Maria Assumpta Est In Coelum, Angeli Gaudent

I said goodbye to my church today. It was our patronal feast day and we started down on the street corner and carried St. Mary on her litter under the canopy back into the church. For the anthem we had Arcadelt's Ave Maria and then some of my favorite hymns, including 278 (Sing we of the joys of Mary). Our last choir director wrote a descant for it specially for our choir that is very fun to sing; lots of high notes.

During announcements, our rector made me come downstairs to be bid farewell and gave me a blessing for my studies next year, which was nice but embarrassing. On top of that, our choir director asked me to sing the prayers, which is also nice and embarrassing; I sing just fine to be a choir member but my voice isn't really strong enough for me to sing by myself, at least, not in front of people. I can never quite make it, breathwise, to the end of 'Father we pray for all who govern and hold authority in the nations of the world'. The other versicles are easier because they are shorter.

Anyhow, it is strange to be leaving Our Lady of the Holy Smokes, as it is nicknamed. I was confirmed there and have been going to church there for five and a half years - I've been there longer than the current rector, I've been a choir member longer than anyone else who is currently in the choir, longer than our current choir director and organist, longer than any of the other 'young people'. We broke ground today for the new parish hall - I'm glad I was there to see it - but I'm sorry that I won't be around to see what happens next.

When I first started going to Our Lady of the Holy Smokes, there were five people under the age of forty, an interim priest who was doing things he ought not to have been doing*, no children and a rather paltry community life. As of today, our congregation has increased from around 100 active members to 150, we have enough children of varying ages that we have child altar servers, around twenty young people, gay, straight, single and married, and the median age of the parish has dropped from 54 to 39.

All of this is nice and it has been wonderful to participate in the growth of the parish but I'm going to miss my church most because it is where I discovered the mystery that is Christianity. When my then roommate and good friend dragged me off to church with her one Sunday morning, I was entirely unprepared by my lukewarm Presbyterian upbringing for the beauty and holiness of the liturgy. I spent the entire service in anxiety; on the one hand, I was enchanted by everything that was going on, on the other hand, I didn't know what to make of the statues and procession and the singing of the Regina Caeli at the end of the service. It seemed to be a good that I was going to church but was I not then guilty of idolatry? Church attendance felt like an occasion of sin. But I couldn't keep myself away the next Sunday, nor the Sunday after that, despite my initial quandary.

Confirmation didn't make the impression on me that I had hoped for - it seems to have been one of those rituals of life that comes here too early, there too late, as Forster puts it - but I will never forget the awe of God's presence that overcame me the first time I went to Benediction, nor the solemnity of my first Holy Week (Presbyterians don't really do Holy Week, at least not in my experience).

A building does not make a church, but those four walls are especially dear to me for having housed so much revelation and love. I'm heartsore at leaving my congregation and all the friends I have therein. And the choir! Will I ever again have the chance to sing Palestrina and Arcadelt and Tallis and Clemens non Papa and de Victoria again? (I do suspect myself of making a false idol of the music sometimes, hopefully not being in choir will help me get past it although I doubt I would ever be able to make my peace with a guitar led mass).

More than anything else that has happened so far this summer, leaving my church is the one thing that has made me feel, rather than know, that this part of my life is over, whether I want it to be or not. I'm scared, both of what might happen and what I might miss. When I was still studying ballet very seriously, it was a comfort to me that wherever I went, ballet class would always follow the same structure and that no matter what country I was in, I would be able to follow what was going on. Now, the structure of the mass gives me the same comfort. Even when I have been to mass in a country whose language I do not speak, I have been able to follow (excepting the sermon, of course) and say the prayers and creed and sanctus and so on quietly in English or in Latin. That will always be there, both in a church and in my heart, and ever my strength and shield.

Okay. My prose is getting a little out of control, so I should probably stop.

Everything here is over now.

