Friendship across the years

I was a 15 year old boy.  I came from a middle - to working class family.  Church was my staple diet.  It was here and at school, that I met people.  They were all, (pretty much) the same kind of people with, (pretty much) the same kind of ideas and views.  I sang in the church choir.  And it was here that a remarkable friendship was struck.  The organist (who was also the wife of the priest) was a woman whose horizon was quite a bit beyond anything I had ever come across before.  To me (and I guess to others as well), she was quirky, independent, irrepressible, strange.  She had a loud voice, for which she made no apology.  She had views, for which, equally, she cared little about crossing the line of acceptability. She was incandescent.

And the friendship we struck was remarkable.  She taught me the organ.  She would hitch up her skirts and smash a shuttlecock on the badminton court.  She would drive me, in her off-brown, two-tone Morris Minor,  to the remote outskirts of Johannesburg - (a wild place called Fourways), for a picnic.  We went to the Ballet together.  We went to the Opera.  We went to the Wilds and the Melville Koppies.

And all the while she would talk.  She would talk about Literature, about Art, about Music (ah yes, music, music and more music).  She would explain why she hated this and why she loved that.  She would ask my opinion on a painting at the Art Gallery.  She would moan audibly when the conductor was Edgar Cree and the pace of a particular piece of music was boringly militaristic.

She had a foul temper.  More than once I was struck across the head when  I played badly, or when as her badminton partner, I missed a shot in a game of doubles.  She swore.  She said words like "shit" and "fuck" and made no apology for them.  Not often. But my mother would have fainted had she heard them.  She would laugh until the tears rolled from her eyes at a good joke and she would yell at people she considered bad drivers.  She would roll her eyes at stuffiness and she would shriek in derision at any sign of prissyness.  Her husband, the priest, could not have been a more middle-of-the-road personality.  He adored her, but remained grey and dull.  Steadfast, but somewhat dreary.

Politically, she was conservative.  I suppose she would probably would have voted for the United Party, rather than for the Nationalists - but largely because of a deep-seated prejudice against Afrikaners, rather than because of any objection to apartheid.

Another older person I befriended, later on in my life, was a Monk of the Community of the Resurrection.  Brother Charles was the exact opposite to Sylvia Glover, politically.  He matched and raised her eccentricity at every other level, but politically, he was radical in a way I had never come across before.  He believed, extraordinarily, that we were all equal.  That we could all have a place in the sun.  He believed Nelson Mandela was a hero and that his banned African National Congress was good.  He would collect people off the street in Braamfontein and invite them (and me!) into his office at lunchtime.  He would spread a tablecloth over his desk and open a couple of cans of tinned fish and share a loaf of white bread amongst us all.  It was food fit for royalty, believe me, for so we were served and treated.

Brother Charles was also a man with an eye for the off-beat.  In his long life, he had read much, experienced hugely, loved variously, lived passionately.  He talked non-stop. He repeated himself at will.  He laughed by throwing his head backwards - flinging his skullcap off the top of his head - and exposing his dentures.

His humanity was endless.  He loved people, especially poor people.  He was a friend to everyone.  To walk with him down a central Johannesburg street too forever, because everyone knew him, and would greet him and would hug him and love him.  When I stayed with the community for several months, he once took me to meet some friends of his down the street in Rosettenville.  A Portuguese couple. It was around nine o'clock in the evening, and they had already retired when he rang the doorbell.  No matter!  We were ushered into their bedroom, their got back into their large King-sized bed and treated us to a glass of wine.

Brother Charles taught me about a Christianity which put people before dogma, which laughed uproariously at silliness and stupidity and anything which counted against people.  He thumbed his nose at it all and lived his life on the absolute edge - with the poor and the hungry and the marginalised.  He took me to them. They welcomed me too.  I was changed forever.

And I have had many more older friends in my life - and I still have them.  They have always enriched me and challenged me and laughed at my pomposity. I have had the privilege of learning from their lives and their ideas.  I have had the joy of being a friend to them as well.

I look at my children, young as they are, and I hope so much that they too will have the privilege of meeting eccentrics like these - while they are still young and while their ideas are still forming.  Older people who can show them how to be something different. How to be bold and bright and irreverent. I wish them this gift.  I wish them this extraordinary path to insight, which older people give to us. And just this knowledge stops me, the older I get, from the worst excesses of grumpiness and dismissive attitude, in case I too could possibly be someone, for someone young to remember.

Worshipping Mary but overlooking women

Growing up, as I did, in a kind of Broad Church environment, Mary was considered a necessary part of Christmas, but to be ignored for the rest of the year - with occasional curt nods in her general direction, during the singing of the Magnificat.

