Homesick

 While my mother, immobilized by vertigo, lay stretched like a corpse on the bed in our Manhattan hotel room, my father and I went to the top of the Empire State building. It was the spring of 1954, and we were on a two-day layover on the week-long airplane trip from Barcelona to Quito.

“Why is she sick?” I asked my father as we walked down Fifth Avenue.

“It’s because she’s sad that we left Barcelona,” he said.

Sad! What was there to be sad about? Weren’t we going on a fabulous adventure to South America, one even more thrilling than those of Hernán Cortés, Ponce de León and Francisco Pizarro? And hadn’t my mother, driven to distraction by the monotony of her housewifely existence, been the principal force behind my father’s acceptance of the Ecuadorian government’s invitation to found the country’s first string quartet? There was no room for emotional ambivalence in my ten-year-old heart. I couldn’t understand that my mother, who had wanted to go on this escapade as much as I had, could also feel regret at leaving her family behind.

For the next three years, while we lived in Quito, my mother oscillated between breathless excitement at the exoticism of it all--snow-capped volcanoes! endless jungles! head-hunting tribes!—and elaborate bouts of homesickness.

I never quite understood what was going on with her, but I sensed that the homesick role was hers to play. By contrast, I sought to distinguish myself by adopting a mask of stoicism. Tears and complaints were not for me--I wasn’t a baby anymore, nor was I sentimental, like a woman. I preferred to mimic my father, and leave the tragic persona to my mother.

And yet, how could I not have been homesick? But nobody asked if I was, and when confronted with my mother’s articulate depictions of her nostalgia, I assumed that mine, if it existed, couldn’t hold a candle to hers.

True, I was sheltered by my parents’ reassuring presence. But once the excitement of being in a foreign place wore off and life settled into a routine, how could I not miss the rhythms of my existence in Catalonia, where each month was marked by some festival, its ritual, and its accompanying dessert?

January was the month when the Three Kings brought me presents and we ate the marzipan-stuffed tortell de reis. February 12^th was the feast of Saint Eulalia, and my mother bought ensaïmadas from the bakery in my honor. On March 19^th, the feast of Saint Joseph, my aunts made crema catalana in celebration of my grandfather.  In April, for Easter, my godmother gave me the mona de Pasqua, a cake topped with chocolate eggs. In May, the month of Our Lady, we ate strawberries. And all summer-long, at my grandparents’ farm, we feasted on melons, peaches, and pears so ripe that their juices ran down my chin and soaked the front of my cotton dress.

All this was gone. And so was the tutelary presence of my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, who had revolved like planets around my sunny childhood, and whose affection, interest, and willingness to entertain me I had taken for granted, just as an infanta assumes the devotion of her courtiers. But that wasn’t all. In the constant hubbub of our extended family, the to-and-fro of visits and phone calls, the telling and retelling of stories, gossip, opinions, advice, and concerns, my relatives had absorbed some of my mother’s emotional energy and distracted her from her focus on me.

Now, without her sisters to argue and shop with, her parents to worry about, and her in-laws to visit, my mother’s attentive gaze, when she wasn’t soaking fruits in permanganate or boiling milk to kill the tropical parasites that threatened us daily, was directed at me. And what she saw was in need of improvement. My baby charms were fading fast, and I was morphing into an icon of preadolescent awkwardness. I was a work in progress, and my mother girded her loins for the challenges that lay ahead.

My mother and I in Quito, 1954

First Communion

“Don’t disturb your mother! She’s embroidering your veil.” It’s August, 1951.There is an old sheet spread on the terrace of my grandparents’ farm house, and my mother sits on a low chair in the center, a billow of white tulle on her lap. She is embroidering a wide border of leaves, tendrils, and flowers around the edge of my First Communion veil, which reaches from my head to my feet. I have been told that in the coming years she will embroider the center, and I will wear this same veil at my wedding.

“Somebody wash this child’s neck, and her feet too. The dressmaker is almost here. She can’t see her like this!” The dressmaker is coming for the final fitting of my white organdy First Communion dress: long sleeves, tiny tucks across the bodice, full gathered skirt all the way to the floor. And, underneath, a long white slip to match.

“Let’s review the Commandments,” my aunt Xin says. “You have your test with Mossèn Ignaci this afternoon.” Mossèn Ignaci, the kindly old priest who married my parents, has acceded to let me make my First Communion early. He has been assured by the family that I am an unusually well-behaved, compliant child, and that I already know my prayers and most of the Catechism, so there is no need to wait for my seventh birthday, which is when, according to the Church, I will attain the age of reason.

In the sacristy, Mossèn Ignaci tests me on the Hail Mary and the Our Father, and also on the commandments about honoring my father and mother, skipping the ones about adultery and coveting my neighbor’s wife. And then we practice the communion itself. He takes an unconsecrated host from a box and puts it on my tongue, explaining that I must let it dissolve instead of chewing it. The little wafer tastes sweet, and before I can swallow it he feeds me another one, and another, as if they were candy, so that I have no choice but to chew them a little bit. 

The day before the ceremony, my father takes me to make my first confession.  I have scoured my brain for sins ahead of time, and have come up with “I have forgotten to say my prayers,” and “I have been distracted at Mass”—sins that will come in handy for something to say during my next fourteen years of weekly confessions.

Mossèn Ignaci is hidden inside the confessional, but I can hear him breathing.  After I finish listing my sins he gives me a penance (three Hail Marys), and absolution. But it’s dark in the confessional, and I can’t tell whether the little door behind the grille is now closed, or still open. Should I leave? I wait patiently until my father, wondering what on earth I could be confessing for such a long while, comes to rescue me.

