Year 10 English Enrichment

Preface

“Raised Catholic” is the term I use when someone asks if I’m religious. “Culturally Catholic” (a term I made up) is even more useful. It serves two purposes: to distance me from the problematic elements of the Church and Christianity as a whole, but at the same time, to enable me to connect with others who are or have ever been Catholic. In that way, it’s a pre-emptive defence mechanism; the product of some sort of anxiety, probably.

​At a time in my life when everything is happening all at once and I am meant to be discovering who I am (or something like that), I have found myself thinking about my experience with religion. Am I agnostic? What happens after death? These questions aren’t new to me. Seven years ago, an inquisitive and probably quite annoying nine-year-old wanted to know why the Pope didn’t reply when she wrote him a letter asking why women couldn’t be priests. And yet – and this puzzles me – despite all the unanswerable questions I have about Catholicism, the existence of the religion still brings me comfort. I still appreciate the beautiful aspects of it, and how it shaped the parts of me that I actually don’t mind.

​What follows is both a questioning and an appreciation of my experience with religion. Included also are some observations and the odd bit of research. I’m not trying to prove any point or even reach a conclusion. These are simply the thoughts of a 16-year-old girl.

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​On Ritual

There is something soothing about rituals. Actions repeated over and over, until they are mindless, meditative. Sometimes they have meaning, sometimes they don’t.

​Even if a ritual is just form for the sake of form, doesn’t it provide us with a moment of freedom that is above any specific meaning? Whether it’s running a bath or reciting the rosary, it is time, it is space.

Even when you’re in a room packed shoulder-to-shoulder with others, strangers, family and friends, you are not truly there. It is a mental space free from the burden of individuality.

​Like many types of worship, Mass is soothing. Many people who have never been to Mass hold a (slightly romanticised) image: orbs of incense swinging like pendulums; the scents of expensive oils and candles wafting up to the dark spaces in the high ceilings of a cathedral; ancient incantations in monotone and hour-long Masses held entirely in Latin; long robes with seasonal colour codes and mysterious meanings, like some kind of indecipherable dead language. Is this image a reflection of the true experience? More of a mystification, a dramatisation stemming from TV and film that is obsessed with the visual and the recognisable. Symbols like crucifixes, statues, and altars are widely recognised yet rarely understood by non-Catholic audiences. To them, Catholic ritual is often seen as mysterious and complex, beyond comprehension. Even some Catholics feel this way.

​Are they right? Are the rites of the church beyond any honest, complete understanding? I think they are not. But even if they are, does that matter? Mystery and complexity are fascinating; that is why some people are obsessed with classic film noir or their parents’ relationship or the Amazon. There is always more to know, lurking in the shadows.

​For me, however, it is the familiar that draws me in. When I drive past a church on a rainy day and see doors open and candles lit, I feel comfortable and warm and welcome. At Easter Mass every year, I sink back into the mindless intricacies, the muscle memory that also happens to have meaning behind it.

​That’s why Mass needs to be either mysterious or familiar to be worth doing; and to achieve either, it needs ritual. Careful, intentional ritual. That’s why when, for centuries, people have gotten up heavy-eyed on a Sunday morning, or Saturday night, or whenever they bothered to get up; when they dressed up in their skirts and suits, shiny black shoes, freshly polished, clean-shaven; when they walked, and later drove – whining kids piled in the back of a car with no air-conditioning – to crumbling old buildings where they sat for an hour, ate some room-temperature finger food (if they were lucky), then left; that is why, when they did not have beauty, they did not understand the meaning behind something so repetitive and mindless. That is why, one day, they didn’t go back. Without something mysterious or familiar to intrigue or console, people cannot take meaning out of ritual.

​For this reason, I don’t think Mass is decadent or pretentious or outdated. Neither is a bubble bath or a rosary.

​I think ritual, in whatever form you choose, is important.​

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On Confession

I kneel in a small, dark box, like a cupboard. There is just enough room to touch my forehead, then my chest, my left shoulder, and my right. The wide-latticed wooden screen is more a symbol of anonymity than a guarantee; I feel wholly, unbearably seen.

​Bless me Father, for I have sinned. 

​Confessing to a priest is worse than confessing to an entire parish. It feels as though their proximity to God gives them the right to dissect, admonish, and judge the wrong in us. In Christian Roman times, priests held the power of both God and the law; they literally judged. Yet now their position gives them the unique power, the authority, to make a different kind of judgement: to forgive.

​Authority is essential to forgiveness – and not just within Catholicism, or religion. It is unspoken: we apologise to the person we hurt, who has the authority, or else we cannot be forgiven. If you were to murder someone, you could apologise to the police, if you really wanted. But they couldn’t forgive you. Only the victim’s family could. So why do we apologise to priests? At reconciliation services, why do we perform a little dance of self-loathing, a public display of penitence? Why not just apologise to the person we hurt, and to God?

