"I wanted to shock the audience," says Mel Gibson. "I wanted to push them over the edge." And the extraordinary brutality of his movie certainly does that. The question is: what for?

'The Passion' is a kind of throwback, a last stand of old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone fundamentalism against the growing modern search for meaning and relevance. And in that respect, it is self-defeating. Such an approach has little to offer to those seeking the essence of religion-- that is, the religious spirit. People can be bludgeoned into submission, but not into faith.

Obedient to the word, fundamentalism loses sight of the spirit. It becomes, in a way, anti-religious. Faith -- that magnificent conscious leap beyond logic -- gives way to blind belief. The sacred is reduced to a simplistic set of binary strictures: all or nothing, believe or be damned.

This is religion made harsh, and at the same time, made bland. It leaves no room for wonder or for a personal sense of the divine. By claiming a hold on truth, it destroys the sense of divine mystery -- of a truth that may perhaps be glimpsed, but never fully grasped. And in so doing, it betrays not just a lack of imagination, but a lack of real faith.

Ironically, given the current fundamentalist battle against knowledge and scientific inquiry, science offers a far greater sense of divine mystery. The astonishing paradoxes of black holes or the long journey of evolution over hundreds of millennia are openings into that mystery, just as is the "historical Jesus" emphasized by modern biblical scholars: the revolutionary who fought for social justice and freedom from oppression, who preached love and inclusiveness, not damnation and submission.

The essence of the deep rift between religious traditionalists and those seeking the spirit rather than the letter of religion is, in a sense, a matter of life and death. When you find your inspiration in Jesus' death and focus obsessively on the mechanics of it, as Gibson's camera does, you create a kind of spiritual numbness -- a death of the spirit -- that easily devolves into hatred. The hard work of the spiritual life, whether within organized religion or independent of it, is not cinematic, but it leads to love -- not so much of the divine per se, for that is beyond human apprehension, but of the intimation of the divine in each and every person. We are all part of the divine, Jesus taught. And the divine is expressed not in how we die, but in how we live.

This is what so many people are now searching for. Call them the new Silent Majority. They are not as organized and well-financed as the evangelical movement, but in many ways, they are far closer to the actual teachings of Jesus. Whether they are Christian, Moslem, or like myself, Jewish, they are searching for that spark of the divine within themselves, within each other, and in the world around them. Placing their faith in wisdom and insight instead of all-or-nothing belief, they may well be the real future of religion.

Imagining the Virgin Mother as a Middle Eastern woman –short, wiry, with dark-olive skin and the trace of a mustache on her upper lip – is a radical departure from Renaissance standards, but Lesley Hazleton is more interested in history than myth. Gone is the meek and mild. Hazleton's Mary, in the forthcoming “Mary: a flesh-and-blood biography,” is a woman who was pregnant at 13 (possibly by rape), endured the political oppression of her time, and watched her son tortured and executed by the state.

Q: Were you concerned that by making Mary real, you might make her seem less divine?
A: It seems to me quite the opposite. When you look at Mary as a real person and see who she really was, you realize she is so much more than we have ever given her credit for being. The reality of who she was appeals to the imagination in a way that the icon cannot. The icon forestalls imagination. But the idea that you might discover her as a human being – and within that human being find the spark of divinity – makes the spiritual more personal and real.

Q: Why do you suppose scholarship on the historical Mary has lagged behind that of the historical Jesus?
A: Mary was adopted by the early church as an answer to the great virgin mother goddesses of other religions. She was the church’s way of competing against them, and it would have been dangerous to have a clearer sense of who the actual person was. They needed the image, not the real woman, so she became depersonalized. This is one of the things we do when we worship somebody. You see only what you want

Q: During the four years it took you to write “Mary,” what conclusions did you draw about spirituality in the world?
A: I know this flies in the face of what a lot of people are saying nowadays, but I began to believe that we are becoming more open-minded. New historical scholarship helps us understand how people thought 2,000 years ago, so that we can consider that Mary indeed might have been both virgin and mother, or that the father indeed might have been both God and Joseph. I think we’re becoming more accepting of paradox and apparent contradiction, and this is important, because paradox is surely the essence of the religious experience.

