteriously restrained at the door. While the others crowded in, she was unable to move forward. Shaken by this, as the story goes, she withdrew to a corner of the courtyard, and images of her sinful life began to assail her. Glimpsing an icon of the Blessed Virgin, she prayed for help to live a life of penitence.

Fifty years later, about 430 A.D., a monk named Zosimus was spending Lent in the desert beyond the Jordan River when he was startled to see a white-haired human figure. As he approached a voice cried out,”Father Zosimus, I am a woman; throw your mantle to cover me that you may come near me.” Mary told him her story; she had lived alone in the desert, without seeing a human being, since the day she wept outside the church. The first 17 years, she said, had been the hardest. She had been tormented continuously with thoughts of the luxuries she’d once enjoyed, but prayer had sustained her and eventually she found peace.

Mary made Zosimus promise not to tell her story until after her death. They met the following year so she could receive Holy Communion. When Zosimus returned the third year, he found her dead body stretched on the ground. Mary was buried there in the desert. The often-skeptical editor of Butler’s”Lives”pronounces the core of this story”not incredible.” In Carolyn’s icon, Mary is severe and withered, an ideal of the type feminists these days call”the crone.”The wise old woman who has risen above her socially assigned role is viewed as a particularly forceful symbol of women’s power. According to feminist reading, that power is so intimidating in male-dominated culture that the once-revered crone has deteriorated over time into images of evil witches and wicked stepmothers.

This is new. When I was a young feminist, in the early days of the movement, we never heard about crones. Crones seem to have emerged in the feminist lexicon just about the time that lots of us are looking across our own Jordans at menopause.

Mary is wise and strong, and she could be a feminist icon. But her character was formed in self-abandonment rather than narcissistic self-fulfillment (though one could argue that it is only in self-abandonment that we can ever be truly fulfilled.)

In her book,”Fire with Fire,”Naomi Wolf instructs that the three principles of”power feminism”must be vengeance, money and victory. Mary’s strength is based on vastly different principles. If this venerable crone were to speak today, her message of repentance would probably not be welcome in the feminist camp.

Actresses are as popular now as they were 1,500 years ago, when young Mary trod the boards. I remember reading about how Sharon Stone once addressed the press corps on the subject of politics, her own breasts, and a contorted tale of beating lymph cancer by”positive thinking”and giving up coffee (a tale she recanted after it appeared in print).

The media prefer a spokeswoman like this to a wise old crone for obvious reasons: She’s earnest and silly, has no credentials other than fame, and she’s talking about her breasts.

I’m trying to picture Sharon Stone weeping outside a church. Or to imagine her after 50 years of prayer in the desert. It could happen; it’s happened before. I wish I could reassure her, if she’s ever felt such a call, to follow it. There’s plenty of desert outside Hollywood, only a few day’s walk away. They say the first 17 years are the hardest. Go for it.

LJB END GREEN