One Glass Or Two: Sometimes It Matters

Our rules. Our rituals. The Catholic Church’s. Our society’s. Our own. How did we get so out of date. So stuck. So imprisoned. And, most importantly, how can we finally be free.

I am currently reading John Banville’s Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir – just in time for Saint Patrick’s Day, I suppose, although that was not really the intention.  Mini book review:  It’s full of quotidian wonderment at life around us, of what we remember and why. It’s both witty and hilarious (and there is a most delightful difference), thoughtful and thought-provoking, and wise – and it has pictures!

Getting back to our theme, however, in one part Banville describes, with just enough brevity to tantalize, some of the variations of pubs in Ireland and the characters that inhabit them. Just last night I came across this description and comment and thought of all of us. He’s talking about the 1950’s and 1960’s – maybe even the 1970’s? – but read and weep anyway:

In the pubs where women were admitted they were not allowed to order pints. I have just remembered this, and am filled with wonderment. A woman could have two halves simultaneously, in two glasses, but not a pint in a pint glass. Where did this absurd rule come from, and why did we so meekly obey it? Under a tyrannical regime – and the Ireland of those days was a spiritual tyranny – the populace becomes so cowed that it does the state’s work for it voluntarily. And as every tyrant knows, a people’s own self-censorship is the kind that works best. In the 1990’s, when revelations of clerical sexual abuse and the Catholic Church’s cover-ups put an end to its hegemony almost overnight, my generation scratched its head and asked, in voices trembling with incredulity, “How could we let them get away with it for so long?” But the question, of course, contained its own answer: We let them get away with it. Power is more often surrendered than seized.

If you’re reading this, you are probably one of the people who are trying NOT to let them get away with it, that mind-numbing abuse of power that continues even today. And I’ll bet, as a result, you are tired, bone tired, and spirit weary. No wonder, after a probable initial queasiness, you, I, we might see surrender as such a restful and, let’s face it, comfortable solution.  Is that why I, you, we, do it – sometimes? – too many times? Understandable, certainly forgivable, but…

Mariam Williams in the March 1, 2019 edition of NCR in an article called “Identities Can Be Lost in Our Rigid Rituals” brought forth a similar point. “When leaders of various religions entered quiet rooms hundreds or thousands of years ago and emerged with books of rites,” she asked, “how many were thinking of black women, indigenous women, or other women of color? What framework were they using when they decided what our rituals would be? Whose identity and lived experience was at the forefront of their thoughts?”  (I would respectfully add: definitely most tragically the women she mentions, but also all women. None of us were in their thoughts.)

Then she asked a question similar to Banville’s: “And if that identity is different from the demographics of our churches now, why do we continue with these rituals?”

Some of us don’t, of course, continue with the tired rituals and the squashing of our voices in Catholic liturgy and life. But that invariably means leaving the Church, even temporarily, for alternatives: for house churches, small Eucharistic communities, home altars, peace sites, the woods, the internet. We are not letting them get away with it, as far as we are concerned anyway, but meanwhile others are surrendering, – some possibly, most probably – to their detriment. We have “seized” individual power by standing, sitting, kneeling, worshipping, witnessing outside the Church. But I think, in this, we may be playing too much into the tyrant’s hand. It may be just the form of self -censorship tyrants loves, the kind that works best for their designs on the many because the few who could have stopped them are not there.

Alas then, weary as we are, we must also keep going inside the Church if only to keep on demanding what all the men now get: a full pint of sacramental participation, leadership, and ministry, not two dainty, delicate, carefully measured and meted out – and probably begrudged – glasses.