Sense and Sensibility

And You Thought ‘The Magdalene Sisters’ Was Bad

I wanted to be furious at “Angels and Demons.”

I wanted to be angry because I was tired of the hoary anti-Catholic hokum that Dan Brown and Ron Howard keep spewing to captive audiences. I couldn’t understand why audiences would rather gobble up convoluted conspiracy theories than nibble on a few facts. It isn’t like the Roman Catholic Church was bereft of juicy indignities. (Renaissance Rome, anyone?)

But Brown’s incense-and-intrigue Gothicism was beginning to grate. First, because it inflamed what historian Arthur Schlesinger once called “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” anti-Catholicism; and second, because its slipshod approach to history is one too many Americans accept as Gospel.

I was actually finding myself in sympathy with the tetchy William Donahue of the Catholic League, who accused Ron Howard, director of “The DaVinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” of “smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales.”

And then the report came out.

The report is the “Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse,” a 2,600-page Gothic saga of depravity, dread and shame that rivals anything Brown could produce. It lays bare 60-years of appalling abuse by priests and nuns on tens of thousands of children placed in their care.

The report, nine years in the making,  details a climate of terror “created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment,” rampant in institutions for the destitute and unwanted. These were the places you were sent if you were poor, or your parents were ill. These were places you to which you were dispatched if your mother committed adultery or beat you with a broom. These were the places you were sent to be helped.

These were the places that would erase your shame.

What happened in these foul institutions? According to the report:

 Nuns stripped children naked and beat them with pokers. Children were punched, flogged and set upon by dogs, according to the report. They were routinely forced to perform oral sex. One of the more than 1,000 anonymous victims reported being “tied to a cross and raped whilst others masturbated at the side.” Girls were molested in confessionals – one, even on an altar.

The abuse, which the report characterized as “endemic,” occurred with the collusion of the Irish Department of Education, which the report authors’ condemned as “toothless.” One of the members of the report’s investigating committee resigned, accusing the education department of stonewalling.

The release of the report, which covers a period between the 1930s and the 1990s, was fiercely debated. The Christian Brothers, the largest provider of residential care for boys, filed a successful lawsuit to suppress the abusers’ names. We don’t know their names But they sound something like this: Monsters. Criminals. Rapists. Hypocrites.

I want to be angry at Dan Brown but his silly contrivances and pallid “illuminati” conspirators seem like cartoon characters compared to the clerics of Ireland. Apologists will haul out their calculators and tell you that the percentage of abusive priests isn’t any worse that garbage collectors, or paralegals or newspaper columnists.

But the people who should speak up loudest about this anathema are not the atheists or the Darwinists or the secular humanists. They are Catholics – specifically Irish-Catholics, like myself – who cannot help but be revolted, incensed and humiliated by priests, brothers and nuns who gutted the childhoods of Irish children and left them unable to tell  whether these men and women of God were angels – or demons.

Easter Lilies and the New Frugality

At Easter, the lilies appear.

They cluster under the gray, bud-less trees, wrapped in silly, fluorescent foil, their blossoms anomalous and expectant, a bit of an absurdity in New England’s brisk, mucky spring. Like their fat, squat cousins, the pansy, now assembling in the region’s otherwise bare garden centers, their appearance strikes me as ridiculous and hopeful. We need a little color these days, after this long winter of discontent.

Easter is all about hope and new beginnings, as is Passover, the Jewish celebration with which today is so intimately entwined. In Time magazine, I read that Americans need to hit the “reset” button, after a gluttonous spree in which our waistlines expanded while our savings shrank. In Forbes, I read about “America’s New Frugality,” a slogan inspired by the seismic 1 percent drop in consumer spending last December. Personal spending, the magazine reported, rose a “mere” 3.6 percent last year, the smallest gain since 1961.

For most of the last century, hope has meant more. Now it is supposed to mean less.

But whether a 21^st century American, raised in a home twice as big as that of his parents, shepherded around in cars as big as motorboats, suckled on 157 television stations and two dozen electronic gadgets, can rein it in is anybody’s guess.

After all, we’re talking about a country whose average home has three televisions, two DVD players or recorders, 1.16 digital cameras, one desktop computer and two cell phones. This country now spends an extra $200 it never spent before on these electronic gee-gaws, which may explain how per capita consumption in the last 20 years ballooned 45 percent.

