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The Brown Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel

Our story starts in the 13th century, with a man named Simon Stock. He will eventually become a saint (though he may never have existed, which is a trick some saints do; and then again, he may have absolutely existed, since parts of him are scattered throughout Europe, with some bones in Bordeaux, a tibia in Kensington, and part of his skull that he no longer needed, resting in Aylesford), but he isn’t when we meet him, on 16 July 1251, experiencing a vision of the Holy Mother, a brown scapular in her hand, and a promise that anyone wearing it would be delivered from Purgatory (if to Purgatory they were sent) on the immediately subsequent Saturday, which was the Holy Mother’s day to run errands, selecting the not-yet-holy who sported the divine object.

the Holy Mother presenting Simon Stock with the brown scapular

(You are asking, because you aren’t Catholic, and neither am I, what is a scapular? My first encounter was when Zach’s Aunt Sue gave him one for Christmas and I thought it was a bookmark and it absolutely isn’t. The term derives from the Latin for shoulders, and there are two kinds: devotional and monastic. Scapulars, that is. There are two kinds of scapulars and only one kind of shoulder I am not an anatomist. Aunt Sue, who left convent life after Vatican II when the Church became “too liberal” and she worried she’d be expected to play folk music on a guitar, gave Zach a devotional scapular, which you’ll see pictured, and you, too, will say, in your Best Baptist, “That is absolutely a bookmark.” But you wear it, I promise, with one end over your chest, and one end down your back. Monastic scapulars look like something women of a certain age would buy at Elaine Fisher as they blossom and bloom into the sorceresses all women become eventually. They’re both holy garments, like what Mormons wear, only older, and with not as much secrecy. As of this writing, there is no porn where scapulars play a significant role. There are, however, entire series devoted to getting young Mormon boys out of their spiritual underwear.)

Later, after Simon’s vision of the Holy Mother, even after his death in 1265, if he died, Pope John XXII in 1322 issued a Papal Bull titled Sacratissimo uti culmine. Pope John XXII, whose human name was Jacques d’Euse, and who fretted about witchcraft, having believed himself the target of an assassination attempt by poison and sorcery, also claimed a vision of the Holy Mother, telling him about her deal with Simon (who, if he existed, still isn’t a saint yet at this point), and that he, Pope John XXII, should tell the world to buy brown scapulars, both devotional and monastic, drink Ovaltine, and elevate the Carmelite Order above all others, because of this gift of fabric and promise.

gals, on the town, casting spells and brewing poisons and coming for your man

(Do we have a copy of this Bull? No we do not. But things get lost and the Vatican is large and we’ve lived in our house for over 15 years and there are boxes we haven’t unpacked so one feels generous with one’s patience, and simply lives in hope. Yet also it seems important to also mention that Jacques was, for a time, a fervent non-believer in the Beatific Vision — the ultimate union of the soul to God — and so, if he did write this Bull that no one can find, yet, he must have done it later, when he calmed down about Beatific Visions, and agreed that those who died in grace immediately enjoy a glimpse of God.)

Gustave Dore’s image of the Beatific Vision for Dante’s Paradiso

(This, too, feels parenthetical, but John XXII had a counter, an anti-pope, Nicholas V, set up in papal finery by the King of Bavaria, a land that only exists in our hearts, even though the literal land of Bavaria is still there, or the memory of the land, since you can’t step into the same river twice, and you can’t trust land, either, after seven hundred years, to be where you left it, so that physical space is as liminal as sacred space. Nicholas is eventually excommunicated by XXII, but he pled so eloquently for forgiveness that John showed mercy on him, absolving him of the excommunication, and held him in honorable imprisonment, in Avignon, which is fun to say, Avignon, until Nicholas’s death in 1333.)

the Anti-Pope, Nicholas V

Eventually, no one believed in Saint Simon, even with his jigsaw puzzle of a body, and no one believed in Pope John XXII’s Papal Bull. They — a list to long to list — said, “It’s a nice story.” They said, “It’s a metaphor.” And now official Church teaching is that the Sabbatine Privilege — that is, the privilege to wear brown and get out of Purgatory — is not official Church dogma at all. A man named Patrick, a good Catholic name, said in 2001, “People are free to believe it if they wish, but we cannot say that the Church teaches it.”