The next morning, standing in my pristine white shoes, socks, and underpants, I hold up my arms as my aunts slide the chilly, silky long slip over my torso, followed by the crisp white dress which fastens down the back in a row of tiny cloth-covered buttons that look like the mushrooms that come up in the fall after a rain. My hair is arranged in untidy corkscrew curls (“Too much hair!” my aunts exclaim before giving up). Then the magnificently embroidered veil is placed over my head (“It almost cost your mother her eyesight!” they remind me) and secured with a crown of white silk flowers.

My mother’s mother comes in, holding the all-important First Communion medal, a bas-relief ivory Madonna set in gold, hanging from a gold chain which she fastens around my neck. My tiny paternal grandmother totters in on her high heels and gives me my First Communion ring (“a bracelet for your finger”).

Somebody puts white gloves on my hands (“Don’t touch anything!”) and hangs my First Communion bag, filled with little cards commemorating the occasion, from my left wrist. I pick up my First Communion missal, which has mother of pearl covers and a gold-colored clasp, and we are ready to go.

It is a brilliant summer morning, the sun not yet hot. I set out from my grandparents’ house with my parents, my mother’s parents, her two sisters and her brother, my maternal great-aunt and -uncle, and, all the way from Barcelona, my father’s mother and father and his two sisters. We walk solemnly down the dusty road, into the village, past the parish church and the fountain with the seven spigots, then out of the village, past vineyards and wheat fields and garden allotments to the hermitage of Our Lady of the Orchard, where Mossèn Ignaci is waiting.

During Mass, I glance up at the statue of Our Lady of the Orchard, enthroned above the altar. It is a reproduction of the Romanesque original (the one supposedly found up in the elm tree by a shepherd), which was burned during the Spanish Civil War. She sits grave and impassive, her robes arranged in weirdly symmetrical folds, one hand on her Baby and, in the other, the sphere of the world.

I have some trouble managing my outfit: my long skirt catches under my shins when I kneel, and my First Communion bag gets tangled with my veil. At one point, I drop my missal with a clatter onto the stone flags. But the communion itself goes smoothly. I remember not to chew the host and, back in my pew, put my head in my hands as I’ve been taught and try to think about God.

Afterwards we march back to the house, the sun hotter now and everybody hungry because of the pre-communion fast. In the afternoon, the village children arrive and I, still in my long dress, distribute sugar-coated almonds in pale shades of pink, yellow, and blue.

Then comes a special treat: my father’s father, who is part owner of a magic shop in Barcelona, puts on a magic show. The other kids are transfixed as he manipulates playing cards, draws peseta coins out of their ears, and does odd things involving handkerchiefs and red cups and yellow balls. But magic tricks always leave me cold. They remind me of fabric flowers, which only look like the real thing. I’m after genuine magic--the mystery for which there are no words.

At the end of the day, after the children go home and I’m back in my short summer dress and espadrilles, the family sits under the apple tree by the well. I am still high on adrenaline and divine grace, racing around and begging the grownups to play with me. My father’s younger sister, Montserrat, plays hide-and-seek for a while, but then it’s bedtime, and as my mother tucks me in I burst into tears. “What’s the matter? Didn’t you have a wonderful First Communion?” she asks.

“Yes, yes, I did,” I answer.

“Then why are you crying?”

“It’s because I’ll never be able to look forward to making my First Communion, ever again,” I sob.

Which proves that it’s never too soon to learn that the happiest times are those we spend awaiting happiness.

The Madonna in the Tree

That magical summer of 1951 culminated in late August, when I made my first communion in the hermitage dedicated to Our Lady of the Orchards, Nostra Senyora de l’Horta--or, as I thought of her, the Madonna in the Tree. Surrounded by fields, gardens, and fruit trees, the tiny church still stands outside the village where my mother was born.

According to legend, the Madonna was discovered by a shepherd who had been napping under an elm in the middle of the orchard. He woke up and there she was, perched high among the branches. Leaving his sheep behind, the shepherd ran into the village and fetched the priest and the verger who, followed by a crowd of the devout, sped to the orchard, carefully cut down some branches, got the statue down, and carried her in solemn procession to the parish church that presides over the village square.

But the next morning, when the verger went to light the altar candles in preparation for Mass, the statue wasn’t there. Panic ensued. Who had made off with the Madonna—thieves, heretics, the devil himself? The village was searched high and low, from the mansion of the wealthy mule breeder to the hovel of the poorest laborer.

The frantic search continued until, once more, the shepherd arrived panting from the orchard.  “She’s in the tree again, right where I found her yesterday!” he gasped. The priest, the verger, and the congregants hurried to the elm, got the statue down, and returned her to what they believed was the more dignified environment of the village church. But the following morning she was back in her tree.

Worn down by the persistent Madonna, the villagers eventually gave up, and built her a little hermitage in the middle of the orchard, where she has remained ever since.

The orchard stands on ancient Roman soil, and the Romans had inherited from the Greeks the enchanting notion that every aspect of nature—trees, springs, the very air—was inhabited and protected by benevolent deities. Dryads lived in trees, and were said to bleed when the trees were cut down. Oreads haunted the breezes, and naiads swam like minnows in every stream. Even the bees had their special nymphs, the meliae. The earth’s fertility, being especially important, was attended by, among others, Artemis, Cybele, Demeter, Rhea and Hegemone.