Every year, the average American throws out 68 pounds of textiles. One fashion designer estimates that the typical American woman owns more than $600 worth of clothing she has not worn in the last year. We are similarly imprudent with food. One government funded study found that 14 percent of the garbage we throw out is perfectly good food, in its original packaging, not out of date – perfect, in other words, for a food pantry near you.

Fatally, among those we classify as poor, money is squandered impetuously and foolishly. Some 97 percent of Americans the Census Bureau classifies as poor own a color TV. Three quarters of the poor have air-conditioning, a VCR and a DVD player. Conversely, 61 percent poor families have no books in their homes.

No books.

This year, 18 million people worldwide will die because they don’t have enough food. If you want to feel a little sheepish about your own economic anxieties, read “The Life You Can Save,” by Peter Singer, who argues that doing more to stave off these deaths is well within our capability. One can certainly hope; the World Bank estimates that, because of the economic crisis, an additional 22 children an hour will die of poverty.

Hope, for those people, means something different than being able to maintain a gym membership.

After the “Miracle on the Hudson” on January 15, 157 fortunate souls who might have lost their life in the icy river, got a second chance. Many of them swore they would make their lives matter. They’d cut back on work. They’d quit smoking. They’d be more patient, more generous, and less selfish. A month later, The New York Times contacted several of the survivors and discovered that those commitments had waned. “It kind of lasts a real brief amount of time,” one survivor said of his vows. “Then the realities of life set in. I think it’s really easy to fall back into those old habits.”

I know what he’s saying. For my Lenten sacrifice, I decided not to speak negatively about anybody for 40 days. That lasted until about noon on Ash Wednesday. I would like to believe I will be more tenacious about my commitment to live frugally, and hew to that charming New England adage, “Use it up; Wear it out; Make it do; or do without,” but I fear that, like most Americans, that’s a resolution that will last, if I’m lucky, only until Pentecost.

Reply: Tracey@traceyosh.com

They’ll Know We Are Chrisitans How?

If

you are looking for a healthy, stable, economically viable place to raise a family, Denmark is the place for you.

Like its neighbor Sweden, it has a 100 percent literacy rate, a 3 percent annual growth rate, low infant mortality and a healthy per capita income. Denmark’s standard of living is among the highest in the world and Sweden has one of the world’s longest life expectancies and lowest birth rates.

But there’s one element neither of these countries has: religion.

God has about as much place in Scandinavia as Bill Maher does in the Vatican.

Though most Danes and Swedes identify culturally as Lutherans, fewer than 24 percent believe in a personal deity, a conviction held by 90 percent of Americans. Virtually no one goes to church in these countries; like most European nations, Sweden and Denmark are devout secularists.

To a Scandinavian, belief in God, says sociologist Phil Zuckerman, is tantamount to belief in Santa Claus.

And yet life in this defiantly irreligious section of the world is profoundly moral. In addition to crime rates that would make any American envious, Denmark and Sweden are among the most generous donors of international aid. Denmark’s government gives 64 cents per capita in foreign aid; Sweden gives 61 cents. The United States gives 13 cents per capita in foreign aid.

These and other revelations led Zuckerman to investigate what in this country can seem an impossibility: An atheistic society filled with morally decent people who make a good living, care for one another, and are generous to those less fortunate.

In other words, godless societies are not the barbarous plains of iniquity some in the Christian Right would suggest, but healthy, happy, productive societies that seem, if you will, more Christian than this one has managed to be.

In “Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment,” Zuckerman, of California’s Pitzer College, examines the apparent paradox: Heavens to Betsy, atheists can be morally decent, too.

One has to hope that Christians cannot be so passionately blinkered to ignore what is obvious to anyone who has stepped outside of a church: Plenty of deeply principled people have contributed to the meat of this society without the benefit of religion.

Conversely, plenty of indecent behavior corrodes some of the most religious places on earth. This month, a Harvard Business School study found that one of the most “religious” — states in this country —-Utah — purchases more Internet porn than any other state. The Harvard analysis reported that online porn subscription rates are higher in states that have enacted conservative legislation banning same-sex marriage or civil unions, where surveys show support for conservative positions on religion, gender roles and sexuality.

