Nicola Denzey's The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women — Book Notes

My last posting was, in some respects, a piece of historiographical commentary. It was a meditation of sorts on how historians might face the challenge of the lacunae, the aporias, the silences (along with the lies and secrets, to echo Adrienne Rich) buried within historical documents, artifacts, texts, etc. My posting pointed you to a recent Salon essay by openly gay Irish novelist Colm Tóibín in which he argues that the pro-marriage equality side prevailed in the Irish referendum about same-sex marriage because gay Irish people — and the families of gay Irish people — chose to make themselves visible in a new way in Irish society, so that many of their fellow citizens could fill in a blank that had not been filled in previously, and recognize that they knew gay people, that they had close ties to families with gay sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers. Tóibín's essay is an excerpt from his foreword to a forthcoming book by Charlie Bird — A Day in May (Dublin: Merrion, June 2016)— about how the marriage equality battle was won in Ireland.

Unearthing Hidden LGBTQ Stories in Family History Research: The Mirror That Reflects Nothing Back

A warning before you dive in: this is one of those postings about one of my particular interests, tracking family history. And so it may not be of interest to all readers. It's also, however, about the challenge of unearthing buried stories about LGBT relatives, in particular, as we pore over historical records.

Sunday Commentary on State of Catholic Church As Papal Election Nears

Habemus papam! Well, at least, according to "Saturday Night Live," it appears we do.

Benedict Takes Georg Gänswein with Him to Retirement: People Will Talk

I wrote recently that people will talk about the arrangement made by Benedict to retire inside the Vatican with his personal secretary Georg Gänswein. And here's some of the talk as Benedict retires:

Historian William Johnston on John Paul's Leadership Style: "Blind Spot" and "Acts of Personal Cruelty"

At several Catholic blog sites, Carolyn Disco has very helpfully linked in the past several days to a 6 April 2005 Australian National Radio "Religion Report" program, in which program host Stephen Crittenden discusses the legacy of John Paul II with British historian and Vaticanologist Peter Hebblethwaite and Melbourne professor of history William Johnston.  I would acknowledge the precise blog site or sites at which Carolyn has provided this link, but for the life of me, I can't track them down--though I did read and save the transcript of the Religion Report program to which Carolyn's helpful link pointed.  And I do remember that a comment posted by Carolyn Disco to some discussion(s) I was following contained this link.

Colm Tóibín on Medjugorje (with Questions about the Politics of Marian Shrines)

I mentioned a few days back that I've been reading Colm Tóibín's book The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (London: Macmillan, 1994).  One section of this travelogue-cum-meditation recounts what Tóibín saw when he visited the Marian shrine at Medjugorje in the early 1990s, in the midst of war.  He happened to be there on Good Friday.

Colm Tóibín on John Paul II's Visit to Dublin: "Mysticism and Mystery Followed by Authority and Power"

John Paul II and Marcial Maciel

 

When I first read Irish writer Colm Tóibín's eulogy of Pope John Paul II in the New York Times several days following the pope's death, I remember being struck by three points.  The first was how perfectly Tóibín captured the theatricality of John Paul II and his papacy.  Of everything John Paul did in the public eye, down to the minutest gesture.  

Colm Tóibín on Gay Culture in the Catholic Hierarchy: Now You See, Now You Don't

Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s review of Angelo Quattrocchi’s The Pope Is Not Gay in this week’s London Review of Books is one of the most brilliant statements on the Catholic clerical sexual abuse crisis I’ve yet seen.  Artists see, by profession.  Tóibín sees what many of us who lack the novelist’s eye otherwise miss, as we look at the abuse crisis.  The telling nuances, the all-important occlusions, the skull beneath (and hidden by) the skin . . . . 

And that Tóibín sees specifically as a gay man raised in a heavily Catholic culture whose church has been decimated by the abuse crisis matters significantly.  His analysis of how a twisted and vitriolic, hidden but omnipresent and pervasive homosexuality in the culture of the Catholic hierarchy turns into cynical blame of openly gay men as a diversionary tool in narratives about the church’s role in the crisis is breathtaking.  And undeniable: Tóibín not only sees what’s there.  He also makes us see.

Colm Tóibín's "Brooklyn": The Heroic Moral Depths of "Everyday" Life

And as I offer some reflections on one book today, it occurs to me to recommend another.

I recently finished reading Colm Tóibín’s latest novel Brooklyn. I've long been fascinated by Tóibín, because he's an out gay Irish writer who manages to combine the Irish experience with being openly gay--and gracefully so.

Though Tóibín’s work has come to be known as "gay" fiction, Brooklyn is not, in any way a "gay" novel (though it has one tangential scene with a bit of lesbian content). It's a quietly told story of a young Irish woman growing up in Wexford after the second war, who realizes, as so many Irish young people have been forced to do until fairly recently, that her village held nothing at all for her by way of a future. She was talented and educated, and there was no work to fit her talents and level of education.

Her family collude to send her off to New York to seek her fortune. And that's, in a nutshell, the story of the entire book. It's a quietly told story in which nothing much happens, and everything happens, in the life of one young Irish woman following World War II. It's a story about how every single human life comprises high drama and pivotal moral challenges upon which everything depends.

I'm deliberately not providing many details about the plot, because in doing so, I would spoil the book for anyone who happens to read it after having seen this brief commentary on it. One aspect of the book that fascinates me, in particular, is its masterful way of exposing the quicksands that lie hidden in almost all "everyday" conversational exchanges, but above all in familial exchanges.

The Irish communities and the family on which the book focuses have that Irish penchant for bitter memory: the people whose lives are traced by Brooklyn are schooled in bitterness. And as in so many Irish communities (and human communities in general), bitterness pools beneath any ordinary word spoken in daily conversation, threatening to pull one down into its treacherous depths and to become not the subtext, but the text, of one's life.

This is a book about the moral life, then, about the monumental struggle of many of us in our "everyday" existence to rise above bitterness, above difficult circumstances, above injustice, and simply to live--to live as human beings and not as things reacting to what other human beings and life itself do to us. It is a book about the quiet beauty--as quiet as a soft Wexford voice itself--with which pivotal moral decisions appear in our life, affecting everything, demanding an answer.

It's a book about how not merely the lives we imagine as heroic or grand comprise such pivotal decisions. Every life involves them. They are the price of being human.

And everything at all depends on how we negotiate the challenge of these pivotal decisions.