Author Lesley Hazleton's portrait of Jesus' mother speculates on a largely unknown life -- and paints a headstrong young woman.  Lesley Hazleton researched theological, historical and anthropological sources to create a biography of Jesus' mother that goes far beyond her biblical portrayal. Hazleton spent 14 years in the Middle East as a psychologist, educator and foreign correspondent for Time magazine and other publications.
 

Lesley Hazleton admits that she's an unlikely channeler for the life of Mary, mother of Jesus. As she writes in her new book, "Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother" (Bloomsbury, $24.95), she first approached her search for Mary by examining her own mixed bag of religious influences, wondering to herself if she was up to the task of imagining Mary's life:

"This may be the answer to the question of 'How dare I?' Perhaps my own biography is what gives me license: as a Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi, as a former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about becoming a nun, as an agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery though no affinity for organized religion.

"Or perhaps I take my license as a woman for whom there is no heroism in 'meek and mild,' or as a psychologist seeking understanding, or as a journalist seeking out the real story."

It's easy to see why Hazleton, 58, would have no truck with 'meek and mild.' The daughter of an English physician, she spent 14 years in the Middle East as a psychologist, educator and foreign correspondent for Time magazine and other publications. She came to Seattle in 1992 to get her pilot's license, rented a friend's houseboat, bought it and has been here ever since.

Her career as a journalist and author is impressive and eclectic — she's written for Esquire, Harper's, Vanity Fair and Parade, as well as critically praised books on the Middle East, depression — and automobiles. The uncertain economics of freelance writing had pushed Hazleton into a comfortable niche in the relatively well-paid world of automobile writing.

Then, at a party four years ago, she met a friend with an idea for a book:

"She knew I was not religious, but was very involved with religious matters," Hazleton remembers. "She knew I had considered becoming a rabbi. So she came up to me and said, 'I have the perfect book for you to write: a biography of Mary,as she really was.'

"There were instant fireworks in my mind. Huge, incredible, brilliant fireworks... Let's call it an epiphany. I knew Mary had to be far more than the meek and mild cipher of tradition — but I had no idea this book would take me four years."

The result, published this month, has received early praise, but also caution that it's not likely to enthrall the more traditionally devout.

Early reviews have testified to Hazleton's inspired writing — "Readers who loved the phenomenally popular fictional account of Jacob's daughter Dinah in Anita Diamant's 'The Red Tent' will find this book about Mary, the mother of Jesus, just as enthralling," enthused Publisher's Weekly.

Seattle Times reviewer Wingate Packard said that "her fictional accounts sometimes run too seamlessly into historical facts, but Hazleton's historical grasp of the Middle East over 2,000 years and her willingness to imagine details of the life of a mortal woman-made-goddess make 'Mary' a tremendous accomplishment."

But Library Journal, while praising Hazleton's "stream-of-consciousness style," said that "some might find it a bit too breezy, too sweeping, or downright troubling" in some of its claims.

The portrait painted by "Mary" strays far from what little is known about Jesus' mother, but Hazleton's publishers hope sales are buoyed by the recent surge of interest in books and movies on religion and faith — the secrets embedded in the phenomenal best-selling thriller "The Da Vinci Code" are based on medieval Christian teachings and the history of the Catholic Church.

There could be a sales bump related to the new exposure that the Mel Gibson movie "The Passion of the Christ" has given to Jesus' story. Though Hazleton's view of early Christianity has little in common with Gibson's more literal interpretation of the New Testament, Bloomsbury marketing director Sabrina Farber says she expects subsequent printings after the 10,000-copy first printing of "Mary."

"We feel very strongly about this book and the message it sends about Mary, and feel fortunate that the topic is in the forefront right now," Farber wrote in an e-mail.

The speculative portrait of Mary that Hazleton sketches is heavily infused with her own experiences living in the Middle East, as well as her feminist bias that Mary was an activist participant in the life of her village, her family and her son.

