09 July 2010
Nun-the-less.
. . .
A gun made of gold, or a bicycle made of
gold: which would you choose as a gift?
That is the moral dilemma posited by Sister Angelica to us
first-graders 50 plus years ago. We were not to answer aloud.
Instead, one by one, we, each of us, dutifully marched up to her desk at the
front of the classroom and whispered his or her answer into her ear, then
returned to his or her desk, solemnly and quietly, as if having just
partaken of Holy Communion, so as to allow the next first-grader in line the
same opportunity for sacramental tranquility and grace.
None of us protested that the question was fantastical, or
even silly. A few of us allowed ourselves to imagine that the parish
priests had gone mad with the spirit of the approaching Christmas and
intended to give us extraordinarily extravagant presents that year.
Above
all, none of us questioned Sister. This was back when all nuns wore
one variation or the other of "the penguin suit," with the habit held firmly
to the head by a long pin that pierced the cloth of the habit,
then the forehead, and then back through the habit —
or so Sister Angelica had assured us. You had to admire a woman
willing to undergo such pain just to get dressed in the morning!
Nuns were a source of some of the most enthralling (and
often scary) stories about martyrs and saints with super powers, wicked
children who died in a state of sin and who were therefore personally and
publicly scolded by God, just to make sure that we all understood how much
He could embarrass us if He chose to. My personal favorite was the
story of the guardian angel who intentionally allowed his young charge to be
hit by an automobile and die. The guardian angel explained to the
bewildered soul, as he escorted him up to Heaven, that he, the guardian angel, had
foreseen that the child, if allowed to avoid the accident, would soon
encounter a temptation that he would be unable to resist, and that he would
consequently live a life a sin and eventually be condemned to eternal
torment in Hell. Hence, allowing the child to die in the automobile
accident saved
his soul for Heaven. As a child, I considered this a neat and even
logical circumvention of Free Will, although, as I think of it now, it seems
that another, unsavory moral could be derived from this story.
And then there were the stories of young women who allowed
themselves to be martyred, not only to avoid denying Christ, but also to
keep their virginity. The nuns, always held to a higher level of decorum than
mere mortals, would not describe exactly what a virginity was, what it
looked like, how big it was, what color it was, etc., but they did assure us
that it was incomprehensibly precious, that it sometimes glowed in the dark,
and that it could be readily lost by way of impure thoughts and actions.
Young Christian men of the past, it seemed, were rarely in
danger of losing their virginity — virginity
was an odd creature with which women, much more often than men, were both
blessed and cursed — but we pre-teen boys were
nonetheless warned, time and
again, always in the most obtuse manner, to avoid the dreadful sin of
masturbation. The nuns, groping for some way of explaining it to us,
fell back to the old term,
self-abuse.
Not that they ever used that term in particular; instead, they made sure to
remind us that all things were, directly or indirectly, a creation of God,
and that to abuse any of these creations would be a horrific sin.
It serves well at this juncture it that a couple of points
be made about
mid-20th Century American nuns.
One, the first eight years of my formal education were
made the responsibility of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, and, regardless
of whatever imagined complaints I may have borne from time to time, they
did, in fact, a pretty good job.
Two, nuns are sometimes parodied for having a
simplistic, child-like view of the world. This is no parody; instead,
it is generally the state of affairs. My own Aunt Mary, a Franciscan
Nun, was a perfect example of this: a kind-hearted soul who saw the world in
simple terms. As a child, I sometimes felt embarrassed by her.
As I grew, I came to appreciate her, better understanding the Biblical
passage (warning?) that, "of
such is the kingdom of God."
Which brings us to one of my Aunt Mary's numerous
pleasures, distributing holy cards among her favorites
— and we were all her favorites, of course. Holy
cards, for the uninitiated, were the Roman Catholic Church's version of
baseball trading cards. A holy card was thinner, more delicate, than
the typical business card, and about two inches wide and four inches tall.