I believe that my Madonna too is a member of that committee of goddesses. She is in charge of fruits and flowers but, in that arid climate, she is especially in charge of water. “Have mercy on us and give us rain, since you have the power,” pleads the old hymn that villagers sing on her feast day.

Compared to her naked pagan predecessors, she appears outwardly tamed and Christianized, but my Madonna, and the many like her who dot the Catalan landscape, is a recurrent manifestation of the eternal Mother, the Old Goddess whose fertility even today keeps the universe going. Our Lady of the Orchard bears witness to the human instinct to regard all of nature as animate, and to revere those aspects—air, water, plants—which give us life.

Today, with our eyes fixed on various screens, our ears connected to disembodied voices, and our skin sheltered from contact with the seasons, we need neither walk nor grow our food. We are in danger of forgetting our physical and spiritual dependence on Nature.

 Like the rest of the developed world, Catalonia is overrun with supermarkets and four-lane highways. But out in the countryside, next to a spring or on the side of a mountain, you can still find stone hermitages housing the local version of the Madonna. The ancient polichromed statues, some with dark faces and hands, look solemn and forbidding. Farmers and shepherds once entrusted them with the fertility of fields and ewes, and couples hoping for children still visit them sometimes. But the churches stand mostly empty now, and the old madonnas stare out at the shrinking fields and listen to the hum of distant traffic. Who heeds their message now?

I didn’t know any of this the summer of my first communion. All I knew was that I felt a kinship with the Madonna in the Tree. Like me, who dreaded the return to Barcelona at the end of every summer, she preferred the orchard and the spring, the sheep and the honeybee to the civilized comforts of the village. In the dark, gray days of winter, as I tunneled by metro between my parents’ apartment and my school, I would think of my Madonna in her silent orchard hermitage, listening to the wind and waiting for summer, like me.

Litany

As a musician, my father was seldom home in the evenings, but on his nights off he often led us in saying the Rosary. My mother, her two sisters, and I would sit in the dining room while he walked up and down, beads in hand. The Rosary consists of five Our Fathers and fifty Hail Marys. How long does it take to say all those prayers? If you’re a kid, half your life.

“Why do I have to say those same words over and over?” I ask my mother.

“You’re supposed to meditate on the lives of Jesus and the Virgin Mary,” she says.

“But it’s boring!”

“Shhh. Your father’s about to begin.”

I stare at the bread crumbs from dinner that litter the yellow tiles under the table. The maid is waiting in her room for us to finish saying the Rosary so she can sweep and go to bed. I glance at my mother’s stockings, which she has rolled like donuts around her ankles to keep them from getting runs, and decide that when I’m allowed to wear stockings I will never roll them like that. I envy my father, who is allowed to walk while he prays, instead of having to sit still.

After the last Hail Mary is said, however, there is a reward: the Litany of the Virgin Mary, a list of fifty epithets of the Mother of God, which my father recites in Latin. After each name, we respond in chorus, ora pro nobis (pray for us).

Here is a sample:

Speculum iustitiae (Mirror of justice)

Sedes sapientiae (Seat of wisdom)

Causa nostrae laetitiae (Cause of our joy)

Rosa mystica (Mystical rose)

Turris eburnea (Tower of ivory)

Stella matutina (Morning star)

I don’t know why this list of names thrills me. Years later I realize that they have  something in common with Homeric epithets such as “white-armed Hera,” and “bright-eyed Athena.” At age nine, though, I have not yet heard of Homer, and I don’t know Latin. I can make out a few words, but even if I understood all of them I would find them puzzling: what is a tower of ivory, or a mirror of justice, and what do they have to do with the Virgin Mary?

But I love the rhythm of the Litany, my father with his raspy smoker’s voice pacing in synch with the names, and us responding ora pro nobis, ora pro nobis. On and on go the names, Mother of our Creator, Virgin most powerful….And this  extraordinary collection of praises is dedicated to a woman—one who as a teenager was visited by an angel, which was just the first of a series of amazing things that happened to her.

And now that She is in Heaven, sitting between God the Father and her Son, Jesus, with the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove hovering above her head, She looks down upon me kindly (Virgin most merciful) and with special understanding, because she was once a girl like me.

The presence of this quasi-divine Lady in the heaven of my childhood gives me something that the images of God the Father, with his white beard, and God the Son, with his brown beard, could never give me: a sense of identification with the divine feminine that puts me in the ancient lineage of females—Babylonian girls praying to Ishtar, Egyptian mothers praising Isis, Greek wives sacrificing to Hera—who, from time immemorial, have sought help and consolation from the Mother of us all.

Camels, Not Reindeer

In my Catalan childhood Christmas was a time of manger scenes (the manger left empty until midnight Mass, when the long-awaited  Baby was placed in it); ancient carols (some of them funny, having to do with misbehaving shepherds); and my favorite dessert, turrons d’Alicant, the almond nougat bars that required a hammer to break them into individual portions.

Gifts were out of the question until January 6^th, the feast of the Epiphany, el dia dels Reis. The night before, Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar guided by a star came swaying atop their camels to leave gifts on the balconies of apartment houses all over Barcelona.

As the days after Christmas passed—the feast of the Holy Innocents, those poor babies slaughtered by paranoid Herod; the feast of Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr--my anticipation grew. It was the culmination of a months’ long pregnancy-like state, which began every autumn with my spotting the doll of my dreams in the window of a toy shop.