Many scholars believe that Mary gave birth at age 13, and Hazleton draws an indelible portrait of the life of a young village girl at that time — the sights and smells of Judea, the day-in, day-out routines of village life, the role Roman repression played in its politics. She examines Jesus' likely role as a revolutionary and the horrible and pervasive practice of crucifixion. Hazleton immersed herself in books of anthropology, archaeology and biblical scholarship to analyze concepts such as the Virgin birth and the resurrection.

Hazleton found "astonishingly little" written about Mary from a you-are-there perspective. The four Gospels, written by Greeks two or three generations after Christ's death, treat her mostly as a "figurehead," Hazleton says: "They were writing theology, not history."

She found more material in the Apocrypha (early Christian writings not included in the New Testament) and the Quran — Mary has an entire chapter devoted to her in the Islamic religious text. She went to archaeological and historical sources to posit what the life of Mary might have been like. Throughout, she calls her Maryam, Mary's name in Aramaic, the language of the time.

She imagines Maryam as a resourceful village girl who trains as a midwife under the tutelage of Salome, a fictional grandmother. Her exposure to the vicious repression of Roman rule turns Maryam toward resistance. Both the healer and the revolutionary strains converge in the person of Jesus, her son.

Hazleton draws on her Middle-Eastern experience to draw a portrait of a typical 13-year-old, headed for a very atypical destiny:

"She is thirteen. Short and wiry, with dark olive skin. The trace of a mustache on her upper lip, soft black down on her arms and legs. The muscles are hard knots in her arms, solid lines in her calves...

"Her thin linen shift is torn from snagging on rocks and thorns. Even the patches are torn, and the original black has long since faded into gray. When there's a village feast — a wedding or circumcision — she begs a few threads of brightly colored wool from the old women, the ones too infirm to do anything but sit and weave, passing stories and shuttles back and forth in the sun-baked courtyards. Then she and her girl cousins huddle together, giggling as they work the threads into each other's braids. They have two colors; red from madder juice, yellow from kaolin clay. They've never seen blue wool. Only the rich can afford indigo, and in this village, as in all the Galilee villages, everyone is poor."

Hazleton did enough research to produce a 1,000-page book — the final version, with detailed footnotes and an extensive bibliography, is 245 pages. "Gloria Loomis, my agent, got worried when she heard that I'd written 30 pages on olives and olive trees," Hazleton says. "They came out."

She invested heart, soul and bank account in "Mary" for four years — she had to refinance her houseboat to complete the book.

But she bristles at any notion that the Mel Gibson movie might help sales. Though she hasn't seen the movie, she says she would rather not be associated with it, though Gibson's interpretation of the last days of Jesus has helped provoke a worthwhile debate: "It's getting people to think about matters of belief and faith. Is Christianity focused on death, or is it focused on the teachings of Jesus, which focus on life?"

One of the virtues of "Mary" is its respect for people of faith. Though Hazleton may not be a believer in the traditional sense, she says that people who insist on picking apart concepts such as Mary's virginity or Jesus' resurrection are missing the point. Speaking of skeptics who attack the concept of resurrection, she writes:

"There is a strong whiff of desperation in such extended reading. Certainly it reveals more about those who make such arguments than about what actually happened. It makes the male disciples into a bunch of connivers, and the women into gullible dupes fooled into believing there has been a resurrection instead of a stolen body. The resurrection is seen at best as a hysterical misunderstanding, at worst as a scam.

"This is what happens when we read the gospels as history instead of theology. We diminish the grandeur of metaphor, and find ourselves reduced from ultimate mystery to a poorly plotted detective story ... to say that it definitely did not happen makes no more sense than to say that it definitely did. For the real point of the resurrection is not literal, but metaphorical. Not physical, that is, but metaphysical."

Hazleton recalls that "my father asked me once: 'Do I really think that God exists?' To me the most wonderful thing is that there is really no way to answer that question. That there are things out there that are beyond our understanding. I think that's very, very hard for 21st-century Americans to admit."