Patrick McMahon, O.Carm

There is a Carmelite monastery in Colorado where one can, through the Internet, purchase a brown scapular. It comes with an instruction manual that proudly announces its belief in Saint Simon Stock (who is believed to have slept in the hollowed-out trunk of a tree, by the way, which accounts for his last name). It also says, “Without saying to Mary that we venerate her, love her, and trust in her protection, we tell her these things every moment of the day by simply wearing the scapular.” Because we all of us are busy, but we all need to get dressed.

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A.N. Wilson is Not Good

A friend is reading A. N. Wilson, The Mystery of Charles Dickens.  He is finding it “delicious,” but knows nothing about the subject.  Have you read it?  Any thoughts?  Wilson is often controversial, is he not?

from an email Steve sent me last night

Oh boy. A.N. Wilson. [takes a long drag off a candy cigarette] That’s a name I thought I’d left far behind me.

Because sometimes the long way is the best way I’ll just ramble before arriving at the point. My first Wilson was The Victorians, which I bought in the early 2000s, because I was beginning my fascination with the era. (And I am not sure if you know this story or not, but all of this [gestures at my shelves of 19th century history and sociology] began with an impulse purchase of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. First off, the author’s name was ridiculous, as if someone were trying to parody a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta or introduce a landlord character into the Hundred Acre Wood. The title was also very intriguing: were there other colors she looked at in the morning? Did she know the night before that, before buying the flowers for herself, she would wear something in a white? Was it actual white, or an off-white? Was it ivory? Shades of vanilla? So much depends, etc. etc. Anyway, the opening line of The Woman in White sold me entirely: This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve. And then, when I looked up the author, expecting him to be swallowed in high collars and I don’t know, the son of a vicar or a boatswain — something that sounded really English — instead I saw a small toad of a man, with a bulging forehead, a very necessary beard, and a delightfully perverted story. This revelation ran so counter to my $200-level-question-on-Jeopardy! understanding of the 19th century, which I was assured was filled with moral prigs only doing right and it was exhausting, that I bought a biography of Collins (by Catherine Peters), read about how counter-culture his life was (two separate households with two women whom he didn’t want to marry but whom he deeply loved), and thought, “Wait a minute.” And then I started reading deeper into that hundred-something-year period and reached my absolutely facile theory of Performed vs Lived morality.) It was large, which felt right to me: I wanted something with a lot of pages because, like McTeague, quantity equaled value. (In McTeague, the title character buys a painting with a lot of figures in it because he feels like he’s getting more than his money’s worth.) And I read…a lot of it. I haven’t finished it. It’s 20 years later and my bookmark is still somewhere around the half-way mark. I found other books, better books; and also realized that biography was actually a more informative way to understand particular eras — because what became very clear to me is that we can’t look at the 19th century as a single thing. (Well, now, writing that I want to hedge a little: there is something to a 19th century novel that is sort of  Platonic (I used that right, right?); but — and now I’m back to my original “all 19th century novels are not the same” point: novels coming out of the 1830s are vastly different than those in the 1850s, than those in the 1870s, than those in the fin de siècle. They reflect different pressures, different mores, and different audiences.) My keenest interests in the 19th century are the 1850s-1860s, which sees the rise of the sensation novel; and then post-Dickens literature, both because we start to see explicit criticisms of the century as a whole, and because an incredibly powerful voice for the poor ceased speaking.

So we don’t get some of Victoria’s later cattiness, like when one of her ladies-in-waiting (for what? the vote? a guilt-free cheesecake recipe? men to give up pretending and just admit that they have no idea what they’re doing down there?)