Like a lover, I would bring up this doll in every conversation, point her out to my mother whenever we passed the toy store, and meditate on her every night before going to sleep. Finally, towards the end of Advent, I would write my letter to the three Kings, humbly imploring them to bring me my longed-for child.

After that, it was out of my hands, and all I could do was pray and wait until the night of January 5^th, when the ceremony of “the laying of the trays” took place.

There were two of these trays, one for the balcony of my grandparents’ apartment, and one for our own balcony. First, we went to my grandparents.  After my grandmother finished entreating my father not to kill himself by working so hard; my father’s younger sisters asked his opinion about some musical performance they’d just heard on the radio; and everyone had a glass of sherry “because it was such a cold night,” I was buttoned into my stiff winter coat and my grandfather flung open the balcony.

My father would lead me out on the balcony and point toward the heavens. “You see that bright star up there? That, I am almost certain, is the star of the Three Kings. It is especially bright to help the camels find our balconies tonight.”

My little black-clad grandmother (she had just lost her eldest son to cancer and malnutrition following the Spanish Civil War) would totter in on her high heels, bearing the tray, which held a dish with three pieces of nougat for the Magi and another with three leaves of lettuce for the camels. She handed me the tray, I set it down carefully on the balcony floor, and we all knelt while my grandfather led us in an Our Father.

Back in our apartment, my parents and I laid out another tray and, after another Our Father, I was sent to bed. There I would lie in a fever of excitement only equaled by what I experienced the night before my daughters’ births. Would the Reis really come, and would I find my doll, my child, on one of those trays in the morning?

Despite the anticipation, I always managed to fall asleep. But one year—I must have been five or six—I awoke in the dark and saw, standing at the foot of my bed, none other than Balthasar, el rei moro, the Moorish king, the most exotic of the three. He had a thin face and dark brown skin, and wore a turban and robe of a fine, scintillating green material. I still remember the look of otherworldly kindness in his eyes.

Although my night visitation only happened once, in the morning there was always the doll. One year it was a rubber doll with a hole in her mouth and another between her thighs. I could pour water out of a tiny baby bottle into the mouth and then experience the thrill of changing diapers. Another year it was a Black doll, dressed in ruffled white organdy. And one year there were two dolls, Pituco and Pituca, with arms and legs made of a spongy material that could be bent in all directions.

  

Those dolls were, without exception, infant or toddler dolls on which I could vent my maternal instincts and practice for what everyone anticipated would be my future career. If someone had handed me a doll with breasts and hips and feet in tiny high-heeled shoes I wouldn’t have known what to do with her. The last thing that Barbie looks like she needs is a mother.

The year I turned eleven we were living in Ecuador. That Christmas there were no grandparents, no turrons or manger scenes.  No laying of trays on January 5th. I was growing faster than my mother could let down the hems of my dresses, and puberty was around the corner. My mother thought it was time to have a talk.

 “You do realize,” she said, “that the gifts of the Magi actually come from the parents?”

“Sure,” I said. “I know. Of course.”

But I was appalled. Appalled that that world of ceremony, mystery, and feverish anticipation--and also the world in which I was la nena, the center of a watchful, loving circle of grandparents and aunts and uncles--had suddenly vanished forever.

 And I was embarrassed, of course, that I was eleven years old and starting to grow breasts and my mother had had to break the news about the Magi. But I was a backward kid, reluctant to grow up. I wonder now if my mother felt sad to dash my illusions, or if she was irritated by my stubborn naivety.

Either way, she did what she had to do, and I’m grateful she spoke up. But around this time of year I always wonder what it would be like to wake up in the night and once again see the Moorish King standing at the foot of my bed.

Francis, It's Not Funny

"Question:  How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?  Answer:  That's not funny!"

Remember the days when we girls were expected to swallow demeaning jokes with a smile, or be accused of lacking a sense of humor?  Remember when being told we were pretty was supposed to make up for being treated as inferior beings?

Now it seems that those days are still with us, at least where Pope Francis is concerned.  In a recent interview, when asked for his opinion on the place of women in the Church, he answers:  "Women are the most beautiful thing God has made.  The Church is a woman.  Church is a feminine word..."

(Why thank you, Francis.  So glad you like our looks.) 

Then he repeats his frequent assertion that "we need a theology of woman."  I wonder who will make up that theology?  Surely not a gaggle of male clerics claiming a special relationship to the Holy Spirit...

When the interviewer asks whether Francis doesn't see "a certain underlying misogyny" in the Church's attitude towards women, the Pope gets nervous and...he makes a joke!  He pretends to justify this misogyny by saying, "The fact is that woman was taken from a rib," then laughs heartily.  And the women of the world are supposed to laugh along with him, or be accused of lacking a sense of humor. 

The journalist, who knows better than to even mention the ordination of women, then asks if he might some day place a woman in an administrative position in the Vatican.  And Francis, still nervous, makes another joke, saying that often priests end up under the authority of their housekeeper.  Ah yes, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world;  the hand that washes the priest's underwear rules the parish.

All this is so familiar, and so sad, not to mention enraging.  Where has Francis been for the last forty years?  How can he be so patronizing, and so naive?  Even more troubling, he presents himself as a champion of the poor and of the environment (he's writing an encyclical on the environment right now) while continuing to condemn artificial contraception as sinful.

My hopes for this pope plummeted when, soon after his election, I read the following quote opposing  Cristina Fernandez Kirchner's victorious bid for the presidency of Argentina:  ”women are naturally helpless to exercise political positions....The natural order and the facts show us that man is the being for politics by excellence; the Scriptures show us that the woman is always the support of the thoughtful man and doer, but nothing more than that.”  http://nbclatino.com/2013/03/14/pope-francis-and-argentinas-kirchner-have-battled-in-past


Nothing more than that--such hope-crushing words for women.  But at least we can take comfort in our beauty.