“MARY” author Lesley Hazleton found that her four years of work on the book were a welcome opportunity to return to Israel, where she lived from 1966 to 1979. The British-born writer,58, who worked as a journalist and psychologist during her years in Jerusalem, spoke to The Report from her home in Seattle, where she has lived since 1992, “on a houseboat that floats under a cloud.”

The Jerusalem Report: You have said that the idea of writing “Mary” was suggested by a friend.
Lesley Hazleton: Yes, and the moment she said it, I knew that I would do this book. The world is full of books about apparitions of Mary, about the development of the Marian legend, or pietistic accounts of her life. But there hadn’t been an attempt to look at her as she might have been. Because of my years in the Middle East, I felt that I knew what she looked like. I knew her name [in Aramaic: Maryam], and the conditions of how she lived, 2,000 years ago. And I knew what I didn’t want to do — and couldn’t do — a conventional biography.
 
Q: There’s a real tension in your book, in that you try to describe the probable life of a flesh-and-blood Mary, but at the same time, insist that religion is meant to have mysteries.
A: Yes, the tension is powerful, although I wasn’t aware of it when I wrote the book. The book is based on four years of research — on how people lived at the time, knowing the language they spoke, then of looking at the great virgin goddesses of the time, and of how people looked at the role of the Divine in conception. These explain a lot, but they also open up new possibilities. My intention was not to rationalize, and the book was not written as theology. I call myself “agnostic,” but I’m sort of a gnostic agnostic.

Q: How did you keep the book so short?
A: When my agent — whom I’ve been with since my first book, in 1976 — heard I’d written 20 pages on olive oil and olive trees, she said, “Lesley: Cut!” So I did. But I still dream of writing an annotated version of the book. And I have an idea that the next one I write will also have to do with Mary. I think she and I have a ways to go.

Q: Maybe you should write a novel. Have you published fiction before?
A: Only a short story, but somewhere in the house is the 500-page manuscript of a novel about Shabtai Zvi. Clearly, I’ve always had this fascination with matters of religion and faith, and the weird and wonderful ways they have affected us, and the way we create our gods.

Q: Have you sold the film rights to “Mary” yet?
A: [Laughs] There’s a meeting in L.A. next week. I’m not sure I want to know about it.

by Ira J. Hadnot, staff writer

The Holy Mother is getting a makeover. The Mary who is emerging isn't a meek Madonna. She is a modern, multitasking mama fighting for social justice. She is a healer. She doesn't disappear after her son is crucified. She moves his ministry forward, teaching until she is in her 50s. There is much more to Mary than the 13 brief references to her in the Gospels, according to several experts whose research is adding to a growing body of scholarly work. Provocatively titled new books about Mary are capturing the public's interest and kindling debate over her place in Catholic life.

"Mary has always been popular," said Lesley Hazleton, author of Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of The Virgin Mother (Bloombury USA, $24.95). "But people are no longer seeing her as an icon. They want to know who she really was."

She said many women, especially mothers, admire Mary but can't meet the standard of perfection she personifies as the Virgin Mother. Ms. Hazleton said her book seeks a Mary that today's women can relate to by examining the circumstances of Mary's life and how her struggles mirrored those of modern motherhood.

The portrait that emerges is of a poor, young Jewish girl who herds sheep and goats in a small Galilean village. The hardness of that life doesn't yield the rich glow of a Raphael masterpiece or the majesty of a statue trimmed in gold and topped by a bejeweled crown. Instead, this Mary is a woman strong in body and spirit, one who fights for freedom and passes these virtues on to her children. Her book introduces the Madonna this way:

"She is thirteen. Short and wiry with dark olive skin. The trace of a mustache on her upper lip, soft black down on her arms and legs. The muscles are hard knots in her arms, solid lines in her calves. Her hair is almost black and has been folded into a single braid down her back ... Her thin linen shift is torn from snagging on rocks and stones ... The shift hides the gentle bulge in her belly. She is unmarried and pregnant."

Ms. Hazleton, a former psychologist and political reporter who lives in Seattle, has deep roots in Judaism and Catholicism. She is Jewish, but attended convent schools as a child. While living in Jerusalem for 13 years, she became fascinated by Mary's story.