My last serious attempt to read Wilson was his biography of Queen Victoria, which is terrible, stick with Stanley “Bitchy Gossip” Weintraub, the American heterosexual Lytton Strachey. Wilson, a man, views the young Victoria as bratty and whiny, and unfair to her mother and her mother’s (allegedly not but come on) boyfriend John Conroy (who, by the way, was taking one for the team by seducing Victoria’s mother because he saw the hope of a regency that he would be the driver of, and once burrowed in like a tick, it would be tough to extract him, even if you held a match to his butt, like my mom taught us, which is how I got burned once on my inner thigh). Her mother and Conroy had devised a system, the Kensington System, that essentially stripped all agency and power from the child Victoria. She was allowed no playmates (because who was worthy enough to be the friend of a monarch-in-waiting?), no real outings, and slept in her mother’s room, even through most of her puberty. All of this, Wilson wipes away with, “Kids, amirite?” (Also, too, he just isn’t…gay? Enough? I mean, all Englishmen are gay, and everyone in England is an actor who has appeared in EastEnders or played Miss Marple (or both), so these gay Englishmen who perform heteronormativity are just really good at disappearing into the role. Except Wilson. So we don’t get some of Victoria’s later cattiness, like when one of her ladies-in-waiting (for what? the vote? a guilt-free cheesecake recipe? men to give up pretending and just admit that they have no idea what they’re doing down there?) developed stomach cancer, but Vicky and her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who kept getting caught in sex scandals, so he’s essentially the Bill Clinton of the 1830s, spread this rumor that Lady Flora Hastings was pregnant, probably with John Conroy’s love-child, and then, when Lady Flora dies, of the aforementioned stomach cancer, Victoria still claims, “But you totally get that she looked pregnant, right?”

I actually didn’t know that Wilson had written a biography of Charles Dickens. In the future, everyone will write a biography of Charles Dickens for 15 minutes. I am burdened with Too Much Knowledge, so a title like The Mystery of Charles Dickens isn’t going to do much for me, unless it is discovered that Dickens was actually Rosina Bulwer Lytton pulling a long prank on her husband by being a better writer than he was. (Rosina was married to Edward Bulwer Lytton of “It was a Dark and Stormy Night” fame, and they were always divorcing, and one of Rosina’s favorite things was to disguise herself as a costermonger and mingle at the back of public readings Edward was giving, and then she’d throw fruit at him. Also, in a neat bit of coincidence for this email, she told people that she was the model for the woman in white in the novel The Woman in White (she didn’t wear a lot of white, p.s.) and that the villain of the novel, Count Fosco, was supposed to be based on Edward, only Wilkie was unable to truly capture how evil Edward was so she considered the novel a failure as a novel, but an excellent entree into any conversation.) But I just looked at the book on Amazon and there is no mention of this so I will assume I know all the mysteries of Charles Dickens. Besides, the book is only 368 pages. Mysteries take time. Our mutual friend Keats wrote, “The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought.” And that’s why the only biography of Dickens you need is Peter Ackroyd’s 1200 page opus where, periodically, he just throws in an imaginary conversation he, Ackroyd, is having with Dickens and other writers of the period. It’s bonkers and makes no sense, but telling someone’s life linearly doesn’t make any more sense so why not? Ackroyd is blind to Dickens’s faults often, but in a way where you, the reader, are not, so you’ll find yourself saying, “Pete, Pete, Pete,” and there you are in your own imagined conversation with Peter Ackroyd and everything is an ouroborus eating itself.

But if your friend is finding Wilson’s slight bio of Dickens “delicious” I could also suggest some books on the Fasting Girls of the 19th century, who also felt self-satisfied, subsisting on so very little.

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Saints Crispin, v.2

In one version of the story these Saints Crispin preached the gospel to the Gauls, made shoes at night, gave money to the poor, and were martyred — almost drowned, then beheaded. But there are no tigers in Africa and there was no Christian persecution in Gaul; however, both are very beautiful in the way false things lead to true understanding in the end.

