Were there ever?
Yes, when I was growing up in the forties and fifties, there absolutely were. Abundant in our catechisms and missals, the Sunday sermons, the Catholic school classrooms where we knelt by our desks for prayers several times a day, the pronouncements about what was right and would get us to heaven, they gave us a facile map to follow. “Sister says,” was a common mantra we learned to accept because our parents insisted we must. Questioning the priests and nuns who ruled our worlds was bad, maybe even sinful.
I know it sounds crazy to you who did not grow up in that naïve and simplistic way. But for us, it was real, and actually kind of comforting. “Say five Hail Marys and make a good act of contrition,” said the priests in our weekly confessions. All our sins were quickly wiped away and we could start over again with our souls cleansed of dirty stuff. Tallying up novenas and yes, “ejaculations” (!) like the phrases “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” and “Little Flower, in this hour show your power,” gave us early entry into Purgatory, allowed us to avoid Hell, though not quite Heaven-ready.
There were rules for every aspect of our lives, even the hereafter.
So reassuring. So painless. So easy.
In the liberating sixties, many of us slowly got the courage to acknowledge how completely crazy this way of thinking and being was. Everyone was questioning everything, even in our Catholic world. Especially birth control and how bad they’d told us sex was, when we had proof positive from our experience of both how freeing it was, to say, enough!
At least, I did, furiously walking out of church in 1970 after the sermon condemning abortion, how the blood of unborn babies was on the hands and souls of the doctors and nurses that performed them. And in the ensuing decades my rage at the lies I was told for so many years escalated, as I was faced with the hard truths of social injustice, rank hypocrisy in organized religion, government and education, the long history of women’s second-class status, abuse and harassment that continued to infuse contemporary society.
But today in our complex and confusing world, there are no more easy answers. In fact, not any answers. And even more questions.
When I began this post a few weeks ago, I had planned to quote from Margaret Renkl’s beautiful essay in the New York Times, “I Don’t Want to Spend the Rest of My Days Grieving,” about life’s brevity, gratitude for the beauty around us, and “the need to attend to what is not dying.” I was feeling lighter, wanting to write my own similar reflections in the face of so much sadness in the world, experience a gentle breeze in the stormy winds of the daily news.
But since then, there has been a massive earthquake in Haiti, the sickening tumble of New York’s governor, the Covid surge and worry about breakthrough infections growing stronger, and now this horrifying situation in Afghanistan.
It’s hard to breathe anymore.
This morning Maureen Dowd had a powerful-op ed piece in the NYT (as hers usually are) in which she references “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats, a favorite of my English major years. And, it turns out, of Biden’s. How true the words for his rapid falling from grace, and for all that is happening now:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
As Haitians shelter under miserable tarps, thousand of unvaccinated die in hospitals supported by exhausted medical staff and more breakthrough infections are reported every day, as horrific reports and images surface by the hour of the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, the complete fallibility in our government’s ability to protect us is exposed.
The centre cannot hold.
I seem to repeatedly end up with the same message in these posts, despite badly wanting a different one. I, like many of you, cannot bear to keep facing these terrible facts, but nor should we turn away from them. They are our present moment, but yes, we must find a balance.
Last Sunday we went to see a magnificent outdoor performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear. I scribbled two lines on my program that seemed to invite that balance, despite, or maybe because of, their seemingly opposing messages.
How light and portable my pain seems now.
The weight of this time we must obey.
I’m trying to figure out how to digest those lines, integrate them into my own experience of the cascading catastrophes that continue to assault us daily. And sending a warm hug to all of you. Because right now, love is the only answer I can think of that matters.
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Here are the references to Renkl’s essay and Dowd’s op-ed, as well as a way to contribute to a charity in Haiti sent by one of my college classmates who has been long involved in work there:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/opinion/nashville-summer.html?referringSource=articleShare
From Michele: If you can help, even in a small way, please go online to NDMVA.org and click Donate. There is a place on the form to designate the money for the Notre Dame Boulangerie. The money goes directly to the organization for this Haiti project.