Well that’s it for now. . .
But I’m sure to have some good pictures to post when I get back from Rome!
Archive for St. Elizabeth of Hungary
Memories of 9/11
“Where were you on 9/11 when the Towers were hit?” People have often asked me that question. My answer embarrasses me a little, because I missed hearing about the horrible event as most Americans did, by watching it unfold as it happened. I have to answer: “I was asleep at the time.” Yet this also meant that instead of watching a gradually unfolding horror, I got the full impact all at once.
In September 2001, I was doing frantic last-minute work on my doctoral dissertation, which I had to deliver to my professors in little more than a week. I was in my apartment next to Fordham’s Bronx campus, but was without roommates at the time. I worked as usual until around 4:00 a.m. on September 11, then went to bed, but couldn’t sleep for anxiety over my studies. I finally drifted off around 6:00 a.m., but slept poorly. Sometime around 10:30 or 11:00 I vaguely heard the phone ring in the empty bedroom next to mine where I had put it with the ringer turned down low to keep from being disturbed at night. I ignored it, figuring the answering machine would pick it up. Finally I fell into a sound sleep, but was jarred awake again sometime after 12:30 p.m. by the phone ringing — and it continued to ring insistently. Something was clearly wrong. When I finally stumbled into the next room to pick it up, I heard the frantic voice of my mother, calling from back home in Iowa:
“Where have you been? Why didn’t you answer the phone? Don’t you know what’s happened?” She was screaming with anger and crying at the same time. This was very unlike her. I couldn’t even answer except to stammer that I’d been asleep.
I’ll never forget what she’d said next: “All hell has broken loose. Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center and destroyed them. Nothing’s left but a hole in the ground. The Pentagon’s in flames. There was another that crashed in Pennsylvania. The terrorists have attacked us.” A chill of horror went through me, but the full meaning of what she said didn’t register. I don’t even remember what I said in reply, or what the rest of our conversation was like. Mom finally calmed down enough to say, “Turn on the TV and I’ll call you back.” She had to call other family members scattered across the country and couldn’t rest until she knew everyone was all right. She was especially concerned for me because I lived in New York, and since I didn’t answer the phone, she thought I might have been downtown. I can’t imagine to this day how, knowing my schedule as she did, she could have even imagined I’d be up early in the morning, much less anywhere near downtown Manhattan, but a mother’s fear is irrational at times.
I turned the TV in my bedroom, sat down and watched the ongoing coverage. The horror which was so impossible to absorb at first gradually took shape and became clearer. I took the cordless phone into my bedroom and talked with my family as we shared our reactions. I sat, still in my pajamas, by the TV all day, not moving, not getting up to eat — the knot in my stomach would have made it impossible anyway — not working, realizing that the entire world had changed. As I realized how many people must have died inside the Twin Towers, I was grateful I didn’t know anyone who worked in there.
The only time I had ever been inside the World Trade Center was in July 1995, the summer after my first year of studies at Fordham, when my mother and two sisters were visiting me in New York. I took them to do all of those touristy things I never had time to do myself. On this particular day, we had gone down to Battery Park to ride the Staten Island Ferry back and forth in order to look at the New York City skyline and the Statue of Liberty. We then walked up the few short blocks to the Twin Towers. We took the elevator up to the wide lobby, waited in line with all the other tourists, then a deep breath - and a long, long ride up to one of the top floors and the glassed-in observation deck with its incredible panoramic view of the city and the vast distances stretching away from it in a blue mist. There were even clouds below us! Last of all, we rode up to the very highest spot, the outdoor observation tower, and Mom took a picture of the three of us that I still have. It had only been two years previously, in 1993, that terrorists had attacked the building. We had recalled it in our talk as we walked around the deck, but we felt no fear other than the dizzy kind at being up so high. As I watched the TV coverage, I could imagine people trying to get down to that lobby where we had walked so unconcernedly, but how the elevators were out, and how the stairways we had never seen became a lifeline for many, and how many on the top floor had flames ten stories deep between them and safety. And what it must have been like for them as the towers fell. . .
As the hours of coverage wore on, other emotions joined the first horror. The tears as family members described the last goodbyes transmitted by cell phone from their loved ones trapped inside the towers. The pride and gratitude as we realized the heroism of the firefighters, Port Authority police and rescue workers, and grieved for their deaths. And the confused sense of bitter anger and pity as we learned about the young men who had been seduced into carrying out the attacks . . . and exactly who was behind them.
I remember many other people’s reactions during the following days. Someone in my apartment building put up a long, badly-spelled screed on the inside wall near the mailboxes, adressed “To Osama bin Laden . . . you have underestimated us. . . America will rise up against you. . . We will get you, you murdering bastard. . .” I can honestly say that I felt no desire for revenge. I knew that measures would have to be take to stop those who did this, but I also knew that no amount of killing people will destroy evil ideas. And hatred is useless.
Other people arranged candlelight prayer vigils and asked us to put lighted candles in our homes. I got one right away. I recalled how Edith Stein, a Jewish intellectual who had recently become a Catholic, went to her spiritual director soon after the rise of the Nazis began, and aked him if she should follow the inspiration she felt God had sent her: to become a Carmelite nun. He said: “You can so much more good against the evil in our land by your writing and your work as a professor.” A few years later, when the full horror of what Hitler was up to became clear, she asked him again. This time he said: “Yes, enter the convent. This kind of devil can only be cast out by prayer and fasting.” She did so, determined to make her life a sacrifice of love for the world and the defeat of evil. She ended up a martyr in a Nazi death camp, and is now a saint. Nothing but love can ultimately defeat evil.