​Because that is exactly what it is: performative. Self-indulgent. In the same way that advertising your last donation to charity or that crochet blanket you made for your grandma is not exactly from the goodness of your heart. Unless, of course, it is made public to show others in a community that everybody sins sometimes; but doesn’t this simply normalise the exact behaviours the Church (on behalf of God) wants to eliminate? Or perhaps it is strategic; sins can be no one’s secret, because then they are allowed to fester and spread silently. To me, it feels like an odd, self-conscious exhibition of guilt. I think that is why we do confessions the way we do, with the order and script of tradition.

​Of course, action is encouraged in conjunction with confession. But then why not just take action? Again, sin becomes part of the public domain. I suppose confession is a chance to name our shame, because naming puts shame in the past tense. It helps you swallow that lump in your throat. Whenever regret is trapped and swimming noisily around in your head, you can release it.

​May God give you pardon and peace. 

​That is all we want: pardon and peace. Pardon, in the eyes of these robed moral superiors, in the eyes of our neighbours who peek over the fence, in the tired eyes of our parents who stayed up all night worrying, in those strained eyes squinting through the shadows and the latticed screen in the little cramped box, trying to figure out who knows their secrets. Peace, in those sweating palms and beating hearts that fear the light outside the dark cupboard.

​Confession is for the confessor; not for God, or the Church, or anyone else. It is like writing in a secret locked journal or making a wish in your head, not out loud, when you blow out the candles on a birthday cake, only with a certain feeling of dread and mortification. It is like going to a friend for validation and reassurance and a trite, but welcome, piece of advice. We confess not for forgiveness, but for self-forgiveness; we yearn to be told that we are indeed the perfect little girl or boy our mothers always said we were. Or our fathers. Or Our Father.

​I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

And so I leave feeling a little better.​

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On Guilt

Anxiety and Catholic guilt are similar conditions. Equally painful, tightening my chest with string and pulling at the loose ends in my brain. Both could be called scrupulousness (or scrupulosity, which it turns out is medically diagnosable).

​Another symptom is colourblindness, reducing a world of nuance into black and white. Everything is binary: useful or useless, pure or tainted, saintly or sinful. When a little girl goes searching in the kitchen pantry, for example, the spoonful of Coco Pops she really wants is bad; the sad-looking, soggy celery her mum offers her, however, is good. She categorises everything edible until she can no longer eat a scoop of ice cream without labelling it (and its innocent little consumer) as bad. And so it begins.

Monthly confessions and a particularly pious scripture teacher prompt her to scour her memory for the last thing she did that could possibly be construed as bad. She remembers reaching for the bag of biscotti at the top of her friend’s kitchen cupboard. She engineered a plan to distract her friend’s mother and stack the dining chairs at the perfect angle to reach the bag, then ran to the shed, trailed by three or four cheeky smiles, to devour it in a secret circle of giggles. Then she lied to her parents about the whole thing. So she confesses and is absolved, but now she starts to think maybe there really was something dreadfully sinful about it. About her.

​Later, she begins to reach instead for anything about her that is not perfect or praiseworthy and eliminates it. She believes that no matter what she does or how hard she tries she can always do better. This lingering sense of inadequacy rears its ugly head from time to time and spurs her ambition, constantly pushing. People are amazed at her work ethic, her principles – undying, unchanging. She wins praise and admiration. But it stems not from a place of motivation and strength and moral perfection, but from a place of guilt. So whenever she is not doing something to help or impress others, she feels like she is harming them.

​From this stems the overapologising. She apologises to the man who stepped on her foot on the train. She apologises to the stairs she tripped on. She apologises to her parents because she is studying rather than doing the dishes, or doing the dishes instead of studying. She feels the need to apologise to everyone she could have possibly hurt or ever-so-slightly inconvenienced or even not impressed. She bites her nails and bounces her knee under the desk because she feels she has upset the teacher and the rest of her class by answering too many questions correctly. And so she doesn’t put her hand up for the rest of primary school, all because of that one time she grabbed the bag of biscotti. She didn’t even get caught with her hand in the cookie jar and she still felt bad about it.

​But she has learnt from her mistake, and is always on her guard. She is defensive not only of herself, but of strangers on the street who her mum makes light fun of; or the woman at T2 who, yes, made a mistake and overcharged us $200 on that set of teacups, but really it wasn’t her fault. And again, for unexplainable reasons, she is defensive of her religion. Even when she has decided she doesn’t believe in it, and she knows that certain people within the Church have done terrible things, hearing Catholic Church jokes and comments about reason versus religion makes her squirm. So when this happens, she takes the responsibility and blame (and even the shame) for something she isn’t even a part of. Not fully, at least.

