Overblown catholic devotion

The grandmum of my chidlhood friend had been raised entirely by nuns. Her house was full of reproductions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and that sort of stuff. Sometimes my friend and I would stay with her for a week during the long summer vacations. There was always an atmosphere of deep piety. I've got memories of my friend and I, aged six, crossing ourselves in the car at every roadside crucifx. I tried that with my parents a few times, it freaked them out a little, but they understood that if they tried to say anything, that would just make me want to do it more, so they let it slide.

So anyway, my friend's grandad died, and her grandmum came to live with them. My friend's dad had always been more of a viveur, and not very churchy at all. He had no problem with his wife's education, but that was her thing. When the grandmum started to live with them she brought her devotional practices with her, possibly reinforced by the recent loss of her husband. My friend's dad found this very hard to live with but his wife supported her mum. He became very restless. I remember him having a drink at our house and saying "this is not me".

Eventually, he started thinking about escaping. This was in part enabled by my own parents getting a divorce around that time. Suddenly, it could be done, he could get out. So my friend's mum had to cope with an aging relative and a husband who wanted out. It drove her nuts because she loved her husband and her mum. At that time she behaved pretty phony but still very churchy. She dropped the ball with the kids, and the youngest ones started to behave (relatively) wildly.

Her husband wanted a divorce, but she didn't. He was the only man she'd ever loved, and she could not bear losing him. But he really wanted out, left the home and started an affair. Under French law, you can get a divorce without the consent of both parties if you can prove that you have been separated for six years. So he was staying out of town on purpose, so he could get that divorce. But all the time he didn't live too far, so he could keep an eye on the teenage kids, over whom he had some mild authority.

About two years ago, my friend visited me at my mums'. She noticed the renaissance paintings on the wall, one of the virgin, and one of the donna velata. The donna velata isn't the virgin, it is quite possibly a woman whom Raphael was in love with, but who was married to someone else (hence the veil). I will never forget my friend's fear: not you?!? she asked, visibly scared by the virgin on the wall. She thought I'd gone all devotional too. Don't worry, I said, I just like the aesthetics, it makes me look cultured, and it fits in with the cavernous basement room, but really these are just cuts from a two-euros discounted art book. She looked a bit suspicious. I had noticed the fear, so I asked, why would that be bad? How's your mum?

It turned out that her mum is living is a small flat packed full of devotional paintings and rosaries and that sort of stuff, about twenty miles from our town. Now having lost both her parents, her husband and the kids who think she's gone weird, she's struggling to keep a job. My mum never sees her anymore. She's big on religious retreats, and the like.

My reason for writing this post is the diffuse sense of ressentment I harbour for our town's parish priest. He welcomed my friend's mum's overblown piety, right at the beginning when it was causing trouble in her marriage. In a town full of not-so-religious nominals, he was thrilled to encounter some of this full-scale devotional stuff that you encounter only in the older generations, or within the secluded atmosphere of a seminary. So he encouraged the zillions masses, the holy water and the retreats.

I have a massive fondness for the priest my friend and I grew up with, but he had been replaced by this new guy. I think that the original priest, who was from the area and knew his parishioner's stories, would have acted very differently. He would have kept my friend's mum from all this devotional nonsense because he also knew her husband, liked him and understood him. This overblown zealotry destroys families. As it happens, families close to me.

Humility goes out the window

About a week ago, I told H. that one of his dissertation's key concepts had not been originated by the trendy British pastor who popularised it, but by an obscure feminist theologian back in the eighties. And I was right.

Concise quote of the day

We often choose peace over justice, to be sure, but they are not the same. To confuse them is simply to invite passive injustice. -Judith Sklar in The Faces of Injustice.

Holloway on postmodern complexity

Complexity becomes the great alibi, both scientifically and morally. The world is so complex that we can think of it only in terms of fragmented narratives or, much more common in spite of the post-modernist fashion, in terms of positive and positivist case studies. The world is so complex that I cannot accept any moral responsibility for its development. Morality retracts: morality is about being good to the people around me, beyond that immediate circle the world is too complex, the relation between actions and consequences too complicated. When I stop my car at the traffic lights (for most academics in Mexico are of the car-driving class), I give (or do not give) a peso to the people begging there, but I do not ask what it is about the organisation of the world that creates more and more misery and how that organisation can be changed. That sort of question has become both morally and scientifically ridiculous. What is the point of asking it when we know that there is no answer?

- John Holloway, in Zapatismo and the Social Sciences.

The wealth you inherit and the people you can depend on

In a previous post, I was reflecting on the movie City of Joy, and observing that the protagonist, Dr. Max, could not undo his privilege. For if he ever got in trouble, if he ever wanted to get out, help (i.e. his family and friends) would only be a phone call away.