(Rictus Varus, who probably didn’t exist, and who ordered the execution that probably didn’t happen, in some stories is converted, too, to Christianity, and then martyred, though, of course, probably not. In some stories, he is persuaded to devote his life to Christ, before being beheaded for this newfound faith, which is fitting, if it’s true, if being the key, as he is the Catalyst to Grace in several other martyralia. Ways lead on to ways; saints lead on to saints.)

In some versions of the story, they are Romans and brothers, twins, but there’s no support for this, other than one time my brother thought Corey Haim and Corey Feldman were brothers, and this feels of a piece with that. Aert van den Bossche paints them as brothers in a broad canvas with martyrs as far as the eye can see, in amongst scenes of gorgeous velvet fashion and ice skating. In the painting they all seem to be Crispins, except when they’re dogs.

My favorite version of the story, though, is this: Rather than Romans, they’re Englishmen, living in Canterbury. Walking one day — maybe their father has been murdered, as one story goes; maybe they’re just perambulators, England being lovely to walk through, they’re on a pilgrimage of their own — they happen upon a cobbler’s workshop ten miles from home, in Faversham, where they stay, entirely content, not being martyred, learning to make shoes.

We band of brothers.

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Christ’s Holy Foreskin, v.2

This is an artist's impression showing the planet Saturn and its rings.

When Christ our Savior was eight days old, as is traditional with Jewish boys, he was circumcised, like we all were in the ‘70s, except sometimes I’m not sure, looking at myself, but rarely, nudity is shameful and I’m busy enough already, but when I do look, I seem to be somewhere in between the Jewish Elect and a Frenchman. “Ask your mom,” someone suggests, someone who doesn’t understand that a conversation about the existence or non-existence of my foreskin, with my mother, is a conversation too far and only even thinking about it makes me want to step with dignity onto a funeral pyre, singing hosannas as my discomfort burns. “He smiled the whole time,” someone whispers as I char and smoke. “So brave in his willingness to escape uncomfortable things.”

When Christ Our Savior was eight days old and circumcised, we’re told, he was 220px-Nardostachys_grandifloracircumcised in a cave, which seems doubtful, because where would you send congratulatory flowers? After the circumcision, an old woman (who knows how she was invited) took the foreskin and the Holy Navel String and preserved them in a carved alabaster box, in a vial filled with spikenard oil, also called muskroot.

We learn, later, that Mary of Bethany bought the alabaster box with the oil-filled vial of Christ’s foreskin and navel string, which she then used to anoint Jesus’s own head and feet. “Feet” sometimes meant genitals, in the Bible, in the Older Testament, like when Naomi told Ruth to lay at the feet of Boaz, a name we don’t hear much anymore, what with all the Calebs, Liams, and Logans in the world, but when Ruth lays at the feet, she’s laying at his grown-up bathing suit area, which is crude, of course, and I’m sorry, but I didn’t write the Bible on account of how I rarely have the time. Mary of Bethany’s brother was Lazarus, whom we remember, mostly, because he wouldn’t stay dead.

Even while we venerate the foreskin, we are also unsure if it exists. If Jesus is perfection, wouldn’t he have arrived already circumcised? Or, if Jesus is perfection, would he have need of circumcision? Would the foreskin itself also be a part of that perfection? If he was circumcised, the foreskin, then – Christ’s foreskin, then – can be seen as the first Christian martyr, the first to shed blood for Christ himself, a paradox that is impossible to solve so we leave it shimmering to light our way.

And if he wasn’t circumcised—but that is too despairing to dwell on, isn’t it, my ducks. He had to, because we have an alabaster box. We have an oil-filled vial. We have muskroot and hope and the tangible wrinkled fruit of his body. The world is too empty, too grim, without it.

There have been many Holy Foreskins by the way, throughout history, as if the savior’s penis was mostly sleeve cut into rings and I’m sorry. One foreskin was stolen, by the way, in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and eighty-three, from the town of Calcata, which only sounds like Calcutta, but is in Italy, not in India, as far as we know, geography being as inexact as it is, as far as I am concerned.

