The revised liturgy: medieval words, modern sexism

The bishops have spoken, or at least succumbed. This weekend American Catholics began saying new words at mass. Well, perhaps new is incorrect - the aim of the revised liturgy is to bring back older words that are closer to medieval Latin. In a time when the Catholic church has been rocked by scandals of almost Renaissance proportions, this move is supposed to make American parishioners feel more holy. It is also supposed to bring us in line with European-language liturgies, whose translations are closer to the medieval text.

Yesterday I went to the 10:30 mass at St. Michael's Catholic Community. The Bishop of Joliet, resplendent in purple robes and gold miter, processed medievally down the center aisle behind an honor guard of Knights of Columbus wearing feathery hats. When he greeted us with the customary "The Lord be with you," half of us responded "And also with you" while the other half said, medievally, "And with your spirit." By the end of mass, we had all caught on and were saying the revised words. I didn't feel especially holier. I did, however, feel greater kinship with European Catholics, who rarely attend mass.

Catholics sometimes reproach Protestants for acting as if the Holy Spirit stopped working with the church in the first century, after the New Testament books were written. Tradition, Catholics maintain, is the Spirit's continuing work in the church. Even the Spirit, however, has a bad century now and then, or at least a bad continent. Apparently the words he inspired the Western European church to use in the 11th century were superior to those he inspired the American church to use in the 20th century. So now instead of simple words like one in being and born, we're back to medieval words like consubstantial and incarnate; and instead of affirming our faith as part of the believing community ("We believe in one God ..."), we're back to medieval individualism ("I believe in one God"); and along with with our guilt-ridden medieval ancestors we can strike our breasts and confess that we have sinned "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault."

And of course we are just as sexist as ever. More so, in fact. A medieval priest did indeed say "Pray, brothers" (oráte fratres), but not at every mass. More likely those words were spoken to brother priests at  concelebrated masses, not to male and female parishioners at typical parish masses. And the medieval creed did indeed affirm that Christ came down from heaven "for us men" (propter nos homines). Never mind that any 21st-century English-speaker hears that as "for us males," whereas the Latin means "for us humans." Why change good sexist texts that are already close to the Latin words, even if the meanings have completely changed?

Alas, as Fr. Nonomen lamented in Commonweal magazine, "the majority [of parishioners] won’t care. They will dutifully learn all the new responses and musical settings and generally remain unaware of the powerful changes this liturgical language is likely to work on the church their grandchildren will inherit." Or will not inherit, as more and more of us get tired of medievally resplendent bishops making excuses for bad decisions by incompetent men in high places, and quietly drift away.

Review: A Plague on Both Your Houses

Knowing of my fascination with medieval sleuths, a friend recommended the Chronicles of Matthew Bartholomew by Susanna Gregory.

I began with A Plague on Both Your Houses, listed all over the internet as #1 in the series that is now up to 15 books, even though the book jacket unaccountably calls it the third chronicle. I suspect this book was the third written though the first chronologically, just as The Magician's Nephew is the 6th chronicle of Narnia though the first chronologically. Which makes me wonder how you can have an unchronological chronicle, but perhaps I'm being too logical.

The story takes place in 1348, some two centuries after Brother Cadfael flourished in Shrewsbury and nearly a century before Dame Frevisse roamed Oxfordshire, but only 15 years before Owen Archer will unravel his first mystery in York. Cadfael and Frevisse are monastics; Archer is an retired soldier and apothecary who works closely with a monastery; and Matthew Bartholomew is a physician who lives with monks and friars in a Cambridge college.

Gregory, a police officer before earning a PhD at Cambridge, has skillfully created the richly detailed historical ambience that medieval mystery readers crave. She includes not only descriptions of 14th-century university life, but also gruesome portrayals of what bubonic plague did to the human body, how it destroyed entire villages, and what the young doctor did to try to alleviate his patients' suffering. You can almost smell the piles of rotting corpses waiting to be tipped into the communal pit.

Of course--since this is a mystery--there is moral putrefaction as well: plots, conspiracies, greed, betrayal, all connected to a series of bizarre murders. Unlike many of his confrères, Bartholomew is naïve and very, very good. Like his biblical namesake (aka Nathanael), he is a man "in whom is no guile" (John 1.47). His innocence gets him into all sorts of trouble.

Bartholomew's character is well drawn, and his companions are believable. Conversation, however, is often stilted and professorial ("'There have been other signs, too,' Michael continued after a moment. 'In France, a great pillar of fire was seen over the Palace of the Popes in Avignon. A ball of fire hung over Paris. In Italy, when the plague arrived, it came with a terrible earthquake that sent noxious fumes all over the surrounding country and killed all the crops. Many died from famine as well as the plague.'" To the author's credit, Bartholomew nearly falls asleep listening to Brother Michael drone on.)

