SOUL FOOD:

If only “The Nativity Story” were all good news. That’s what I wrote in December 2006, shortly after the New Line Cinema film was released.

The high hopes I’d held for the movie sank as I watched it. What has surprised me since is they’ve sunk ever more each time I’ve watch it again.

In spite of the flaws I originally saw in the film, I wrote that it was likely to become a Christmas tradition. And until now, it did.

This year, my husband watched it along with me. But I have to confess we’re not looking forward to seeing it again next year.

Last week, after seeing the film for the fourth time, including twice in 2006, I revisited the column I wrote about it then — to my chagrin.

The thing that troubled me most this year about this telling of the Nativity story was the portrayal of Mary. Yet in 2006, if I’m to believe what I wrote, I then found Keisha Castle-Hughes “movingly convincing.”

But her portrayal of Mary as what a review at spiritscholars.com describes as a “relentlessly ordinary” is contrary to what the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church teach about Mary the Mother of God, the God-bearer, the Theotokos.

Wherever screenwriter Mike Rich and director Catherine Hardwicke (“Thirteen” and “Lords of Dogtown”) got their notions of Mary (and her parents, Joachim and Anna) they didn’t get them from scripture or from other prime sources in the church.

They didn’t draw on the 2nd-century Protevangelium of James or the Gospel of the Nativity of Mary found in the writings of the Early Church Fathers. They didn’t draw from the long history of the life of Mary in icons.

Their Mary pushes against the wishes of her parents. She questions their wisdom and their authority. She sulks.

Hardwicke says she wanted Mary to seem like other teens, “not perfectly pious.” But the church teaches that Mary is “Panagia,” the all-holy saint.

As Mary Grace Ritchey points out in an essay on the Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple (in Jerusalem), published on melkite.org, in the icon representing The Entry of the Virgin Into the Temple, “[Mary] does not look like a child except in size because already she is a ‘mature’ or [a] perfect person.”

And so it is in every icon that depicts Mary, even those that show her in her cradle. She never was considered an ordinary teenager or an ordinary child.

To read about The Feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple, which is celebrated Nov. 21, is to realize that.

Mary was born to her pious and wealthy parents, Joachim and Anna, who had been childless into their old age. Anna’s conception was considered a miracle, an answer to her and Joachim’s earnest prayers.

Anna promised her child to the service of God. It was in keeping this promise that she and Joachim took Mary at the age of 3 to the temple in Jerusalem and presented her to Zacharias, the High Priest.

Zacharias recognized Mary as the young woman whom prophets said would bear the messiah. So he took her into the temple’s sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, normally accessible only to the High Priest once each year.

The sanctuary was holy because it contained the glory of God, the manna given to the Hebrews in the wilderness, the Rod of Aaron and the tablets bearing the 10 Commandments.

Yet, as Ritchey relates, Archbishop Joseph Raya explains in his book “Theotokos” that Mary entered the sanctuary because “she was more sacred and holier because she was to contain Glory Himself.”

In his essay “Entrance into the Temple of the Theotokos” published on antiochian.org, Huwaida Bouri writes that when she entered the temple, “Mary passed through all the stages of spiritual life: purification, illumination and union with God.”

She lived at the temple for 12 years and was, writes Bouri, “not only a flawless maiden, but she gained the wisdom and faith of the deepest scholars.” The Protevangelium of James says she conversed with and was fed by the hand of angels.

When it came, she was not unprepared for the angel Gabriel’s message that she would conceive of the Holy Spirit and bear the Son of the Most High. She was no ordinary teen.

Why didn’t it bother me two years ago that “The Nativity Story” portrays her as such?

And why didn’t it bother me to see Joachim and Anna depicted as commonplace farmers struggling to eek out a living and pay their taxes? The church teaches otherwise.

The Gospel of the Nativity of Mary describes her parents as “guileless and right before the Lord” and “irreproachable and pious before men,” dividing their wealth into three parts. One third they gave to support the temple; another third they gave to the poor; one third they kept to support themselves and other family members.

Among Protestants and sometimes even Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians, The Protevangelium of James and The Gospel of the Nativity of Mary are regarded as merely legends, since they are not Scripture. Grant this and I still prefer these 2nd-century accounts to the contemporary imaginations of Hardwicke and Rich.

As Roman Catholic Father Angelo Mary Geiger wrote in a review of the film two years ago, their Mary “lacks depth and stature.” And that greatly diminishes the whole film.

Rich and Hardwicke do not know — or don’t care for us to know — Mary or Joachim or Anna or Joseph the way the Early Church Fathers did. And it’s hard to believe it took two years for me to object to this.

All the same, I wasn’t alone in 2006 offering higher praises for the film. In my own faith tradition, the Rev. George Shalhoub of St. Mary Antiochian Orthodox Church in Livonia, Mich., effused, “For the first time, I’ve seen a biblical movie that doesn’t have a lot of glorification. It’s told as a very beautiful, a very respectful, but a very realistic story.”

I wonder if he’s still content with this.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].