Merton's influence is evident but not as much. Jungian concepts are prevalent in Kidd's work. Her bestselling third novel, The Secret Life of Bees, emphasized the feminine nature of the divine as seen through the spiritual influence of the statue of the Black Madonna.Ĭarl Jung and Trappist Fr.
She doesn't quite explain this nebulous term, but she seems to mean feelings of connectedness to nature, interest in archetypes, the ability to interpret dreams and an intuitive sensibility. He has sex with her, but Kidd handles this with deft strokes with Ana modestly saying, "I knew my husband, and he knew me."Ī Christian, Kidd has a sense of feminine spirituality. During this time, as Kidd sees it, Jesus marries Ana. With her research as background, Kidd invents the years between Jesus being lost in the temple and the start of his public ministry, years when no one knows what happened to Jesus except that, as Luke puts it, he grew in wisdom, age and grace (2:52). Hoping to better understand the life of the single most important individual in history, Kidd spent approximately five years researching daily existence among Jews living in the Galilean world of the first century. If they did not marry, it was humiliating for their parents. But it's quite possible that he was married since during Jesus' time, Jewish men were expected to marry and procreate. Kidd says people will never know whether Jesus was celibate. Nor has it been banned by the Catholic Church.
But her book, just out in paperback, should not scandalize most readers. Now, in her fourth novel, The Book of Longings, Kidd also embellishes the Gospel story of Christ. Kazantzakis' story came out in Greek and then in English in the 1950s and was promptly put on the list of forbidden books. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Nikos Kazantzakis and others had already explored similar questions with Kazantzakis' novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, arguably the most popular take among the group. Soon, Kidd asked herself what happened to Jesus in the years not covered in the canonical Gospels.
0 kommentar(er)