____________________________________________________________

* He was trying to switch the church from being part of the Episcopal church to being part of the Anglican Church in America - much more conservative and against the wishes of most of the congregation but not necessarily those of the vestry, two of whom were very wealthy and tried to throw their influence around that way and who scared off all of the candidates for the new rector by pretending that their viewpoint was the majority viewpoint over a two year period before the bishop intervened, dissolved the search committee, froze the vestry and more or less appointed our current rector - happily, I had no idea this was going on at the time or I wouldn't still be there - for something that almost split the congregation and did drive many people away, there was very little gossip.

This Is Not a Real Post

It is instead a Cretan paradox. (Ha ha...philosophy jokes are so deeply unfunny: classics jokes are much worse)

This is a link to one of the blogs I read: if you're looking for a patron saint of mentalisms besides St. Dymphna, have a look.

Look for a real post on Monday or Tuesday!

Rereading The Well of Loneliness

I have been enjoying my week's holiday so far by reading novels, something I can't usually do in term-time. I finished 'The Secret History', an old favorite, on Saturday and then picked up 'The Well of Loneliness', which I had not read in a very long time, much longer than I thought.
I realised that it had been a while when I came to a protracted reference to St. Therese of Lisieux on pages 264-266 that I did not remember. My former roommate is very much devoted to St. Therese and I have, consequently, heard much about her, had her picture hanging in my hallway and seen the movie (yes really). If I had read Well of Loneliness since she and I started sharing living space back in 2004, there could be no way that that would have escaped my notice.

I read Well of Loneliness, as most people do, because it was the first novel about lesbians, much referenced in other literature and also the subject of legal prosecution. When I first read it, when I first came out, I was an atheist. Not only was I an atheist, but I was quite militant about it. I started down the merry path to losing my faith for several reasons but one that looms above the others is my first girlfriend. Referring to her as a girlfriend is somewhat overstating the case because it was all very virginal and inchoate and unnamed but the sense of it is true. She was Roman Catholic, and eventually broke things off between us because of it. Nothing that happened between us ever felt like a sin, much less a mortal sin, to me. I had first begun to suspect that I might be gay when I was thirteen and it, remarkably, hadn't troubled me one bit. I was confident (rightly, as it turns out) that my parents would love me either way and nothing in my upbringing had disposed me to think that being gay was wrong or bad. Then, just as it was all starting to become clear to me at the age of fifteen, it suddenly took on the quality of sin. It was horribly confusing, to the point that I just stopped thinking about it and assumed that I must really be straight. Indeed, all the external evidence pointed in that direction. I was a very serious ballet student (hadn't mentioned that before, had I? I even had a tiny little professional career) and what could be more girly and normal than ballet?

Time went by, I went rigorously through the motions of being heterosexual and assumed that my dissatisfaction was the result of my quite serious devotion, religious in its quality, to my vocation. Gradually it became clear that things were not going to work out for me professionally and, rather than resigning myself to teaching dance for the rest of my life, I decided to go to university and there I took an Introduction to Philosophy course, which has had a pronounced effect on my life. It was in that class that I first learned how to think and think clearly; I took great joy that summer in pulling apart and setting in order all the woolly concepts in my mind.

In this way, I ended the summer an atheist and newly questioning my sexuality. When I went back to university that fall, I came out to my friends and proceeded to fall profoundly in love, quite to my surprise.

I managed, of course, to fall in love with a very religious girl who had been raised in one of those bible-thumping non-denominational southern churches. In the course of time, she too split up with me for religious reasons. But this time, it had the opposite effect on me. Because I was so in love with her, I started to reconsider God. It was impossible for me, so enamored, to ignore or dismiss anything so important to her.

In the aftermath, I found that my faith had grown back. It took some years but after I ended up living in the US and sharing a roof with my friend who was devoted to St. Therese, I started going to church. A year or so later I was confirmed and so began my tussle with the lesbianisms and the church.