Occasionally Gregory seems guilty of anachronism. Though she depicts the general ignorance and superstition underlying 14th-century medical practices, and though she acknowledges that Bartholomew is ahead of his time, his ideas about the causes and treatment of disease sometimes seem unbelievably advanced. The plague is not a punishment from God; leeches are harmful; there is no reason to waste time with horoscopes ... will we discover in a later installment that a time machine has flung Bartholomew back from the Renaissance into the Middle Ages?

This is a complex, tightly plotted book. Trying to get my bearings, I kept returning to page 7, where the eight Fellows of Michaelhouse are briefly described. Eventually I knew everybody well enough to read in a more linear fashion, but then the bodies started to pile up. Gregory helped me out by having Bartholomew stop every now and then to take stock, usually by asking himself a paragraph or two full of questions ("Was it Abigny? Had he come back from wherever he was hiding when he had heard that Bartholomew knew about the [spoiler deleted]? Could it have been Swynford, back from his plague-free haven? Was it Michael, who had reacted so oddly at Augustus's death? Was it William, who had prompted him to look at the bodies in the first place, or Alcote, skulking in his room?" Is it tedious to read so many questions?).

The author also helped by neatly tying off all the loose ends in the final chapter and epilogue, which seemed just a little like cheating--but then if she had followed the novelist's adage Show, don't tell, the book might have become too heavy to lift.

Whether this is the first or the third chronicle, it is an early book in a series that has a lot of devoted fans. A reader who thinks the Matthew Bartholomew books "are simply the best out on the market" (and he's read them all) wrote this in an Amazon customer review: "Admittedly it has taken Ms Gregory 4 novels to really get going and you can almost see the development in the writing skills as you read each one." That's how I felt about the Dame Frevisse novels, with which I eventually fell hopelessly in love. So perhaps, several books from now, I'll be in love with the Bartholomew chronicles too.

Dissolution

This morning I finished reading Dissolution,and author C.J. Sansom is now high in my pantheon of mystery writers. You suspect a book is going to be good when it's blurbed by P.D. James and Colin Dexter--and this is only Sansom's debut novel.

The strongly characterized, intricately plotted, fast-paced story is set in 1537, the year England's Henry VIII moved against the larger monasteries. The king's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, sends hunchback lawyer Matthew Shardlake to investigate a murder at the Monastery of St. Donatus in the fictional Scarnsea. Shardlake's mission is not only to discover who killed the previous royal emissary, but also to unearth other unsavory goings-on that could justify closing the monastery.

He unearths plenty, and on both sides of the church-state conflict.

No doubt one reason I like this book is because its cynicism is general--Catholics and Reformers are equally corrupt. I like the flawed but decent protagonist who makes serious mistakes but retains his essential honesty. I like the author's knowledge of and attention to historical detail (he has a PhD in history and has practiced law). I like Sansom's skillful, unobtrusive writing style. Mostly, I enjoyed the story.

Fans of Candace Robb's Owen Archer or Margaret Frazer's Dame Frevisse (or Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael or Peter Tremayne's Sister Fidelma) are bound to enjoy Sansom's Matthew Shardlake, even if he lives in the decades that finished off the Middle Ages. The cast of characters still includes a king and councillors, an abbot, a prior, and dozens of monastics. The setting still features monasteries, serving girls, horses, and of course rumors of war between England and France.

Sansom's second book in this series, Dark Fire, won the 2005 Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, and he has added two more titles to the series since then. According to a November 2007 article in The Guardian, the BBC plans a TV adaptation of Dissolution starring Kenneth Branagh.

Another medieval gumshoe

I was telling my friend Sharon about Margaret Frazer's medieval mystery series featuring Dame Frevisse, and she asked if I'd discovered Candace M. Robb's medieval sleuth, Owen Archer.

Now I have! Book 1, The Apothecary Rose, was a delight, and Sharon tells me it's only a warm-up for the rest of the series. I'm looking forward to many pleasant winter evenings with the next six books.

Unlike Dame Frevisse (early 1400s) and Brother Cadfael (early 1100s), Owen (late 1300s) is not a member of a religious order. St. Mary's Abbey (York) is, however, significant to this story, and its resident herbalist, Brother Wulfstan, plays an important role.

Like Frazer and Ellis Peters, Robb mixes actual historical characters--in The Apothecary Rose, that would be primarily John Thoresby, Lord Chancellor of England and Archbishop of York--with invented villagers, monastics, miscreants, victims, and villains. All three authors show meticulous attention to historical detail without allowing it to overwhelm the story.

And what is The Apothecary Rose about? Well, of course, someone has been murdered. Two people, in fact. And more before the story ends. As the story unfolds, people undergo terrifying events. Someone falls in love. Eventually the truth comes out and justice is restored. This is a medieval mystery, after all.