(You can see the English version of the full interview here.)

Iris On Happiness

The British novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch, wrote, "One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats."  At first this sounds like hedonism with a small "h," possibly resulting in enormous weight gain.  But what Iris is really telling us is to pay attention, and when we do, we discover that most ordinary days are in fact a long succession of small, sometimes tiny but nevertheless pleasurable, treats.

When I was young, I had nothing but disdain for small treats.  I was focused on big ones:  a degree, a job, a mate, a child, a house.  But once those treats are in place, what is left?  One could start all over again:  get another degree, find a new mate, have another child.  But those treats are problematic, and require a lot of energy.

It used to be that people got the big treats and then they died.  Now for most of us there are years and years to fill after the big treats have been bagged. What is left, to ease the string of decades between the age of the big treats and the end of life, is the small stuff.   So it's important to become adept at inventing and identifying small treats for ourselves. 

Sometimes the treats are so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye, and it's a good idea to carry a magnifying lens so as not to miss any that might go unnoticed.  And we need to train ourselves to look forward to our small treats, and then to remember and be grateful for them afterwards.

I stumbled upon this practice all by myself--or perhaps it was divine inspiration--in the darkest times of my CFS.  When the day from dawn to dusk had held nothing but misery and malaise, I would lie in bed in a tangle of frustration, unable to sleep and endlessly rehearsing all the things I hadn't been able to do.  Then one night, to calm myself, I began to go over the last sixteen hours with a mental magnifying glass, starting with getting out of bed in the morning, and noting every single good thing that had happened to me, no matter how small.

It turned out that even a particularly bad day was a succession of continuous small treats.  There were so many, and counting them was so relaxing, that before I knew it I fell asleep.  But while I was going through the process I was amazed at how studded with good things those miserable hours had actually been.

What kind of things? There was the comfort of waking up in a warm house on a cold day, the jade plant blooming next to the sunny window, the spouse's offer to fetch pizza for dinner, the freedom to lie down when I absolutely had to, the dog at my side...these were all, when I focused on them, reasons for happiness and deep gratitude.

In Catholic school we were taught to every night, before going to sleep, make an examination of conscience, reviewing any faults we had committed during the day.  I have since replaced the examination of conscience with the counting of small treats.  The practice of gratitude, because it leads to happiness and contentment and thence to generosity, is just as likely to make me a better person as the awareness of my failings.

So now that the era of big treats is mostly over for me, I lie in bed at night, fingering my day bead by bead, a rosary of continuous small treats.  And long before the end, I always fall asleep.

Sundays At The Church Of The Internet

For the first quarter century of my life, I went to church every Sunday.  I didn't mind the Mass so much, but the sermon did me in.  As a child I fidgeted in the pew, but as soon as I became capable of critical thinking, I fidgeted inside my head.  Proud of my book learning, I passed the time identifying logical fallacies and deploring the oratorical style, or lack thereof, of the man in the pulpit.

After the Ite, missa est released us, I would tear the chapel veil off my head and complain to my mother about yet another ridiculous sermon.  She, who probably had the same objections as I, would counsel humility, the suspension of judgment.  "But," I would counter in full adolescent preen, "if God didn't want me to use it, why did He give me a brain?"

Then for many years I didn't go to church at all.  But when life got difficult and my sense of invulnerability faded, I became aware of an annoying longing for spiritual guidance.  This led me to join crowds of lapsed Catholics and Jews at the local Unitarian church, but my old critical habit soon reared up its wizened head, and I stopped showing up.

After we moved to Vermont I started listening to On Being because it came on NPR while we were eating Sunday breakfast.  And because I usually missed part of it while I was out feeding the chickens I would later, when I thought of it, go to the website.

And I was off.  With the wind of the Holy Ghost in my sails, I discovered Viktor Frankl,  Richard Rohr, Pema Chodron, Sylvia Boorstein.  Eckart Tolle, who looks like a Dark Forest elf, reminds me of the German nuns who were my first teachers.  Also, he owns a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.  Do these sound like frivolous reasons to listen to a spiritual teacher?  If those priests of my childhood had owned a dog--or had a wife and children--I might have understood them better.

The vagaries of links led me to someone I would never have looked up, Geneen Roth, who lost all her money to Bernie Madoff and wrote beautifully about it, and to the illustrator Jennifer Orkin Lewis, whose works make me want to draw, or write, or something...

I know all too well the orthodox rebuttal to my digital spiritual wanderings.  I am picking and choosing what feels right--as opposed to what IS right--which is utterly non-Catholic.  But I'm not so sure about that.  No Sunday sermon on the dangers of mortal sin was as stark as Pema Chodron's message about the need to accept the impermanence of all things, to give up hope for good.

These digital homilies are hardly touchy-feely--at least the ones I read.  They deal with the inevitability of suffering and the need to be present, because the present is all we have.  And if an internet sermon makes me want to write or draw or stop thinking for a minute and just look into the green woods, isn't that all God's work?

Dear Pope Francis...