Even regionally, the “least religious” states in the country (that would be those in New England, according to the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life) are also the safest, healthiest and most tolerant. The states with the highest murder rates, particularly those involving guns, are in the South, the region with the highest levels of religious attendance [Dash] and the highest rate of divorce than the Bible Belt.

Is the “religious” swath of this country just filled with moralizing hypocrites of the type so roundly skewered by Flannery O’Connor? Or are Zuckerman and the like neglecting the cultural hegemony of places like Scandinavia, as Yale professor Thomas Ogletree suggests. “The key advantage of both Denmark and Sweden is that they are highly cohesive societies, genetically, culturally and socially,” he says. “In cases like that, people don’t tolerate wide disparities of income and wealth because they’re [all] family.”

The U.S. has the highest income inequality in the industrialized world. Economists report that 80 percent of net income gains since 1980 went to people in the top 1 percent of the income distribution. The more income inequality a society has, the more friction, frustration and, alas, crime. “What’s troubling to me,” Ogletree said, “is why do not persons in faith get more involved in that issue. It’s very disappointing to me that even Roman Catholic leaders talk more about abortion than poverty. But classic Roman Catholic teaching says that you should really care about your brothers in need.”

Religion, as recent headlines grotesquely remind us, can never be free from apostasy, hypocrisy, or just plain flagrant abuses of power.

One answer to “The New Atheist Crusaders” might be found in the simple Christian hymn, “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love.” Rather, it is understood, by our political positions and our volume. It would be a great relief if the strident were to adopt a humility more in keeping with their faith.

It has become more than embarrassing to watch clerics thunder about the ravages of sin one day and shuffle through a perp walk the next.

Still, those who criticize the religious for failing to live up to their own standards of perfection forget that faith is a practice, not an achievement. It is a process, not a fait accompli. <$>It is not law, ethics, morality or jurisprudence.

British critic John Ruskin distinguished between religion, as feelings of love and reverence; and morality, which is the law of correctness in human conduct.

If we could start by being civil to one another, the faithful and the faithless might come to some kind of harmony.

Miracle on the Hudson — or Not

On Jan.15, at 3:25 in the afternoon, US Airways flight 1549  lifted out of LaGuardia with 155 passengers and crew. Seconds after liftoff, a collision with a flock of birds crippled the plane’s ascent. The pilot, seizing the controls from the co-pilot, instantaneously evaluated the peril and swiftly tracked a course along the Hudson River, into whose icy currents he directed the aircraft.  

We all know what happened next. The jet didn’t sink. The passengers, including an infant, were safe. The incident has grafted itself into our national mythology and granted the hero of the hour our most esteemed bequest: a spot on the 50-yard-line at our venerated national bloodbath: The Super bowl.

Almost immediately after the discovery that all 155 aboard the plane survived, the media had baptized the marvel: “The Miracle on the Hudson.” Suitable for framing.

This is the season for miracles in a country starved for them. Hope, the buzzword of the new administration and the beacon of a new generation, is virtuous and temporarily satisfying. But for sustenance, for girding our loins for the treacherous road ahead, we need a miracle. Just one.

Lent is about many things – sacrifice, empathy, repentance, surrender. But miracles are the tempo that builds the Lenten story. Christ cures the blind. He animates the lame. He opens the ears of the deaf and, perhaps best of all, he exorcises the demons that gnaw at us. In many ways miracles are the intercessors of the ambivalent. They upset the apple cart of faith, and are remarkably effective at gathering adherents. They offer what faith never can: Certitude in world drenched in doubt.

I cannot have been the only one in America troubled by the use of the term “Miracle on the Hudson.” Perhaps it is inevitable that the persnickety would wince at a term so freighted as “miracle.”

C.S. Lewis

Before you answer, a suggestion from Aristotle, particularly useful in my own profession: “Those who wish to succeed must ask the right preliminary questions.”What, then, was the miracle?

Perhaps one of the most familiar miracles in the Gospels is the multiplication of the fishes. We were all taught this story in Sunday school. Jesus is confronted by a vast throng, savaged by hunger. His disciples suggest that Jesus dismiss the crowds so they may return home to get something to eat. “No need,” Jesus says, and gathers five loaves of bread and a couple of fish, blesses and breaks the food, giving it to his disciples to distribute. Five thousand, Matthew tells us, “ate their fill.” And when the fragments were gathered up, they filled 12 baskets.