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​On the Implications of Translation and Interpretation

For a text to carry so much meaning and responsibility is dangerous. The Bible has been mistranslated, misunderstood, and misused since its inception, intentionally or not. These tangled threads have been woven into the enduring fabric of society: our values, our beliefs, our stories, our understanding of history and truth and God that hem us in forever. Words contain everything. That is why the translation and interpretation of texts – from the code of Hammurabi to Athenian forum shopping lists – is so important. At least in Western, Christian-derived culture, our understanding of the Bible has hemmed us in, with grave consequences.

​Take the words we use for Hell, for example. Gehenna, Sheol, Tartarus, Hades. All words used in the Bible that we (at least in English) take as one and the same. All separate places and times.

​Gehenna is actually the Valley of Hinnom in the east of Jerusalem. Sheol is a grave for the spirits, a dark and dusty land of exile. It is directly translated as “The Enemy’s Bunker”, and like most depictions of hell is overseen by the Devil, but it is ultimately ruled by God. The Tartarus of Greek mythology is the underworldly prison of the gods; but in the Bible, it is where 200 watchers (angels) are chained in endless darkness. Hades, also Greek, is both a subterranean place for departed souls – a purgatory – and a place of torment for the wicked after death. None of these are the fiery furnace of horned demons and torture my (very intense) scripture teacher described to me one day in Year 3; you may think she was simply an especially zealous, perhaps bitter outlier, but many of my friends recall similar threatening images waved at them lest they do something wrong. The modern, Western idea of Hell stems mainly from Gehenna, the valley outside the city walls of Jerusalem where rubbish was burned and lepers and exiles cried and ground their teeth in pain. These are the flames and weeping and gnashing of my terrified childish imagination: an ancient incinerator surrounded by sad, sick,
lonely people.

​One of Christianity’s biggest obsessions is policing sex and gender. 500 years ago, the Tumucua people of what is now Florida translated the Bible from Spanish, and in the process, managed to remove all gender constructs and negative connotations, as well as using explicit (rather than euphemistic) language around sex. They seemingly had no problems sharing a religion with the deeply religious conquistadors as a result. In the Tumucua version of Genesis, Eve eats the apple the snake gives her because she wants the power, the knowledge of Good and Evil, rather than handing it to Adam. Another passage suggests not having sex with another person’s spouse, rather than not walking with another man’s wife – if  English translations of the Bible were this precise and explicit, the language almost legislative, then perhaps modern Christianity wouldn’t be as fraught and hypocritical and divided as it is.

​Another infamous example: homosexuality. In the Bible: malakoi, arsenokoitai, or in some translations, knabenschander.

​Interestingly, malakoi comes from the Greek word malakos, meaning soft. As in English, it had multiple meanings; one of which was ‘effeminate’, which in a patriarchal society informed by the story of Adam and Eve meant being weak and easily tempted. It could have meant the vain, the lazy, the cowardly; and in some cases, especially in Roman translations, it implied male prostitutes. It did not mean homosexual men, men who had sex with men simply because they wanted to, not for money.

​Arsekonotai is first used in Paul’s letter in First Corinthians, in which he lists those not welcome in God’s kingdom; it is rarely used afterwards, and is often only used when quoting the letter itself. Arseno in Greek means male, and koites means bed – male-bedder. While it is easy to assume this refers to homosexuality, cupboards do not always contain cups, a dragonfly is not a dragon, nor is a chairman a man upholstered; words are not always literal. In the case of arsekonotai, the word male – as opposed to man – is particularly important. Pederasty (sex with boys, male slaves, and prostitutes) was common in Ancient Greece when the Bible was translated, so Paul could have been condemning pederasty. Another commonly used word at the time was paidophthoreseis, which means corrupting children; it is found in a number of texts between the second and fourth centuries among lists of immoral actions, including adultery and prostitution, both of which were associated with pederasty and paedophilia. Thus, arsekonotai may not mean male-bedder, not homosexual, but paedophile. That is what the Bible condemns.

​Knabenschander literally means boy molester. The original Lutheran Bible contained the word knabenschander in place of words like malakos and arsekonotai, such as in Leviticus and Corinthians. The word homosexual didn’t enter the bible until the Revised Standard Version, published in 1952. The German translation of the Bible remained using knabenschander until 1983 when the American company Biblica paid the publishers to use the word homosexual instead of knabenschander.

​This deliberate mistranslation of the Bible is the perfect example of how religious texts can be weaponised. When you consider that much of the Bible was written in a time when non-procreative sexual activity meant birth rates decreased, populations shrank, and thus economic and military resources dwindled, it becomes clear that the Bible condemned these acts because, at the time, they threatened the survival of the human race. Given that Earth’s population has now surpassed 8 billion, “unproductive” sex is quite possibly the last thing most Christian humanitarians and missionaries (at least) are concerned about. Thus, even if the Bible was homophobic at the time, we have no reason to maintain this fear of “unproductive” sex, as much of the Church and other Christians continue to do. However, the confused translations of words like  malakoi and arsekonotai and even knabenschander have justified this fear and the violence, hatred, and unthinking prejudice that follow.