I had not held out much hope for the election results, but for about five minutes after the announcement that you would be the new pope I felt a surge of optimism.  I liked it that you had named yourself after everybody's favorite saint, who despised the trappings of wealth and authority and got down to bare essentials.  I liked hearing about the small Buenos Aires apartment which you chose over the episcopal palace and where you cooked your own meals.  I could just see you riding the bus to work so you could give to the poor the money you saved by leaving the limo in the garage.  And I liked it that you are a Jesuit, which supposedly means that you know how to use your mind.

But with the second wave of news reports, my optimism faded.  I am willing to suspend judgment on your supposed silence during the military dictatorship in your country.  It can take a long time after such periods to decipher who did or did not do what to whom.  But I cannot get past your opposition to the legalization of gay marriage, nor your opposition to Argentina's president, Cristina Fernandez Kirchner, on the grounds that ”women are naturally helpless to exercise political positions....The natural order and the facts show us that man is the being for politics by excellence; the Scriptures show us that the woman is always the support of the thoughtful man and doer, but nothing more than that.”  http://nbclatino.com/2013/03/14/pope-francis-and-argentinas-kirchner-have-battled-in-past

Above all, I cannot stomach your supposed compassion for the poor on the one hand and your opposition to birth control on the other.  The poor have a lot of needs:  for food, housing, education, honorable work.  But one thing they do not need more of is children.

Can you not see that the Church's traditional prohibition against contraception is a remnant from a time when the survival of the species necessitated every woman to give birth as many times as her body could bear?  How can you not realize that in this century the very reverse is true, that the welfare of humanity and of the planet hinges on people having fewer babies?  What do you suppose Christ would say to the desperate mothers and their starving infants if He were walking around the slums of Lima and Port Au Prince these days?

The birth control prohibition, back when it had very personal implications for me, caused me to leave the Church.  I had been brought up too strictly to embrace cafeteria Catholicism, the kind that says "I'll use contraceptives but still go to Communion when I feel like it."

I've been trying to find a way back ever since.  I've been looking for a chink, no matter how small, that would let me squeeze back into the cloister.  But from what I can see so far, Francis, the stone wall is thicker than ever, and all the chinks freshly mortared.

Some Catholic Reflections On An Early Spring

As many of you know, I am a former Catholic--or rather a lapsed Catholic,  since few people ever succeed in ridding themselves completely of Holy Mother Church's hold on their psyches.  I ceased practicing in my twenties, since I couldn't go along with the Church's position on birth control and had been taught that a cafeteria-style Catholicism was worse than no Catholicism at all.  But I can still chant the Credo in latin, and will do so at the drop of a hat.

The imprint goes much deeper than Gregorian chant and the smell of beeswax candles, however.  It is my suppressed Catholicism, for instance, that is responsible for my tendency to imbue everyday happenings with a religious significance.  Take, for instance, this early spring, which has caused maple sugaring to begin a full three weeks ahead of schedule. 

I know many people who glory in this sort of weather, who are grateful to be able to get outdoors and start raking the hay mulch off the flower beds--a task that in normal years they couldn't even begin to think about until April.  I, on the other hand, view this warmth with deep suspicion.  For one thing, we don't deserve it.  We don't deserve it because we haven't earned it by three good months of snow-shoveling, fire-stoking, and long-underwear-wearing.  There have been no blizzards, no cabin fever, and thus none of that bursting out of doors on the first day the thermometer hits 32F to fling spinach seeds on the still snow-covered garden.  The prizes that aren't sacrificed and waited for are hardly worth the winning.  It is by our sufferings in this vale of tears that we earn eternal life, no?

Furthermore, I think this early spring is the first stage of something we have earned:  a severe punishment, in the form of global warming, for our sins against the earth.  Hildegard of Bingen knew what she was talking about, back in the 12th century, when she said:  

Now in the people that were meant to be green there is no more life of any kind. There is only shriveled barrenness. The winds are burdened by the utterly awful stink of evil, selfish goings-on. Thunderstorms menace. The air belches out the filthy uncleanliness of the peoples. The earth should not be injured! The earth must not be destroyed!

To distract myself from these dire thoughts, yesterday I pruned my two little apple trees.  I was shocked, when I took off the first "sucker," to see how much green there was under the bark.  The sap had certainly been running, and I hoped I was not too late with my shears.  But I finished the job anyway, sculpting the trees by cutting away the upright-growing branches and preserving the ones that came off the trunk at a wide angle, and snipping off the skinny little twigs that would get in the way of a thrown cat (if an apple tree has been properly pruned, you should be able to throw a cat through its branches).

And here again I found myself having Catholic thoughts--all this cutting and purifying and inflicting pain (I hope not much) in the hopes of a glorious future harvest reminded me of going to confession, where in exchange for the pain of telling your sins to a stranger you are left feeling cleansed and full of hope.

Speaking of which, as soon as it stops raining, I will plant my spinach, which mundane act will not fail to remind me that by doing my little bit to minimize the "shriveled barrenness" of the earth I will perhaps save my life, and possibly even my soul.

Forgiving Our Mothers

Went to a meeting of women of a certain age yesterday to talk about mothers and daughters.  The room was crowded, and  I couldn't help wondering what an equivalent meeting for men would have been like.  Would guys have showed up in such numbers on a Sunday afternoon?  Would they have told intimate stories about their fathers?

In this meeting, the stories came pouring out. There was the woman who, the night before her mother died, dreamed that she was carrying her mother down a path towards a bridge whose other side was obscured by clouds;  the woman whose mother could not attend her daughter's college graduation because she was giving birth to her fourteenth child;  the woman (several women) who felt abandoned by her mother.  Finally, there was the woman who, try as she might, could not bring herself to forgive her mother. The room had lots of advice for her, basically having to do with letting go of her feelings so she could get on with her life.  Then, as the meeting was about to end, one woman spoke up "You can't just think about forgiveness."  She clasped her hands to her bosom, "Forgiveness has to come from the heart."