This is why re-reading Well of Loneliness was so interesting to me. It is the only novel I know of that deals both with lesbians and the church in a positive way. There is a great deal more subtlety in the novel than I remembered and more than many grant to Radclyffe Hall. For one thing, she is genuinely concerned about the reconciliation of heterosexist society with gay people. There is an unusual lack of simple xenophobia and classism. Class anxiety is a theme in the book but the common bond among those who share "the mark of Cain" causes the characters to band together. The distress that heterosexism and homophobia exert on gay people is carefully delineated and exposed as prejudice. It is what my ex would call a 'golf lesbian'* attitude toward the world; an attitude that assumes that the norms of heterosexist society have intrinsic and essential worth but that accommodation must be made for non-heterosexuals.

However, Hall's attitude toward this accommodation is unusual even for today. She makes no apology for gender variation. There is, at least in America, considerable hostility from some gay people toward other gay people who "flaunt" too much or look too different and thereby harm the cause of acceptance.** Hall, on the other hand, accepts visible gender variation as a natural part of homosexual orientation.***

Hall challenges the church and challenges God for forsaking gay people instead of rejecting them out of hand, in the facile way that some (certainly not all - there are definitely thoughtful atheists authors out there****) authors do. This alone is enough to make me re-value the Well of Loneliness, cheesy anthropomorphy and all.


*The term 'golf lesbian' originates with her and is meant to indicate that post second-waver, white woman, acommodationist, 'we're just like everyone else and lesbians who are not like us should learn to behave' attitude.

**I have little patience for this; after all, straight people have expensive weddings, announce their banns in church, have baby showers, wear wedding rings, have sex all over the telly all the time, a rigorous dress and behavior code wherewith to recognize themselves and so on. If that's not flaunting one's sexuality, I don't know what would be.

***I do, of course, resent her attitude that 'normal' looking women are not really as gay as gender queer women being as I am more than a little on the feminine side (not femme and really, really not a 'lipstick lesbian.' I think I might have worn lipstick about four times in my life. I hate that term.)

**** In a somewhat gratuitous aside, I would like to mention that Ian McEwan is not one of them - blegh - not even to mention that he is a full-fledged member of the gender and patriarchy police.

The first picture is a holy card of St. Therese that I have borrowed from the blog Holy Cards For Your Inspiration and the second is that well-known one of Marguerite 'John' Radclyffe Hall and her lifelong partner Una Troubridge. I sincerely wish that blogger would allow for captions and footnotes, don't you?

Work Avoidance

I thought that the biggest obstacle I would have going back to school would be the depression part of the bipolarnesses. I was completely wrong, at least so far. It's the anxiety that gives me the most trouble.

Case in point: the fact that I am writing a post instead of getting on with the Greek. As soon as I pick up a piece of homework I become extremely anxious that I'm going to do the wrong homework or do the right homework badly or not be able to finish it all or that my feeling that the medication has made me less intelligent is about to prove itself to be true.

It turns out that it's a good thing that most of my classes are very early in the morning as I simply don't have time to wake up enough to become too anxious to go if I have to leave the house at 7.20 am to get the bus.

Taking the bus is itself a strategy to foil the anxiety. The university is only about a mile and a half away from my apartment but since I live in urban Appalachia, it is a very uphill and downhill and up a very steep hill kind of walk to get home. So, if I take the bus instead of driving it is much harder for me to change my mind and leave or go off campus between classes and fail to come back. This works because, being urban Appalachia, our buses come only once an hour and the routes run in circles rather than back and forth with the result that while going to university takes about seven minutes, coming home on the bus takes at least a half hour. It's faster to walk, which is what I do, but all those hills make me less eager to leave.

So far I haven't been anxious in classes, which is fantastic. This also makes me think that the anxiety will ebb as the semester goes on. It is, as is usual for me, the transitions between doing one thing and doing another that throw me. I quite understand the ancient obsession with Hermes and Mercury; the same sort of anxiety surrounding states of change has led to me attaching my St. Christopher medal to the inside of my school bag so that I can't forget to bring it with me and holding on to it when I feel particularly worried. It helps, even if he isn't officially a saint anymore.