800px-Heliga_Birgitta_på_ett_altarskåp_i_Salems_kyrka_retouchedDid Birgitta of Vadstena, who comes to us from fourteenth century Sweden, eat the foreskin? No, she did not. That was Agnes Blannbekin, whose revelations, hopes, fears, and loves were tenderly transcribed by her Franciscan confessor. “Crying and with compassion, she began to think about the foreskin of Christ, where it may be located,” after the Resurrection. “And behold, soon she felt with the greatest sweetness on her tongue a little piece of skin alike the skin in an egg, which she swallowed. After she had swallowed it, she again felt the little skin on her tongue with sweetness as before, and again she swallowed it. And this happened to her about a hundred times.” It took me about a hundred times to understand that I didn’t really like coconut water, so we come to understanding in our own way, but in the right time.

So, ultimately, where did the Christ’s Holy Foreskin go, after the Resurrection? Maybe it flew to heaven, this holy piece of the holiest of flesh. A seventeenth century theologian asserted, in an essay sadly lost to history, and to us, that when Christ ascended, bodily, into heaven, after the crucifixion, of course his foreskin – wherever it might be – ascended, too. Nothing of this most divine body could stay on the earth, and why should it, now that all were redeemed by the sacrifice.

Leo Allatius tells us, in his Discourse on the Foreskin of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which none of us at the point can find, that the foreskin sailed swiftly through the night sky, finding the planet Saturn, father of Zeus, and holding it as a ring, as a gambler holds a promise.

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“From what I heard, and kind of put together…”: Casting JonBenet

This is best read by those who have already seen the documentary, but it’s your one wild and precious life, so gey gezunt. It’s just, so much of the power of this movie comes from not knowing what you’re about to see at all — going in with your own expectations, anticipating what a true crime investigation of a six-year-old’s murder is going to give you, and then gradually having that stripped away.

There are no official experts interviewed for Casting JonBenet. No crime scene footage. No photos of JonBenet herself, hair piled marshmallow-high. Instead, over the course of 80 minutes, we watch actors auditioning for roles in a JonBenet Ramsey-based project.

When we die and are taken to whatever our reward is going to be, we will be told three things: Every good act we’ve ever done, that we have always been loved, and that Burke Ramsey murdered JonBenet. Until then, though, this case remains frustratingly unsolved. Any answer is as good as any other. All theories are in play. “Do you know who killed JonBenet Ramsey?” one of the little girls auditioning for that role saucily asks, an impish grin on her face, maybe because someone put her up to the question, and children want to please.

2017_castingJonBenet_Netfix-920x584

“I’m normally typecast as the loving mother, and then also as…a bitch,” one of the actresses auditioning for the role of Patsy Ramsey tells the camera. She looks like Maya Rudolph playing a Very Specific kind of white woman, maybe Miranda from Sex and the City. Another says, “Usually mom, or the friend, is what I’ve played.” One woman, who brought her own Mrs Colorado pageant photos, says, “Both of us–” meaning she and Patsy Ramsey “–are not the really thin girls. We’re a little bit heavier.”

Some of the women have Patsy’s dark hair, but just as many don’t. Many wear the traditional Patsy Ramsey garb of a short-sleeved red sweater, but one woman auditions in a navy blazer with a blue collared shirt, unbuttoned to show a pearl necklace. “I noticed that you had some of the other women who are auditioning for Patsy wearing the red top, but for me, it’s the pearls that make who Patsy was.” She might be the closest, physically, to what Patsy Ramsey looked like. But she could also easily play Ina Garten in a TV movie.

071_CJB_SG_00351

Casting JonBenet isn’t interested in answering any questions, and certainly not questions about the death of JonBenet. Instead, it’s interested in how others answer that question, and exploring, very gently, how they came to that conclusion. The documentary doesn’t concern itself with presenting the truth — because it knows it can’t. Instead, it wants to explore the nature of truth, and how our individual ideas of the truth lead us to conclusions that may not necessarily be correct. There’s this idea we have created, where we think that if we have enough pieces of the truth, they will fit together like a puzzle into a Grand Explanation. But they don’t, because they can’t, because there is no Grand Explanation to anything, no puzzle to put together.