​Translations have the power to change lives. I hear of friends of friends who rock back and forth, crumpled up like a piece of paper, at the thought of eternal damnation in the fiery depths of a Hell that does not exist; at least not convincingly. One word in one book could convince these people otherwise. I read grim, block-lettered headlines of violent, brutal homophobia, of unearthed reports of child abuse at the hands of the Church. These people could have been protected rather than condemned and silenced if it weren’t for a monk’s careless, candle-lit, mead-fuelled mistranslation of a word in a manuscript 1,000 years ago.

​And so these threads remain tangled in the fabric of our society: our stories, our understanding of relationships and power and the afterlife. These threads have hemmed us in. And now, to our demise, they cannot be picked out.

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​On Womanhood

My mother said to me: women in countries like Spain are worshipped, but not often respected. They are idolised like those statues of the Madonna you can buy in dollar stores, but they are just as easily shattered and replaced. They are belittled and used, but the next day they are celebrated and held and kissed all over. They are the scum of the earth, they are everything that’s wrong with society these days, but they are also the world, what would we do without them?!, all at the same time. That’s a pretty confusing thing to be.

​From where do we get our notion of womanhood – by which, so often, we really mean motherhood? Is it some deep, primitive corner of our brains, etched in by eons of evolution? Why is it that the same images and categories and perceptions of women appear time and time again in our history? Did the Bible create these “types” of women?

The pages of the Bible contain the blueprints of womanhood, the types of women we can be. We must choose our persona, our image, from the very beginning. We are asked:

Are you a Mary of Nazareth, or a Mary Magdalene?

​Are you the Whore of Babylon? 
(Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth, who wore purple and scarlet and gold and pearls and carried a cup full of her sins and drank the blood of saints).

​Perhaps you are a Sarah?
(A Matriarch, barren but miraculously birthing a child at 90, who obeys and submits to her husband’s every wish and is celebrated for it.)

​No? Perhaps Ruth or Naomi?
(Are you a loving mother or a caring daughter? Do you devote your life and sacrifice your own interests time and time again, selfless, without question, always in the service of others, Amen? Or not?)

​Or do you think you’re an Esther?
(You are pure and demure, a gift from god, a quiet achiever who humbly takes on whatever task you are given.)

​Rebecca?
(Cunning, ambitious, a career woman. You’re just not family-oriented. You look out for yourself before anyone else. You take what you can get. You’re motivated by money and success rather than love or family. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

​Mary and Martha?
(Women are all bitchy and hate each other and want to tear each other down. They compete for men’s attention, praise, love, only consoling themselves with the belief that men are shallow, women are where the real friendship lies. But only lonely, unloved women say that.)

​Eve?
(Derivative of Adam)

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​On Motherhood

Blood soaks, stains, drips, coats. Hands scrub, wring, shake, repeat. Brows furrow and form fault lines, cracks in the clay of the face. The earth envelops the seedling – it protects, it nurtures – but it always holds on to the roots.

​Generations of matriarchs have built layer upon layer of a tradition that has formed a foundation for every human life they have created, but what happens when it starts to crumble? What happens when the bedrock of the society they knew morphs into something else and the trusty old answer to motherhood – what grandmothers and their mothers before them did, smacking their children or giving them a little bit of rum in the Christmas cake custard – is no longer acceptable?

​The traditional Catholic mother – or the image we have of her – is full of contrasts. She is hardened and hardworking (which actually means never not working). She is soft and warm. She is constantly forgiving, but she is not foolish. In fact, she is sensible. But she may have a sense of humour. She is firm, but kind. She is loving and caring. She is harsh and cruel. She is the impossible!

​I am 16 years old and I am forced to consider being a mother. One wrong move, my own mother says, and my whole life – at least the next 5 years – is turned upside down and shaken up like dust lining an old book or something settled in a clouded jar at the back of the fridge. My mother has a stern look she puts on, just before she says words like “risk” and “good decisions”. It fills me with dread. I’ve had nightmares of getting bigger and bigger until I nearly burst like some balloon of blood vessels and tissue with no control over my body; I’ve dreamt of crying and pleading with friends’ mothers begging for a lift to the hospital because the one person I should be able to talk to would never talk to me again if I tried; in my subconscious, I’ve watched myself die doing the one thing I never intend to do: becoming a mother.

​I have the great privilege of being unafraid of anything in my future, except that.

​So what do we do when we’re afraid? We pray.