Saturday, May 24, 2008

If God is Dead

If God is Dead, His ghost keeps reappearing in some very unexpected places. I was watching a repeat of an interview with the late lamented director Antony Minghella, who directed "The English Patient", "The talented Mr Ripley" and other notable movies. He sadly died recently and unexpectedly at the age of 54. In his conversation with Mark Lawson (an arts-oriented journalist for the BBC, the Guardian and various publications), Minghella mentioned his practice of examining his conscience every night before retiring to bed. This is the first time I have heard that phrase used in years - I can't remember the last time I heard it used in church. As far as I know, Minghella was not a believing or practising Catholic in adult life, despite his Italian ancestry. But he was a very intelligent and thoughtful man who obviously still appreciated the value of this discipline. As an ex-Catholic himself, Mark Lawson must have understood this disclosure far more deeply than the majority of the British audience.

In the fascinating French movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly", the firmly non-religious editor of "Elle" magazine is catastrophically paralysed by a stroke. He is so comprehensively immobilised that he cannot even move his tongue or his lips and thus cannot speak. Theodore Dalrymple, who moved to France to escape the barbarities of modern England, commented that France is the least Catholic of Catholic countries. But the editor cannot escape the residual religious influences in his country. One of his dedicated therapists prays fervently for him and takes him to Mass in his wheelchair. She and the priest air the idea of taking him to Lourdes on pilgrimage, which sparks off his hilarious reminiscence of a trip to Lourdes with one of his mistresses when he was able bodied. They ended up in one of the gloriously tacky souvenir shops, which give tawdry garbage a bad name.

Having been to Lourdes many times, I have fond memories of such emporia, some of which are skillfully targetted at the English speaking pilgrims and especially the Irish, though any of them speak enough English to relieve you of your money. My particular favourite piece of junk was the plastic holy water bottle in the shape of the Madonna, with the screw cap on her crowned head. However, the editor's mistress takes a fancy to a much more expensive souvenir, a huge illuminated Madonna ("blessed by the Cardinal", as the shopkeeper advises her). The editor pays 1,899 francs (around $300) for this monstrosity to keep her happy and they haul it back to the hotel. (For me, this was an extra happy reminder of pre-Euro France). With this flashing statue glowing and dominating the bedroom, he is too embarrassed to have sex with his mistress and they split up shortly afterwards.

To be fair, there are a few shops in Lourdes where you can buy beautiful religious artifacts at very reasonable prices, but religious megastores such as "Palais du Rosaire" are on the most prominent sites and attract the most attention. It was such a surprise seeing Lourdes in this movie; I had seen the shrine depicted only in two earlier films, "The Song of Bernadette" (1943), starring Jennifer Jones, and "Bernadette" (1988), starring Sydney Penney. Mind you, the very reverent "Song of Bernadette" has a truly bizarre background. As the noted American Catholic writer E Michael Jones commented, here you had a novel by a Jewish Anarchist author on the run from the Nazis being turned into a movie in an astonishingly short timescale by Hollywood Babylon. Not to mention the later letdown when Saint Jennifer Jones married her divorced producer.

As I noted in an earlier post, most American and European movies are grotesquely evasive and unrealistic in their treatment of religious attitudes. Even in the face of crises such as terminal illness or a ferocious battle, the characters are seldom driven to prayer or deeper reflection on their circumstances. So "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" was a refreshing exception. Also it was truthful enough to portray both the editor's suicidal desperation and the pain caused by his callousness in leaving his partner and children for a younger mistress. The abandoned children still loved him and one daughter prayed desperately every night for his recovery, while his abandoned partner visited and helped him. The utter verbal confusion in family relations which I noted in my previous post surfaces here also. When the doctor tells the paralysed and mute editor that his wife wants to see him, his irritated voiceover declares: "She's not my wife, she's the mother of my children!" (The partner/wife is played by

Emmanuelle Seigner, better known as Mrs Roman Polanski, so it looked extra odd, to my eyes at least, that the actor playing the editor is the spitting image of Mr Polanski. It was also wonderful to see that even provincial French hospitals recruit only the most gorgeous girls as therapists!)