What?

Talk about a perpetual guilt machine.  I can imagine the unforgiving woman beating herself up for the rest of her life, saying "But I don't feel forgiveness towards my mother."  Paradoxically, my often guilt-inducing Catholic education could have come to the rescue, had I had a chance to speak.  "Feelings don't have anything to do with it," I would have told her.  "All you need is the intention to forgive.  Make an act of the will.  Act as though you have forgiven, and things will take care of themselves."

There's nothing we can do about our feelings.  Resentment, hatred, gluttony, envy, lust keep endlessly erupting out of that hidden volcano we all carry inside.  They appear uninvited, sometimes a trickle,  sometimes a torrent.  And sometimes they vanish for good.

The only thing we can control is our actions. The practice of acting as though one has forgiven reminds me of the loving-kindness practice in Buddhism.  You keep repeating "may all beings be safe, may all beings be happy..." and eventually you may end up feeling kindly towards your worst enemy.  But it's o.k. if the feeling doesn't come, as long as the intention is there.

This approach to morality has helped in my own dealings with my mother.  I can recall things my mother did or said that still arouse less-than-loving feelings in me.  But in my mind and with my will I have forgiven her, and thus am spared the burden of guilt.

The process of forgiving my mother has been assisted by my being the mother of adult children--daughters at that.  How can anybody who has bumbled and improvised her way through motherhood, armed with nothing but luck and good intentions, see herself through the eyes of her grown daughters and not cast a newly indulgent eye on her own mother?  In other words, let her who is without guilt cast the first stone...

Despite my refusal to cast stones, I'm sorry to say, the resentment volcano still erupts.  "Why  did she...?   How on earth could she...?  Didn't she see that I...?"  On and on, ad infinite nauseam.  Isn't it time I got over this, I wonder?  Will it ever go away? 

I am beginning to suspect that this particular volcano will never go completely dormant.  But after yesterday's meeting, hearing all those stories, at least I know that mine is not the only volcano that's still sputtering away.

Sculpture That Spooks

Phyllis Kulmatiski  , who makes beautiful figurative sculptures inspired by Romanesque art, posted an  article by Michael Kimmelman in which he laments the near-oblivion into which traditional European pre-modern sculpture has fallen.

Baudelaire seems to have put his finger on what bothers us moderns about figurative sculpture when he called it “Carib art,” by which he meant art that is too close to its primitive, religious, animistic roots.  Somewhere inside our brains, we all still carry  the three-year-old who endowed dolls and teddy bears with souls and personalities, just as we still carry the paleolithic carver who believed that his round little "Venuses" had the power to ensure the fertility of bison, reindeer, and women.

Because three-dimensional figures touch us at a level we would rather not acknowledge, we turn away from them, and won't have them in the house.  Interestingly, we are more comfortable with sculptures in the garden--that middle ground between the wildness of Nature and the civilized space of the house--where mystery and imagination are still allowed to have some play.

Me, I am not spooked by figurative sculpture.  In Spain in the 1950s, religious sculptures were household objects as common as soup tureens.  Every room of the house had its appropriate statue.  A crucifix hung above my parents' bed;  a wooden carving of the Sacred Heart presided over the dining room;  a terracotta Immaculate Conception stood on my dresser.  At Christmas, our Nativity scene included, in addition to the Holy Family, tiny painted clay figures of kings, shepherds and peasants with their retinues of camels, sheep, cows, geese, chickens, and pigs.

Next door to our apartment building there was a statuary maker, and I could watch the progress of his work every day on my way to and from school.  On Sunday, in church, there were statues everywhere, and I used to imagine that at night, when the great doors were closed and the church was dark except for the lamp that burned perpetually in front of the Blessed Sacrament, Saint Joseph with the infant Jesus in his arms came down from his plinth and went to visit his wife on her altar, and Saint Francis and Saint Theresa walked around in their brown habits, talking quietly and breathing the incense-saturated air.

No wonder Luther banned sculptures from his church.

Not long after I was married, as my father lay dying, my mother took down the crucifix above their bed--the crucifix, she reminded me, under which I was conceived--and gave it to me, to hang over my marriage bed.  As crucifixes go, this one was pretty subdued.  Both the cross and the corpus were metal, and the look was stylized and vaguely Byzantine.

I thanked my parents and put the crucifix in my dresser drawer, under a stack of sweaters, where it lies to this day.  I never could bring myself to hang it over our bed.  I found it...spooky.

Pema Chodron To The Rescue

A friend recently told me that Pema Chodron, the renowned Buddhist nun, writer and meditation teacher, has CFS.  As soon as I heard this I ran to the computer.  "This," I told myself, "is too good to be true.  I've been waiting all these years for someone with a real understanding of the illness to shed some light on the spiritual aspects of  life with CFS, and it turns out that this deeply wise woman is struggling with it herself.  If anybody can show me how to deal with CFS, Pema can."

Google did not disappoint.  It gave me a number of sources--interviews and biographical articles--that confirmed that Pema Chodron does indeed have CFS.  Furthermore, she was diagnosed the same year as I, 1994, and like me her symptoms had begun to appear gradually several years earlier (the more typical pattern for the illness is the sudden onset of symptoms).