“And what it cited, that I think incited so much rage in me was that the stressors that Patsy was under — one of them being the holidays, and another being her impending 40th birthday. And I’ll be 39 next month.”

There’s an interesting gendered approach to how the actors who are auditioning for John Ramsey describe him, and how the actresses for Patsy describe her. The women are protective of Patsy, while not totally exonerating her; if anything, they hammer Patsy for her narcissism, ironically on camera, because they are actors, and the only other more narcissistic profession out there is close-up magician. There’s an “if” haunting the women’s points: If Patsy killed her daughter, it was an accident, either from exhaustion or deep insecurity. “She’d gotten too old,” one woman explains. Another recounts an article she had recently read about the case, explicitly naming Patsy as the murderer: “And what it cited, that I think incited so much rage in me was that the stressors that Patsy was under — one of them being the holidays, and another being her impending 40th birthday. And I’ll be 39 next month.” The men see John Ramsey as incredibly competent, and both praise and envy his business successes. “I don’t believe he was involved in any way,” a man who looks like Kris Kristofferson says, but doesn’t explain why. Another man says, “The more manic side of this situation seemed to come from Patsy’s side,” and that may have to do. We’ve always gendered mental illness while recognizing its trans properties. I’m Mike Bevel, and I’m manic depressive, better known as bipolar, and generally attributed to women. Men just get to be tortured geniuses and lose two wives to suicide via stove. (RIP, Ted Hughes.)

Actors are always themselves, which is a formless state of being, but seek to inhabit other people. They empty themselves to fill themselves with the Presence of the person they’re portraying. They need to find their way into another life, usually via empathy. In a way, actors see themselves as the frame into which all the puzzle pieces of a person’s life fit. Casting JonBenet is interested in this framing — and sees not just actors, but humans, as mechanisms for processing information via our own experiences and empathy. We watch this happen on screen, when a woman starts out with, “Why? She had no motive,” explaining Patsy to the filmmakers and to herself. But then her explanation shifts: “I’m frustrated as a parent. I’m frustrated with my kids. There’s no motive to kill them. There’s no motive to do that.” Patsy couldn’t have done it because she couldn’t have done it. She is like Patsy, and Patsy is like her, and we’ve all been frustrated, so frustration can’t be the answer.

But there’s still a dead six-year-old.

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Another woman explains Patsy’s involvement this way: “More than anything I think it was the ransom note that was written, that handwriting experts said she most likely wrote. I found that pretty interesting because I’ve had my handwriting analyzed. And it was fascinating, because I wasn’t there. It was an ex-boyfriend who showed this handwriting expert a birthday card that I gave him. But this expert could actually tell that I had had a trauma to my right ankle. And sure enough I had reconstructive surgery on my right ankle.”

We want to understand why terrible things happen — be satisfied with the outcome. But this is very different. We confuse satisfaction with understanding, assuming that what feels right about any situation must be true. One woman feels she has gained insight into Patsy by getting as close as she could to Patsy’s earrings. There’s a look of satisfaction on her face.

Casting-JonBenet-876642

Later in the documentary, the actors are shown rehearsing the press conference. “You know, they were never really too close,” an actor who looks like a version of Matt LeBlanc who has received bad news explains to his acting partner and to the camera. “Like, they weren’t like this [puts his arm around “Patsy”] or, I mean, but I might just angle in.” There’s a long pause while the Ana Gasteyer-looking woman really thinks about the Patsyness of her own psyche, and then the pause is longer still, until finally, “I don’t think I would angle in.”

So, again, the brilliance of the documentary is that it’s not just the actors who are seeking to be cast in a JonBenet-themed project. We do it too. We do it each time we work through a series of someone else’s unfortunate events. “I would have done x, y, or z.” Or, “Why would anyone do such a thing?” Or, “Both of us are not the really thin girls.” The Gospel of Thomas says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” And bring forth we do, often, seeking satisfaction more than understanding; confusing truth with a puzzle that we think we’ve solved.