Winston Churchill commented in a speech in June 1941, just after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union: "There are times when all pray". His reference was to the supposedly atheist Russian women desperately praying for the safety of their men at the front. Desperate circumstances encourage spiritual seeking. I saw the fascinating little play "Women of Lockerbie" at our local Progress Theatre recently. The little town of Lockerbie in south-west Scotland was an obscure backwater until the terrible night just before Christmas 1988 when Pan Am flight 103 exploded above it, killing 259 passengers and crew and 11 people in the town. This peaceful little town and its surrounding countryside were strewn with wreckage, bodies and bits of bodies. This very moving play was unusual in that its characters, both Scottish and American, pondered the impact of this horrible disaster on their faith and understanding of God and His presence in human affairs. Their comments were desperate questions rather than any illuminating insights, but it is not often you hear such matters aired in the modern theatre. It seemed particularly incongruous hearing it in a place like the Progress Theatre, which was founded in 1935. At that time "Progress", always a cant word, would have been synonymous with the advance of socialism and the worship of Stalin.

At the Lectio Divina group at my church, another parishioner reminded us of ancient Catholic symbolism of the scallop shell, the emblem of St James, patron of our parish. As a child, one of my teachers told us that medieval pilgrims on the long and dangerous journey to the shrine of St James at Compostela in Spain would wear such a shell. This badge was allegedly a signal to brigands and highwaymen to give them a break. A few miles north-west of Reading, there is the ancient Catholic estate of Mapledurham. Its fine house boasts at least one priest hole, used to conceal priests from the English Government agents who would have arrested and executed them. As Mapledurham is on the River Thames, many of the priests came and left by boat to minimise the risk of arrest on their journeys. If a priest was in residence at Mapledurham, three shells would be displayed in a window to discretely indicate that Mass could be heard there. And at Reading University you see this triple shell emblem everywhere as part of the University's shield; on the information leaflets, on the sides of University vehicles, on wall plaques. The University's website explains:

"The arms of the University of Reading were granted on 7 August 1896 when the newly incorporated University Extension College, Reading was still part of Oxford University. This was thirty years before it was granted a Royal charter and became a university in its own right. The simple and effective coat is one of only six armorial bearings adopted or granted by English universities before the turn of the 20th Century.

The three scallop shells on the upper part of the shield had been the arms of Reading Abbey founded in 1121 and their presence serves as a reminder that the first college was once part of the Abbey.

Since at least 1130, the scallop had been the special badge of the pilgrims to the shrine of St James the Greater at Santiago de Compostela in Spain. By the end of the 12th century it had also become the emblem of James the Apostle. Reading Abbey acquired as its principal relic, the hand of St James and a cult, complete with miracle stories, rapidly developed and eventually the scallop shells appeared on the Abbey’s coat of arms.

It is also possible that the scallop shells might allude to the arms of the local family, the Palmers. Walter Palmer, son of the co-founder of the Huntley and Palmers biscuit firm that came to Reading in the 1840s, was the first President of Reading University Extension College and the family has been and remain benefactors of the University today.

On the lower portion of the shield is the Lancaster Rose set on an engrailed cross (indented along the edge with small curves) and is derived from the arms of Christ Church Oxford, to whose initiative the Extension College owed its foundation. The arms of Christ Church were those of Cardinal Wolsey who in 1525 founded Cardinal College, later renamed as Christ Church by Henry VIII in 1546."

Reading University is hardly noteworthy as a hotbed of piety or Christian learning nowadays, but there are still very unexpected shoots of hope. Apart from the valiant Chaplaincy team, you have David Oderberg in the Philosophy Department who produces wonderful coherent arguments defending the sanctity of life against abortion and embryonic stem cell research. The British Parliament took scant regard of such arguments in their latest outrageous decisions to continue allowing abortion up to 24 weeks gestation and giving the green light to producing human/animal hybrids, but the power of reason and truth is mercifully independent of the power of venality, stupidity and fashion.