From Pema herself, however, regarding CFS there were only some quotes from a letter that she wrote to a fellow sufferer.  This is what she says:

 The key to working with what is so deeply unwanted, is to let go of the ideas...about how we shouldn't be sick and what will happen to us if we remain sick. Somehow we have to respect the illness, welcome it, enter into it...we surrender and say, okay, what have you to teach me...about letting go of control, about slowing down...about tasting the full experience of a moment...the light, the sound, the quality of our mood, of our pain, the sight of dust or birds or nothing special...respecting all that. It's a kind of death, this illness, the best kind of death if we'll let it be. It's the death of old stuck patterns and opinions and habits and it makes way for something new to be born in us.

I must confess that I was disappointed.  Her words struck me as generic Buddhist advice on how to deal with life and its inevitable contretemps.

But then, as if on cue, I went into another relapse, a quite severe one that kept me essentially bed-ridden for three days.  In my thick mental fog, I tried to remember Pema's words, but all I could recall  was, "it's a kind of death, this illness...."

Gradually, however, something else came back to me--the part about "tasting the full experience of the moment."  In my case, the full experience of the moment had to do with a long list of things that I dearly wanted to do (pick peas, walk the dogs, redesign this blog, start a new clay piece, have lunch with a friend) but couldn't, and heavy feelings of the futility of undertaking any project, since I never know when I will be grounded by a relapse.

In the past, my strategy has been to try my best not to think about all the things that I need/want to be doing, and especially not to contemplate the feelings of futility and hopelesness about ever accomplishing anything of even the smallest significance.  This time, instead, I let myself feel it all, particularly the despairing part.  "I am feeling that it's no use starting another clay piece," I said to myself, "since I've been having such frequent relapses that it will probably take me forever to finish it."  And, when the next feeling arrived:  "Now I'm laughing bitterly at myself for even thinking of redesigning my blog, since I can't even manage to post regularly on it."  And then:  "Now I'm having that familiar dread of committing to anything, since I to have to beg off so often."

Well, it was a long three days, and I can't say that they were easy to live through.  But with Pema's words swirling through my brain, this time the bad feelings, instead of appearing as accurate perceptions of reality,  seemed discrete and detached from reality--as if they had quotation marks around them--and didn't overwhelm me so completely.

The relapse eventually faded, as I knew it would.  Sooner or later it will return, as it always does.  Better not attach to feeling better.  Better learn to respect the illness, as Pema advises.  Better let it become "the best kind of death," if there is such a thing.

All this has an oddly Catholic ring to me:  the value of resignation, the idea that pain is an aid to salvation.  Maybe those first twenty years of my life, spent in an atsmophere of beeswax and incense, are going to come in handy now, after all.  How the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, the Sisters of Mercy, and the Benedictines who taught me from first grade through high school would chortle if they knew that it took a Buddhist nun to get me thinking this way again.

A Spring Day's Thoughts About Death

Today I accompanied my spouse to have one of those tests that, according to the medical establishment, ensures that adults of a certain age will stave off death until...whenever.

In the waiting room, I thought about the situation.  Here I was, sitting comfortably and assuming that after the procedure we would drive home and have lunch and a nap and then get on with our lives.  But what if the procedure took longer than expected, and then I was called into another room, and had to wait for the doctor, and he finally came and made sure I was sitting down before he said the unthinkable?  It was entirely possible.  After all, that is what these tests on asymptomatic people are for.

Year after year, as I tie on the soft cotton gown in preparation for my regular mammogram, the same thoughts run through my head:  this is no big deal;  on the other hand....

We carry the seeds of our own death inside our body.  They are waiting for the right combination of light, temperature, hormones and whatever else to put out their malignant rootlets and cotyledons and eventually bloom and destroy us.  And all that doctors can do is to try their best to uproot these sprouts before they do us in, the way I pull up garden weeds in the spring before they get big.

Meditations on mortality are not new to me.  Decades before I qualified for a mammogram I would kneel at the altar rail once a year to hear the priest mutter "pulvus eris, et pulvus reverteris" ("thou art dust...") as he traced an ashen cross on my forehead.  In school, beginning at age twelve, we had annual spiritual retreats whose purpose was to remind us that, despite our surging hormones, we were vowed to death.  And before that, shortly after I learned to speak, I was taught to ask the Mother of God morning and night to pray for me now, and at the hour of my death, amen.

In this secular age, it is up to the medical establishment to remind us, through their choreography of blood tests, colonoscopies, EEGs, mammograms and sonograms, that we are dust.  They don't put it that way, of course, it being their purpose to stave off as long as possible the dwindling into dust.  But as we sit in waiting rooms reading cheery articles about eating healthy and staying young through exercise, the hour of dust grows closer every day.

The problem with the medical approach is that it doesn't tell us what to do about the eventual turning into dust--it just tries to postpone it for as long as possible.  But we all know that one day, no matter how carefully we have exercised, eaten anti-oxidants, and gone for check-ups, the doctor will call us in and make sure we're sitting down before he speaks.

The approach I knew in my early years, on the other hand, was full of helpful hints.  No matter how young you were, you became aware of the inevitability of death.  Having done that, you could devote yourself to ensuring that what came after death would be as good as possible (and it could, you were told, be very good).  And at any moment you could pray for assistance, as in "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and in the hour of our death.  Amen."

We  are in such an in-between era.  The old solutions are gone, for the most part, and what do we have in their stead?  Tests and more tests, and an anti-oxidant-rich diet, and lots of exercise....

BTW, my spouse is fine.  Or I wouldn't be writing this.