Maybe I should strand myself at the library today. Either way, it's time for me to stop working on this and go look up sixteen more verbs that will all mean anger, death, plague or destruction. If the vocabularies of a language say anything about the people who spoke them, then the Greeks were very concerned with war and spirit and death. The same would make the Romans extremely passive aggressive for saying 'amabo te' for please: 'amabo te' means 'I will love you.' Can you imagine? Sometimes it would work better than our 'please'; if you were hanging from a cliff begging for help, it sounds stronger. But in everyday life? 'Would you please pass the butter' becomes 'Pass the butter and I will love you,' with the implication to my ears that a failure to pass the butter would result in the alienation of affection. Then again, this could just be a reflection of their much stronger sense of duties towards others. I wonder.

See how easy it is for me to distract myself? Off I go, now, truly this time.

anyqueensway

Does anyone else remember when the Queen of Hearts tells Alice (in the book of course) that "all ways around here are [her] ways"? Thinking about that used to make me smile whenever I'd go to or through Queensway, a neighborhood in London. I miss it. London: not Queensway. It's hard to miss Queensway. Or the Central Line, for that matter.

Well, friends, I think I might have a touch of the euthymia. I was speaking to my ex on the phone earlier and she asked me had I been drinking? what had I been doing?

I haven't done anything but wash the dishes, said I, except that I came back in the living room and found two mugs and a plate and thought, oh well, I'll just do them tomorrow.

But you're making me laugh, says she. What's going on?

Oh dear. What a regular ball of sunshine I must have been being!*

I should probably crack on with the Greek homework. Nothing mixes better with an effervescence than Greek and I've got 42 lines of Homer to tran and scan. (Like the abbreviation? See, you can tell I'm so cool that I'm part of the app. crit. crowd. {which is an extremely dorky form of cool wherein classics students show off by referring to the apparatus criticus [critical apparatus - it explains variations and misreadings of other texts and manuscripts and helps with weird verb forms] as the app. crit.})

Needless to say, this is a variety of cool not recognised in the general taxonomy.


I am, however, very excited to be following the same educational syllabus as St. Augustine, which is probably not a form of excitement recognised in the general taxonomy. But then, I'm an anomataxic girl at heart, really.

Ah, the nonsense. But at least I found my Carmex this evening. Can't have been a total loss, then.


*(Ah, the past perfect participle. Nothing could make me happier, except for the timely use of the future perfect.)

Oh the moaning

I'm trapped in the registration black hole of "will I be able to collect enough signatures quickly enough and I think that they gave me the wrong form and please, God, let me graduate."

Well, I will graduate and soon enough, whether or not I can do so at the end of this semester. I wish I could. My poor beleaguered parents: I want to give them a happy day where they get to see me stand up and receive awards and commendations. They have to go through so much with me and I know that this would make them happy.

I'm wearing my anxiety screen, clonazepam. It's like sunscreen, but instead of blocking out harmful sun rays, it blocks out harmful stress and anxiety rays.

What shocks me is that I seem to be handling this surprisingly well. Am I actually finally stable? It's a strange feeling. I love it. I'm excited to be back.

Again, all I can say at the moment is

St. Thomas, pray for me
St. Catherine, pray for me
All of you reading, pray for me

This graduation is a gift I want to give to my parents, so, so badly.

If any one knows of a patron saint for untangling bureaucracy, I'd love to here about it. The two who come to mind are St. Therese of Lisieux and St. Theresa of Avila. Any other ideas?
_________

On a less related note, I see now that I have another follower and I want to say welcome, I'm glad you're here.

Look out for the more humorous version of this entangled endeavor in the next post.

School's in for Winter

Well, tomorrow is back to school for me. I'm so nervous! I bet I'll feel better by tomorrow night if only from exhaustion. (Wednesday is the big church night - rosary and choir practice and then there's also a party for the new artists at my job!)

I'm no end pleased to have received my first comment and to have three followers, one of whom is the lovely Sister Mary Martha herself! I never thought that would happen this quickly.

I'm too pre-occupied to have much else to say this morning apart from:

St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for me
St. Catherine of Alexandria, pray for me
Everyone who sees this, please pray for me

It's my last semester. . .I can't believe that I might actually graduate! (And am I not specially blest to have two saints who are patrons not only for students but also for philosophers? Very nice for a philosophy student. . .)