SELF-ABUSE Snow, Patricia
First things (New York, N.Y.),
01/2024
Journal Article
Despite the worst his detractors continue to say about him-sometimes with good motives, sometimes with bad (Luhan, incidentally, had tried and failed to break up his marriage)-the appeal of Lawrence ...and his books has not abated. In my own case, when I was still decades away from the Catholic Church, some of whose foundational teachings align with Lawrence's, I was riveted by Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow, The Lost Girl, and, yes, long sections of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a book unfortunate in its title (the author wanted to rechristen it Tenderness). ...in early adolescence, in an adult novel I had borrowed from the library, I came across a veiled description of the behavior in question. From Ann Landers's columns in the 1970s to the candy-colored vibrator on Gwyneth Paltrow's popular website in 2022, there is more or less a straight line, as a traditional understanding of sexual intercourse as an act of mutual self-giving and love was replaced by an attitude that regarded a sexual partner primarily as a means to one's own satisfaction.
SATAN UNBOUND Snow, Patricia
First things (New York, N.Y.),
12/2022
Journal Article
The rite is similar to rituals in the churches of the East-the Byzantine Catholic Church calls it the Great Blessing of Waters on the Eve of Theophany-and it entered the Roman Ritual in 1890, the ...same year Pope Leo XIII composed his "Exorcism Against Satan and the Apostate Angels," a longer version of his familiar 1886 St. Michael prayer. Many parishioners attended the blessing in the church that night, bringing with them water in receptacles of every kind, from antique glass perfume bottles to plastic gallon jugs, all of which were spread out on the rosewood floor around the altar. Faith healers and deliverance ministers, self-appointed prophets and preachers routinely called out Satan in public, tearing down strongholds and binding every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God. In the dispositions of ordinary Catholics, I discovered a remarkable confidence in God's providence, and a literally cruciform faith, which accepted sufferings as crosses from God's hand.
Heavy rains and rising temperatures washed the snow away, and on Ash Wednesday, when I drove to the church, the sky was crowded with clouds seemingly blowing on different winds-heavy cumulus clouds, ...and behind and between them lighter clouds like fine scarves that were darting and threading their way, like children slipping through a crowd of adults, hurrying toward the city. ...as Wade was adamant, we went into the kitchen with him and stood together under a fluorescent light fixture, near a massive range. In Hartford, on Asylum Street, in the shadow of the concrete cathedral that was as steep and forbidding as an ocean liner, I fought my way across the full parking lot, wrenched open a rear door and felt it shut out the wind with relief, only to have the silence immediately filled by a thunder of feet in the stairwells; a crush of humanity on tiled floors; the clamor of hundreds of refugees. ...we filed upstairs into the new cathedral, which was gloomy and futuristic, with an aluminum baldachino over the altar and leaden mosaics on the walls, metal stars on the ceiling and oversized windows in harsh colors-orange and red, bitter yellow and cobalt blue-that hung over us like vast icons, like enormous abstractions drifting behind steel screens. Standing on tiptoe in the dream, I strained to see whether the people from the Episcopal church in East Haven had come in.
March 2022 It was at this point, at the very end of the Church year, inspired by a tremulous confidence and the irresistible attraction of first love, that I established the habit of going to daily ...Mass. Whereas Dwight Chapel was intensely vertical, St. Mary's was almost as wide as she was high, as if the same architectural plan-the pillars and vaulted roofs, arches and side aisles -had been restricted in one case and dramatically expanded in the other. ...whereas in Dwight there was a seemingly unbridgeable distance between the dirty floor where we worshiped and two indecipherable windows far above, in St. Mary's sixteen massive stained-glass windows were set almost at the level of the pews-one window for each mystery of the Rosary, with one to spare-even as the congregation was subtly elevated by the rosewood floor of the nave. Add to all of this polychrome statues of saints-statues that, like the windows, were brought down within reach-and intricately painted and gilded bas-relief Stations of the Cross, and the colorful exuberance of the whole sounds almost too much on paper, yet it worked in the church, in the dim recesses around the altar especially, where the reds that were almost orange and the greens that were almost blue were at once resplendent and fugitive, overstated and vanishing, like the iridescent plumage of a tropical bird. In every evangelical experiment in my experience- excepting the messengers but even including My Father's House, a charismatic outpost of Catholicism-I had encountered a palpable anxiety if I tried to stand on my own, and then a flurry of activity designed to provide me with cover or legitimacy, as when the Episcopal minister hurriedly confirmed Charles in East Haven, or Hugh and Siafa dressed him up in a little authority.
ON THE THRESHOLD Snow, Patricia
First things (New York, N.Y.),
12/2021
Journal Article
After this second conversation ended-after the woman promised to pray for me and to give my number to Father McCarthy-I sat at my desk with my hand on the telephone for a long time, while the ...medicine of these paired conversations took its full effect. Father Keller sat in a large chair in front of a fireplace, and the rest of us sat on a red sofa under a window, and on stiffly placed chairs in a circle. ...as if she had done it for all of us, Adrianna started violently from the sofa, wrung her hands strangely and protested that she had a fever, that she couldn't breathe, and only after Father Keller soothed and reassured her, only after he brought her a glass of water and asked the rest of us if we needed anything, were we able to continue more equably, in an atmosphere a little less charged. ...he announced that, beginning on a Thursday in two weeks, he would be teaching a second class as well, on the Ten Commandments, or the Moral Law, that he strongly urged us to attend. ...before he prayed, when people were paying for their Catechisms and an information sheet was being passed around, I leaned over and said quietly to the attorney next to me-a tall woman with a haggard face and wild, hennaed hair-that my husband was an attorney, too, and where did she practice?
