Essays in Idleness

The expression, “Mother of God,” got my attention long before I became a Christian, let alone was received into the Roman fold. I found it a rather thrilling assertion, whether or not “true.” The idea that God could have a Mother, fritzed my underdeveloped neurons; but it was better than that. For there is a second, Trinitarian punch coming, when the corollary follows, that “Christ is God” — and thus no “prophet” as I was raised to think of Him in my highly secularized milieu. It seemed to me that the Catholics had knocked the wildest Evangelicals into a cocked hat.

This comes back to me, naturally, each year at the Annunciation. From the same milieu, I knew that word as a term of art. Quite literally, an “Annunciation” was a painting of the angel Gabriel coming to Mary, to declaim a famous passage from the Gospel of Luke. I was once fairly well-educated, by Canadian standards, I would have you know. I knew that passage from a provocatively early age. I’d read my Gideon New Testament, which in those days was distributed to schoolchildren. (If the schools tried that today there’d be trouble.) I had it from both post-Christian parents that one ought to read the Bible, in order to become an “educated person.” This was not the Holy Bible they meant, rather, “the Bible as Literature” — another book, of identical text, but much different meaning. (Jorge Luis Borges once wrote a good story on this theme: “Pierre Menard.”)

“Mother of God.” … Well that just takes the cake, my wee mind thought.

Having been pupil in a certain Saint Anthony’s in earlier childhood (a school in Lahore), I was already prepared to accept the proposition that Catholics are, as a species, crazy; though not necessarily crazier than other people. Indeed, they seemed so easily to attract persecution (not only in Lahore), that I tended to identify with them. (I was also an instinctive Jew-lover.) At some point in early adolescence, the notion that those alleged most crazy, but apparently non-violent, might be the most sane, was consciously formulated.

It took me to age fifty to join up formally, but as God is my witness, I had been gently pro-Catholic until then; and never more than in a Canadian high school, where I was an “evangelical” Atheist and a spiky debater. I noticed the school’s few Catholic kids were the butt of much smug, bad humour. I decided, for instance, to defend Humanae Vitae, as a spiky debater back in 1968, on purely secular, rational grounds.

All my crushes were on Catholic girls; but that was only indirectly because of their religion. Really it was because they wore their hair long, and had headbands, and were one hundred percent not tomboys.

This eccentricity eventually got me inside several Catholic homes, where I saw the statuary. Mother Mary invariably made an appearance, as she did not in nice Protestant homes. These “Mics” had pictures any Protestant would find in bad taste. They had crucifixes “with the little man on them,” which looked as if they might drip blood on your shoe. They pulled out biblical texts in weird translations. They were tribal, largely because they were excluded from respectable society, and their fathers might work in sinful places like a brewery. Their surnames might end in vowels. One might call mine an anthropological fascination; for I was also partial to Armenians, and Chinamen.

“Mother of God.” …

A (deceptively sweet) little girl called Liddy, who told me that I would be going to Hell, because I was not a Catholic, once used this expression. I found it as enchanting as her pigtails.

The Mother of God, and by extension, the mother of everything: as nearly as I could make out. My mind was not ready for the Virgin Birth, or the Immaculate Conception. That is for older boys. But these Catholics had devices called Rosaries — you know, looping strings of beads — and I gathered they’d address prayers to Mother Mary, fifty times.

Now almost seventy-two, and doing this sort of thing myself, I continue, amazed. The Annunciation seems to me, still, too much to take in. The conception of the universe comes into it.

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POSTSCRIPTUM — This item has been brought forward from 2017 (with the usual fussy little changes).