That, you see, is a definitive miracle in the way we were raised to appreciate them. From very little, Christ creates a banquet. Miraculous, right?

But for me, the miracle happens just before. If you read the 14^th chapter of Matthew, you will find the story of the death of John the Baptist. Herod has had John arrested because John had the temerity to tell Herod “It was not right” for him to live with the wife of his brother. This ticked Herod off, but not as much as it incensed his wife. So, on Herod’s birthday, his wife’s daughter, Salome, performed what we have come to  believe was the notorious dance of the seven veils. So taken was Herod by Salome’s erotic – err, exquisite – dance, that he tells the young woman she can have anything she wants. And what, prey tell, does little Salome want? Prompted by her mother, she wants John’s head on a platter. Herod waffles, but agrees, thus killing Jesus’ cousin and closest confidant, and not incidentally ushering in a cliché that plagues us still.

It is in the moments after Jesus learns of his cousin’s death that he is greeted by the hungry crowds. When Jesus heard this, Matthew tells us, “He withdrew by boat from there to a deserted place by himself.” This is one of many, many times in which Jesus absents himself from the mob, reminding us of the sustenance and urgency of solitude. The only man in the world who understands him, the one to whom he has submitted, the one, Luke tells us, who jumped in his mother’s womb at the arrival of Mary to his mother Elizabeth’s house – is dead. How many of us have endured the anguish of losing our most intimate friend?

And yet at this moment of vulnerability, with the wound still seething, the crowd confronts him—thirsty for his words, hungry for his solicitude, desperate for his grace. And Jesus? Who wants, more than anything, a moment to assuage his grief? What is Christ’s response. “His heart,” Matthew tells us, “Was moved with pity, and he cured their sick.”

If you are a working parent, this is a scenario too familiar to you. You have  been up to your eardrums in crises at work. You have missed deadlines. You have forgotten the Olive Oil at the Stop & Shop. Your car needs gas. You have just lost your closes friend in the world and you would like to tell that world to go straight to blazes. You want only to close your eyes and breathe in some stillness and indulge your reverie and mourn your friend.

But your husband has thrown out his back. And your daughter has a book report due – which is news to you. You have a PTA meeting and your dog has clearly ingested something non-organic.

And anybody would be entirely within their rights to say, as my mother often did, “Calgon, take me away.”

But Jesus. Doesn’t. Say This. His heart moves instantly to pity. His reflex is compassion. This, of course, is what makes him Christ and the rest of us believers the  haplessly devoted. You can look at Matthew’s story and tell me that the miracle is the multiplication of the fishes. But I look at that and I see that the miracle is reflexive compassion. For Christ, kindness is not a virtue; it’s an instinct. And our work as Christians is to make it instinctive for us, too.

I don’t think that God turned that U.S. Airways jet down the length of the Hudson River any more than I think he sent that flock of geese into those engines. I don’t think that a pilot who trains for decades for just this event is a miracle worker. But I do think that when that plane landed, and those passengers tended to one another, grabbing infants, and old men and hurling anxious women over their shoulder, that was miraculous. On the wing of that plane, as ferry boats pivoted on the water and raced to the needy, we saw people whose instinct was to help. We saw people, without regard to their welfare, wrench power out of places they never knew, keep their wits in the midst of fear and understand that survival is for everybody.

Does it take divine intervention to achieve such a miracle? I believe it does. I believe that the greatest miracle God achieves is the turn in our hearts, the expansion of our souls, the swelling of our compassion, the understanding that the way out of despair is too frequently as available to us as a neighbor’s need.

We are in the depths of a national crisis whose denouement is obscure, but whose victims will be legion. For many of us, the world will tatter in ways we can neither fathom nor evade. A thousand little cuts besiege the 300 million people of this country. When hope runs thin, they will look for miracles. And when they look for them, remember this: The miracle begins with you. You are the miracle, and have been since your birth. How tempting it will be to look for pyrotechnics when, we must remember, God spoke to Elijah in whisper.

Don’t look for the miracle. Be the miracle. The miracle is you.