She called the book – the fruit of four years of cultural, religious and anthropological research – "a reconstruction of the real Maryam." She uses Mary's Aramaic name, she said, "to restore her birthright. In Hebrew, she is Miriam. In Arabic, she is Maryam and has an entire sura (chapter) in the Quran. In Christianity, she is Mary. She is in all these faiths, and in the goddess traditions."

The Hazleton book, published in March, follows several others on the role and image of Mary. It comes at a time when some Catholic scholars are questioning a Vatican II decision that, they said, "radically minimized" Mary's spirituality. Marian devotion was viewed as "strong on sentiment but weakened by unbiblical images of Mary," one expert said. The Vatican council's quandary was how to honor Mary, recognizing her inseparable association with her son's saving work, in a way that did not obscure or diminish worship of Jesus...

The church "decided 40 years ago that it must modernize itself by minimizing Mary," wrote Charlene Spretnak, author of Missing Mary: The Queen of Heaven and Her Re-Emergence in The Modern Church (Palgrave, $24.95). Today's church "is split over the meaning and status of the Blessed Virgin," wrote Dr. Spretnak, a professor of philosophy and theology at the California Institute for Integral Studies in San Francisco. Her view is that Mary's "spiritual presence has been drastically reduced visually and theologically."

The re-examination of Mary's role comes at a time when feminist theologians are challenging what they view as "centuries of male interpretations of the Bible that have reduced or completely ignored the role of women in the development of Christianity," said Elizabeth A. Johnson, a theology professor at Fordham, a Jesuit university in New York City. Mary and Mary Magdalene are poster girls for the feminists' cause.

In gauging Mary's scriptural importance, Dr. Johnson said, there's much more to consider than the scant number of times she appears in the New Testament – like what is happening when she is mentioned. For example, there's the time an angel salutes her with, "Hail, thou art much graced," honoring her stature above all women. In the Acts of the Apostles, when the Holy Spirit descends to inspire Jesus' disciples, Luke makes a point to note that Mary was among them...

Young women especially need the image of a Mary who is not docile, said Dr. Johnson of Fordham, author of Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (Continuum International Publishing Group, $26.95). "The little bits of Gospel about Mary have never been enough for some people, and they have had to embroider their own version of her," she said.

While some theologians have overreached in their interpretations of Mary's role, others, after Vatican II, have almost sought to eliminate her from Catholic life, Dr. Spretnak wrote. Some parishes have overreacted to the swinging pendulum by draping or taking down old-fashioned statues of Mary. In some Catholic churches built within the past decade, it is hard to find Mary – even in a stained-glass window.

Like architecture, art has been influenced by the changing interpretations of Mary, said the Rev. Thomas A. Thompson, director of the Marian Library at the University of Dayton. "Catholic religious popular art made her look extremely pious and unreal," he said. "It was too ethereal, too perfect. She didn't even have a blemish." At the Marian Library, he said, "We have a representation of Mary in her 50s, and the response has been very positive. People like it."

Through all the changes, Mary's mystery and spiritual meaning still have vitality for millions of believers. There are more reported sightings of her than of any other holy figure, according to researchers at Dayton. The Catholic Church only recognizes as authentic the sightings at Guadalupe, Mexico; Lourdes, France; and Fatima, Portugal. But Web sites abound with claims, information, speculation, and trivia about her. And year in and year out, Mary ranks as one of the most popular names for girls.

This "grassroots resurgence of Marian spirituality" will come to greater prominence in this century, Dr. Spretnak wrote. People in many lands, particularly Mexico, have not embraced the Vatican II changes regarding Mary and are reluctant to let go of the traditional images adorning their churches. The largely Latino congregation of the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe in downtown Dallas, for instance, did not want to remove a 17-foot tapestry of Our Lady of Guadalupe a couple of years ago – even though the diocese had pronounced it "liturgically incorrect." It was eventually replaced by a 7-foot replica of a 470-year-old Mexican image of a dark-skinned Virgin Mary.