Challenged by the Code
My daughter always makes great recommendations for readings. I have no idea where or from who she picks up her tips but when she asks me to get her a book I often end up reading and enjoying it.
She had asked me to get her the book "The DaVinci Code" by Dan Brown in December 2003. I had planned to bring it with me to Manila but with several other books she had asked me to buy, I left it in New York. And yesterday, desperately needing a break from reading the full trilogy of "The Lord of the Rings" I decided to use it as a breaker. I began to read it at about 9:00 AM and ended up not putting it down literally and finishing it at 2:00 AM today.
Dan Brown is a great storyteller. His story is about a Harvard professor Robert Langdon who gets entangled in a murder mystery that involves the Catholic Church and the Opus Dei. Although Brown clearly states that the book's characters are all fictional, he notes that "all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." His story of a murdered museum curator begins at the Louvre and takes the reader through London and New York in the race for answers to the secret messages the victim had left for his grand-daughter, Sophie, who is a cryptologist. She takes to this adventure with Robert Langdon, a symbologist whose book draft on the Holy Grail might as well had been the catalyst for the tragic event.
Brown then spins his story of a secret society which had for more than 2,000 years protected the mystery of Jesus' and Mary Magdalene's relationship, and how she had children by him. He narrates how the Nicean Council of the 3rd Century was the context for Emperor Constantine's power grab and the relationship of Magdalene as Jesus' wife ended there. A long winded conspiracy theory is never really confirmed but provokes the now captivated reader to further research on topics such as the Gnostic Gospels (Nag Hammadi documents discovered in 1945), the Holy Grail and the works of Leonardo Da Vinci who was believed to belong to the same society as the dead curator, the Priory of the Scion. A romance between the hero of the story Landon and the quest for the Holy Grail ends where it began, at the Louvre without a clear answer to many questions that now baffle the reader. I end the book to find myself challenging once again my faith.
I am Catholic and have gone through numerous overhauls on my faith that I consider myself more liberal than what my education from the convent schools might have shaped me to be. I am not against abortion if the health of the mother or the child is at risk or if the pregnancy is caused by rape. I think in these cases pregnancy should be a choice of the mother and not the church. I am against abortion, however as a contraceptive. Neither do I think that the church has a better opinion of a marriage than the spouses who suffer with their family in an unhappy union. And that the choice of who are to marry should be made by those entering into the contract and not by those blessing it.
I have a friend to who has once reminded me that I should never mistake going to church for religion. I suppose he had meant that one's faith is not measured by how they practiced their rites. And in retrospect, I believe him. I respect what the church stands for but my faith and my God is detached from the politics, corruption and abuse that has scarred this religious institution since antiquity.
I pray and go hear mass and give thanks for the blessings, the good days, and hope that if it will not save my soul it will at least alleviate my worries that I am not the only one in control of this mad life. It is, comforting to know that someone good and more powerful has things in rein and to surrender my fears and my hopes to that infinite special being is definitely very liberating.
Today after watching a movie with my friends, I got another book for my daughter, “The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail". I promised myself I’m not reading it. I now on page 25 of Niccolo Ammaniti’s "I’m Not Scared”.