On the front was the picture of a saint — any
saint, approved and canonized by the Church would do. On the reverse
side, rather than key statistics, was a prayer deemed appropriate to the
saint. The picture of the saint on the front was normally derived from
artwork, typically European, Renaissance period or later.
And good Roman Catholic boys, such as myself, were
encouraged to use these holy cards as prayer tools, so to speak.
Want to ask God for something that seems impossible?
Whip out your holy card of St. Jude, patron saint of the impossible, focus,
and pray!
Need to pray to ward off impure thoughts? Just whip
out your holy card of the Blessed Virgin Mary! Pray that prayer on the
back side! Then meditate on her picture —
a picture drawn by an artist who, wanting to portray her as perfectly good,
painted her as perfectly beautiful —
pure — young
— virginal . . . .
Clearly, my piggy little soul had been fore-ordained to
eternal damnation — a Hell in which I might,
every thousand centuries or so, glimpse the briefest of personal pleasure,
after which the door to my small, dark cubicle would burst open. In
would roar a giant, robotic Sister Angelica, her face an angry, iron mask of
phlegm-green and blood-red, scowling and berating, belittling me for my
wretched self-abuse! Cowering and quivering, frantic to cover a
glaring sin, I would lack the wherewithal to even whimper the obvious
answer: "But, Sister, I'm not abusing it — I'm
enjoying it!"
Truth be told, I developed, several years later, a
"Heaven" version of this grim fantasy, in which a slim, Audrey Hepburnesque
Sister Katherine would quietly slip into my small dungeon of debauchery.
Here there was no berating, no yelling, no accusations. Rather, her
gasp of titillated shock would lead to timid questions, a shy outreach for
the truth of the matter, and, after some considerable fumbling and groping,
a wholly gentler, kinder, and more satisfactory conclusion.
Here were aspects of Heaven that the nuns had sometimes
forgotten to include in their manifold tales of the After Life.
Despair had been banished; wonder and appreciation abounded.
In this version, Sister Katherine's nickname is 36
— for in a real Paradise, a
man has worked eternally only half way through his allotment of 72 virgins.
Setting aside the fate of my immortal soul, less than a
quibble in the grand scheme of Eternal Existence, there remains only the
original question.
I have considered over the last half-century that the
question may have been intended to be nothing more than a simplistic
sexuality test: all boys must prefer guns —
thank you, Dr. Freud — leaving the girls the
golden bicycles. On the other hand, it could have been a test of
aggressiveness, a sampling of our "fight-or-flight" instinct. When
faced with danger, do you prefer to stand your ground and fight it out?
Then you would want the gun. Or do you prefer to flee danger to live
another day? Then the bicycle is your choice, obviously.
But what about critters like me who preferred to slink
about and avoid confrontation entirely? Where was our invisibility
cloak? (Preferably made of gold)
Alas! After I told Sister Angelica my
answer — the golden bicycle
— she failed to follow up with the question,
"Why?"
Even as a first-grader, I knew that the cheapest,
flimsiest Schwinn bike that my old man could scrape up at a reduced price
through a friend would weigh much more than the slickest, most powerful,
plastic-spitting revolver that Mattel could put on the market! Give me
the golden bicycle! I can get it melted down, sell the gold at a fair
price, and have enough money to buy the flashiest bike that my timid legs
would allow me to mount, enough toy guns to maim at least half of the
neighborhood, and get enough gum, candy and soda to keep me sick
indefinitely, as I lay in bed, casually looking over my 100% complete
collection of baseball trading cards that covered the entire Major Leagues!
But, alas! the question "Why?" did not evade
Sister Angelica's lips, and I left school that day, knowing that, although I
had given her the answer that was, to the best of my reckoning, the correct
one, the logical and sensible answer, I had nonetheless failed her!
I went home that day, sad. I wept silently through
the night. And I prayed.
I think I prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary that night.