Indeed, we eschewed anything which could be considered vaguely Roman. There were two - and only two - candles near the altar. Saints were in the stain-glass windows and nowhere else. Crossing one’s self would have been seen as an indication that one wouldn’t be taking communion, because the Holy See had forbidden it.

I first encountered Mary through a friendship I developed with a monk of the Community of the Resurrection. He was a man in his sixties and I was an irritating 20 year old. He was blessed with an impish sense of humour. He loathed posturing and falseness and would poke merciless fun at all pretence and posing. He would laugh uproariously at some of the things I took extremely seriously, at the time. Not because he was cruel, but because he was forgiving of my youthful enthusiasm.

It was he that introduced me to Mary. His devotion to her was neither extreme, nor passionate. It was just something ordinary, natural and true. And I suppose I sort of decided to emulate him and, from a very uncertain base, conjured up and fashioned an untutored but real devotion to the Mother of Jesus.

He once told me a joke, which I suppose, demonstrated his ease with the holiest of things. Pope Paul VI (it was round about that era) died and went to heaven. There at the pearly gates he was met by St Peter.

“How wonderful to meet you!” said St Peter. “God has told me to tell you that he is so pleased with your work on Earth, that I should grant you one wish – and that I should grant it – whatever it is”.

Pope Paul, rubbing his hands in abject humility, was overcome by God’s gift. After thinking about it for a while, he responded in Latin.

“St Peter”, he said, “it was a great honour and privilege to be the Pope and I really don’t feel I need any recognition at all. But if God insists”, he said, “and if it isn’t too much trouble, I would very much like to meet the Virgin Mary”.

“Done!” said St Peter. He snapped his fingers and a golden chariot, drawn by 10 white horses drew up. Pope Paul got into the chariot and the horses took him a couple of heavenly kilometres down the road. The horses stopped at a tiny little house on one of the streets of gold.

Pope Paul nervously stepped down from the chariot, went to the front door and knocked, with due reverence. After a while, the door opened a crack. Then wider, revealing a tiny little old lady.

She looked at him, but said nothing.

“Virgin Mary”, said St Paul, dropping to his knees, “it is such a privilege to meet you, considering you are the Mother of our Blessed Lord”.
There was a long silence, and Pope Paul nervously looked up from his kneeling position.

“Vell, you see”, said the little old lady, “he vas a great dishapointment to us, you know. Ve vanted him to be a lawyer!”

I recount this story, not only because it is a good story, but because it so scandalously (and thoroughly) demystifies Mary. Mary, seen as a little old “Bobba”, instead of the Queen of Heaven.

And my point is this. It is all too easy to worship a deified serene image of the Virgin with gold rays beaming from her crowned head. That is the religious imagery of wonder and awe and mystery and divine fabulousness. That is flawless stuff. It is the stuff of which worship and devotion is made.

It is much more difficult. Much, MUCH more difficult to see and to worship Mary in the "Bobba" next door. And there is the heart of the contradiction. Why is it so easy for Catholics to adore the showgirl, but to ignore (at the very best) any other girl?

While this is not something which men do alone in the church, it is something which has its essence in a patriarchal world view. A view where, functionally, to be divine is to be male. And, most of the time, to be human is to be male as well. Women need to define themselves in the light of the male paradigm, which is fearlessly and vigourously defended at every turn.

And so the image of Mary is stately, regal, virginal and ageless. That is the pristine image which is venerated. She didn't grow old and ordinary. Her breasts remained pert and firm. Her lips rounded. Her eyes clear. Her waist slim. That is the image of the theotokos - the God bearer.

But there is a slight of hand in the image. Because it is unreal, because it is much more similar to a Hollywood movie than any common reality, it is controlable, manageable, essentially dismissable. If the image were not like that and more like reality, it would point us inexorably to the woman sitting next to us in the pew, or in the traffic, or in our street. Then it would lose its glamour and become disturbingly familiar. It would then lose its holiness. That is the sad truth of the matter.

It strikes me, altogether more so in a consciously Catholic parish, that the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary is no guarantee of an exalted place for women in general. In fact, it is disturbingly true that, more often than not, that where Mary is most fervently honoured, women are most emphatically overlooked. And if not that, then held in lower esteem in one way or another. Or made to occupy a place specially reserved for them, away from the real action.

It is a strange and curious contradiction and I think it has something to do with the problem we have with seeing the Blessed Virgin Mary as someone's rather ordinary grandmother.