I successfully defended my dissertation on October 21. My mentor, Professor Gyug, then invited me the next weekend to have dinner to celebrate with him and his wife in their Manhattan apartment near Columbus Circle. It was the first time I had ventured downtown since the towers fell. I felt comforted to see that traffic seemed normal in the city, and people filled the sidewalks as usual; there were even laughing and chatting groups sitting as usual on the edge of the fountain at Lincoln Center. A feeling of pride in my city filled me. Yes, my city. I had lived in the city for seven years on 9/11, but I can truthfully say that I became a New Yorker that day.
The Real “Sacred Feminine”
Though I’ve blogged about The Da Vinci Code, I haven’t yet described the strange experience of actually reading it. It’s so hard to give the 2 or 3 people left in the world who haven’t experienced this wonder of a book a proper idea of the superior cheesiness of its dumb thriller plot, the sublime wackiness of its bug-eyed “secrets” and “revelations,” the . . . well you get the idea.
Above all, they have missed the fever of its author’s enthusiasm for the “sacred feminine” — though this is certainly very widespread in culture today. But nowhere will you find it as you do in DVC. We not only learn, as everyone knows by now, that Jesus was really just the hanger-on, that Mary Magdalen is the real divine figure, the religious link to the goddess in every woman - the feminine principle the male-dominated church has been oppressing for centuries. We also learn that the hero, Robert Langdon, wears a Mickey Mouse wrist watch — in honor of the divine Disney figure of Sleeping Beauty, made so drowsy by patriarchial oppression — or maybe just by the droning nature of the prose. This particular revelation is where I finally lost it, and gave in to the giggles.
I don’t want to give the impression that I think that patriarchal oppression is a laughing matter. Particularly when it comes to the very real sins of the Church towards women in the past - part and parcel of what society has done to them, and the Church, holy though she may be in her essence, is always part of a sinful society (Hey, did the author even realize that the Church he sees as so oppressive of women is actually always described as feminine?).
But surely inquiring minds (at least 2 or 3 of them) want to know: what does the religion of the goddess and the “sacred feminine” offer that is so much better than what the Church has given women? What exactly does The Da Vinci Code’s goddess stand for? What does she do? Darned if I know, and, as I’ve said, I’ve read the book. The closest I can come to an actual answer is that she stands for the principles of tantric sex. Yep, that’s it. The divine earth mother sexuality in every woman is the means for the male partner, as the moment of greatest pleasure, to experience the divine - what women get out of it isn’t mentioned. Oh, I forgot, they’re already divine. Is this all the revelation we’re going to get? That’s what a goddess woman is for? To give men pleasure? Well, they certainly have for centuries, but what’s so liberating for women in it?
Now I believe, and the best writers in the Church, starting with St. Paul, have always believed that the physical love of man and wife should be a divine mystery of self-giving, like the relationship between Christ and the Church. But it’s not likely to come about through tantric techniques, or we women imagining that we’re already divine. It comes about through the effort to overcome the self, through mutual self-sacrificing love, which isn’t very popular with Da Vinci Code devotees searching for an easy fix religion. Nor will such a religion give any cure for the real source of oppression, one which Langdon and crew don’t seem too eager to search for — inside the human heart and its sinfulness.
Most of all, this feeble and impoverished conception of women conceals from them their real greatness. Some of the greatest women in history have a divine aura of a quite different kind about them — the saints, not imagined “goddesses” pasted over the image of saints like Mary Magdalen.
This brings me to the reason I haven’t blogged for almost a month. I’ve been given an assignment by Minister General and Vicar General of the Franciscan Third Order in Rome, to revise my doctoral dissertation on St. Elizabeth of Hungary and to translate some of the earliest sources on her life in time for the eighth centenary of her birth in 2007. This is going to keep me very busy for some months, but for me, it’s a glorious and longed-for opportunity to let people know more about one of the strongest and most compelling women in history.
Elizabeth, the daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary, was brought up in Germany and married to Landgraf Ludwig IV of Thuringia. At one of the most glittering courts in Europe, with a husband and children she was devoted to, she became aware of the suffering and misery outside the walls of her castle. She founded a hospital, cared for the poor, and comforted lepers in person. When she became aware that much of the suffering was due to unjust taxation, she refused to eat any food taken from the poor peasants in this fashion — perhaps history’s first boycott. Though her husband supported her, she became a scandal among many at the court. When her Ludwig died, Elizabeth was cast out with her children. She gladly accepted suffering with the poor as one of them. Devoting herself to God, she donned the habit of the Franciscans and worked for the rest of her short life in a hospital for the destitute. She went from being her country’s Princess Diana to its Mother Teresa. She is still loved and remembered and celebrated 800 years after her death as an example of courage, love and selfless dedication.
.jpg "St. Elizaberth of Hungary by Hans Holbein the Elder")
If an “oppressive” Church can produce a woman like that, what kind of woman would a truly liberated society produce?
Forgive me, though, for thinking that real liberation is going to come from somewhere besides the teachings in the Da Vinci Code.