I’ve heard of guys who became priests because money was not a concern (yet I'm not in their head, and I hope I'm wrong). They did not need to make a good salary because their family was independently wealthy. So if they were quite churchy and they liked theology and singing hymns, they could just go for it. They could afford to make little money because they were set to inherit a lot of it anyway. If that wasn’t disturbing enough, they would also go through life thinking that they have made an enormous, painful sacrifice by not pursuing a more lucrative career: all this great earning potential they’ve given up!

But at the end of the day I’m in the same boat, because I too have a very supportive family and I too will one day inherit their accumulated wealth. I would like to think that I won’t touch it with a bargepole but we’re not there yet. And meanwhile, I will probably never be truly vulnerable. I don’t need to build bigger barns; my family does it for me. But since I already benefit from the “security” they created, it would be hypocritical to affirm that I don’t put my trust in riches.

This moneyed piety is getting on my nerves. I need more words and more concepts for the things I observe and, stupidly, I rely on Google. Google didn’t find fuck about the “revolutionary ethos”, and it didn’t find anything about “moneyed piety” either. Apart from poserorprophet (where I got the concept from to begin with) and one loony whose prose doesn’t make sense. Rats. I’m going to have to do the conceptualising on my own.

I miss you

As is apparent from these pages, I've spent the last couple of months getting pretty mistrustful of God for not stepping in more against human suffering. But once again Nakedpastor captured my sentiment better than I did. David posted this twenty days ago and it has stayed with me since.

Edit (Sept. 2nd): Today, I was browsing my enormous pile of notes in order to further enrich my thesis narrative. I had condensed all my findings into soundbites, and then weaved the soundbites into storylines, so it had been a while since I had actually worked with my primary notes.

I liked working with my notes again. This is stuff that was gathered between October 2005 and October 2006, so it reminded me of the person I was then. By chance I found an old to-do-list on which I'd collected very valuable information. That info was easily retrievable elsewhere, but it would have taken some time.

So I was pleased. Handel's messiah pleased. For fun I played the hallelujah chorus on Deezer. It had the same effect. I used to love Handel and listen to it quite a bit, but I haven't done so in a couple of years. And like my notes, it transported me back a few years, when I wasn't mistrustful and cynical and lost. It's like the "system restore" function on a computer, I get to go back to the configuration as it was at a point in the past. Me two years ago, who would wake up and feel like singing to God all day long. This is weird.

Meet thy neighbour

We have never met H’s neighbour. There were some stories circulating at the pub that he is a bit weird, that his daughter smokes quite a lot of pot and that once, last year, they had some problems with rats. Don’t get me wrong, we are not being cautious or keeping to ourselves, if we had even bumped into him we would have said hello, we just never saw him (or at least I never did).

Last week a friend of the neighbour’s daughter gave H. a bit more background. The man had been a successful academic, but was involved in a car accident that killed his wife when the daughter was a baby. He never recovered and basically began to drink. That was more than 25 years ago.

Oh God, I thought. This situation clearly warranted a lot of accompaniment before it got out of hand. Why did his community let that happen? Twenty five years of isolation and alcohol addiction? And where were the bloody Christians?

They were trapped in liberal norms that warrant that we simply don’t get involved in strangers’ lives. Trapped in a neoliberal panopticon of sorts. Trapped in a dis-membered church. They were just as isolated as he was.

And I too am trapped in these norms. I too operate within their bounds. Sometimes I try to budge these norms a bit, I try to be approachable. If people want my company, they can have it. But I’d still feel weird knocking on this guy’s door. I feel compelled to function within the realm of what’s expected.

Incidentally, I think that this might be one of the reasons why Western Christians "worry" so much about the homeless. The homeless’ plight is highly visible; it seems to call for immediate action. When travelling to remote places in the countryside, you’ll find that socially-minded people "worry" about the inner-city ghettos. The visible poverty functions as a reminder that we should be doing more to help.

But the sad truth is that we simply don’t have fellowship at all, within or outside the church. Without fellowship, the visible poverty is the only one we’ll see, and the only one we’ll seek to intervene against.

If you’ve been following this blog for a little while you’ll have gathered that my favourite sport these days is to communicate to “the mainstream church” exactly what I think of it. So I wondered, what was the mainstream church going to do in our neighbour’s case?

Turns out that it doesn’t take all that much for the church to be interested in your fate, but they need to know about you, and they also need a half-decent reason to suppose that you would welcome their help.

All it actually takes for people to get a visit from their chaplain when –say- they’re in hospital is to specify on a form that their religious affiliation is Anglican, or Catholic, or Presbyterian or whatever. Similarly, if they’ve seen you in church maybe just a couple of times, and someone informs them of the stuff you’re going through, they can (and will) get in touch. In its own clumsy ways, the mainstream church is also trying to be present and to not let people face these kinds of tragedies on their own.

But at the end of the day, what worries me is that I don’t have a clue how to communicate with H’s neighbour without breaching the usual social norms of polite indifference.