Little Miss Muffett Fell Off Her Tuffett–She Wanted To Have Sex With Jesus, And Found Him In The Strangest Of Bodies

Patty Muffett, like all little girls about to make her First Communion was dressed in a frilly white dress, paten leather shoes, white gloves and a floral tiara.  “I’m so proud of you”, said her father. 

It was a day long in coming for Patty Muffett who, even at the young age of eight, felt she had a calling, a vocation for a life of prayer.  For her the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary was not just holy, but perfect in every way.  Her elegant blue robes, her peaceful, contented smile, her beauty, and her sweetness spoke to her, had meaning far beyond her maternity and her place in the Church.  She was feminine, quietly seductive, and alluring.  Although Patty was very young and years still from adult sexual desire, she knew what feminine allure was – something irresistible; something soft, graceful, rounded, and elegant.  If she became a nun, she would be both a woman and a saint, or more accurately, a saintly woman.  She would accompany, worship, and love the sensuous Jesus on the cross of her church.  He was muscular, but lithe and supple.  He had an almost feminine grace but was masculine in his endurance and strength.

After her first communion, she became pious, attentive, and loving – exactly the kind of girl the nuns hoped partaking of the body and blood of Christ would be transform from ruffian to servant of the Lord.  She was their favorite, slated for a life of devotion among the Sisters of St. Helena, a cloistered, prayerful, abbey in the Shenandoah.  At the same time her mind kept returning to the sensuous and increasingly sensual image of Jesus above the altar.  What must have been like as a young man? The lover of Mary Magdalene, perhaps, or other women among the thousands who followed him in Galilee and Jerusalem.  They were not just servants of God, these women, but his lovers.  How could they not be, in his presence – a god, a perfect man of physical strength, sensitivity, and emotional strength. 

Patty was lucky to have Jesus as her first lover.  What could compare with that perfect communion of holy mother, lover, and follower?  No man could possibly measure up to the Jesus on the cross, and the idea of a life of spiritual and sexual fulfillment with him brought tears to her eyes.

The priests of her parish were men, of course, and as much as their ordination granted them a holy proximity to Jesus, they were pale imitations of him.  Father Williams was a fussy, womanish man who loved to polish the chalice and paten to a bright shine, who loved the rustle of his silk alb, chasuble, and cassock, the glorious music of the organ, and the beautiful symbolism of the Mass.  Father Reilly liked the idea of the muscularity of Christianity – Jesus was courageous and unafraid to preach his gospel; and Christians must be stalwart, strong, defenders of him and his faith.  Father Reilly worked out in the basement of the rectory, and liked to the feel of his muscles against the wool of his suit.  He walked like an athlete, but, thought Patty, there was something pretty about him, nothing like the insistent maleness of Jesus.

As she reached adolescence, began to fill out as a young woman, and notice boys, she found them unattractive at best and a defilement of her sacred image of Jesus at worst.  They were a gawky, stumbling, acned lot – charmless, clueless, and aimless.  Her faith in the virile Jesus only increased, and her commitment to a vocation continued. Her parents, devout Catholics, while nodding to the presumed influence of Jesus in her decision, were unhappy that their beautiful, talented, and graceful daughter should spend her life behind the walls of priory.

It was only surprising that Patty’s unusual sexuality – profound physical desire but only for Jesus – would bifurcate, and that her sexual instincts far more deeply embedded in her makeup than any spiritual ones, would out.  It took only the male sensuality of Billy Pease – who not surprisingly looked like the iconic Jesus (dark, wavy hair, aquiline nose, full lips, high brow, and sensitive eyes) to complete the split and she could overlook his lack of religious empathy for his calm, centered, determined sexuality. 

To assume Miss Muffett’s abnegation of her faithfulness in bed with Billy Pease would be to do her an injustice.  She never lost her desire for a spiritual, maternal coupling with Jesus, but could not resist her feminine, very human sexual desires.  She acknowledged Billy’s physical resemblance to Jesus and embraced it – a spiritual/sexual serendipity, she said.  Sexual love with Billy was celebrating Christ’s duality as Man and God, feeling Him inside her and having a Lawrentian epiphany every time she came. 

If this sounds new or unusual, it isn’t.  Seemingly convoluted sexual identities and interests is par for the course, and literature is filled with such flights of fancy. Henry Sutpen, a figure in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, is incestuously in love with his sister, is physically attracted to her fiancé, and both wants to be the man’s lover and his sister.  He is male, female, and both together, tangled in a sexual knot.   Because his very conservative Puritan sexuality does not allow for a relationship with Charles Bon, nor would Bon be receptive to it, Henry cannot have Bon and kills him to keep him from his sister. 

Shakespeare In Sonnet 20 expresses ‘the poet’s  love and longing for his male friend, and offers a similarly self-serving justification. “You were created by Nature as a woman but more beautiful than any woman’, the poet says, “for you do not have their faults. But Nature changed her mind as she made you, and turned you into a man, for she herself adored you, and, perhaps desiring congress, gave you male parts. Therefore I cannot love you with the fullness that I would love a woman. But let me have your real love, while women enjoy the physical manifestation of it, which I know to be merely a superficies.

Michelangelo’s Pieta has often be referred to in sensual terms – the image is profoundly spiritual, but the depiction of Christ as a sensuous naked man in the arms of his Mother/Lover Mary is equally profoundly human and sexual.  The canonical duality of Christ lends itself to such human characterizations; and most critics have understood the implicit sexual longing and desire of women for Christ The Man.

Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc (Henry VI, Part I) was no less a complexed figure, loving Jesus, on a holy mission, but a sexually attractive woman pursued by Charles VII and perhaps a lesbian. 

Freud was not the only theorist to speculate about the influence of male and female parents on the sexual maturity of their children.  Patty Muffett simply extrapolated – took the outline of her father and filled it with the sensually alluring, spiritually exciting Jesus – and was better off for it.  Her father was little more than a male outline.

Whether spirituality is as sublime and complex as the Trinity, as ragged and put upon as the lives of the saints, or as very human as the very male, human Jesus Christ, it is still the same event.  Those on the philosophical edge of the spectrum manage to hold on to their faith longer than those who tend towards ‘the historical Jesus’, or ‘the humanity of the Savior’.  It is hard to give up on the esoterica, profoundly intellectual first five verses of the Gospel of John and quite easy to throw in the towel when life keeps nagging. 

And so it was with Patty Muffett whose own brand of sexual esoterica couldn’t stand the test of time.  There were too many inadequate lovers, disappointments, and too much flabby insecurity to keep her hopes alive.  She didn’t so much give up on the idea of Jesus as her lover – it still would be nice – but like most of us capitulated, married, had children, and was buried in a nice plot.  Yet there is something especially appealing about her fantastical sexual idealism.  Most women just want Paul Newman or Jude Law in bed with them.