The puzzle is important--I suppose it's the mind of the mystery. The mystery's body is equally important. In this case, the body includes a comfortable inn next to a well-stocked apothecary, an archbishop's furs and a medicine woman's rags, monks and highwaymen, mud and cobblestones, home-brewed ale and herbal potions, a wise pariah and an evil churchman...

Time to quit writing and go to the library. Book 2, The Lady Chapel, is on the shelf.

Someone you should know: Dame Frevisse

Margaret Frazer, The Apostate's Tale (New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2007)

By the time I was reading book 3 in the now 17-book Dame Frevisse Medieval Mystery series, I was hooked. Mr Neff quickly followed suit, and you can be sure that when Mr Neff and I both like a book, it’s really good.

The books

Frevisse is a 15th-century nun at St. Frideswide’s priory in Oxfordshire, England. As the niece-by-marriage of Geoffrey Chaucer’s son Thomas and cousin to his daughter Alice, Countess of Suffolk—actual historical characters, by the way—Dame Frevisse rides out of the nunnery surprisingly often, inadvertently getting involved in affairs of state, church politics, and even smuggling. Some of the best tales, though, take place at the priory itself. Practicing hospitality as enjoined by the Benedictine rule, the nuns open their gates to all comers, providing them with food and a place to stay. In turn, the guests offer gifts, adventure, and sometimes mayhem.

In 1431, when the series begins (The Novice's Tale), Frevisse is a thirtyish no-nonsense good-hearted woman who loves tradition and tends to get involved in other people’s problems—a lot like our other favorite heroine, Precious Ramotswe of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Both series stretch the definition of mystery: the crime rarely happens in the early chapters, and in some books nobody gets killed at all. Both are full of local color. And though both protagonists are intensely practical, both also think a lot about moral and ethical questions. In The Apostate's Tale, Dame Frevisse butts heads with a shameless narcissist.

The story begins during Holy Week 1452. Cecely, a runaway nun, has returned to St. Frideswide’s with her young bastard son in tow. At the same time, the ailing mother of one of the sisters arrives. In quick succession follow a businessman and two servants, several members of Cecely’s late paramour’s family, a mother and daughter who differ as to the value of the monastic life, and eventually the Abbot and his retinue. With few winter food stores remaining and not many provisions available in the nearby village, the nine resident nuns wonder how they will manage to accommodate so many guests. And then a would-be murderer strikes—and strikes again. No wonder the prioress has a nervous breakdown.

The authors

Margaret Frazer is the pen name of two women who began the series, mystery writer Mary Monica Pulver and amateur archeologist/historian Gail Frazer. They met at the Society for Creative Anachronism, became friends, and wrote the first six Dame Frevisse novels together. Then Pulver went on to other pursuits and Frazer continued the series on her own—while repeatedly battling cancer.

With Frazer as the sole author, the books have moved closer to the thin line separating period mysteries from historical fiction. Frazer loves research. One of her pet peeves, she said in an interview, is writers who rely on clichés about life in the middle ages (“streets deep in filth,” constant “lawless violence”), “who play fast and loose with facts to make their story-telling easier.” Frazer takes pains to make the Priory of St. Frideswide historically accurate, and Frevisse’s participation in the Benedictine life of prayer rings true.

Soul and body

More than any of the previous books in the series, Apostate slips into Dame Frevisse’s soul as she prays, sings the daily office, and goes about her work. Book 10, The Squire's Tale, foreshadowed this book's spiritual sensitivity with this lovely paragraph about the liturgical hours:

Frevisse ... sank into her own familiar place, made sure of her breviary and Psalter in front of her, then slid forward to kneel in prayer until everyone was in place and the Office began, continuing the unending weave of prayers and psalms begun years into centuries ago and never ceasing, prayed and sung by so many women and men in so many places, their lives given to the prayers and petitions and their lives lost to all memory but God's, that sometimes it seemed to Frevisse that here and now this hands-count of nuns no more made the prayers than someone made a river: they simply stepped into the endless flow, to be carried by it the way a river carried whatever came into its way. (41)

In Apostate, Frevisse’s theological and mystic musings take center stage as she enters the church and joins in the prayer of the church:

Here was the reason for all else. All the duties and rules and limits of her life were for this—these times of prayer when she could reach beyond life’s limits toward God and joy and the soul’s freedom. (35)

Despite her mysticism, Frevisse is realistic and unsentimental about the religious life. She explains to another sister that she hasn’t been given the gift of holiness, and that she doesn’t expect to achieve it in this life:

My hope isn’t for holiness, only that I grow enough—can set my roots of faith and belief and love deep enough—that like a deep-rooted plant growing taller than a shallow-rooted one, I finally come as near to God in my mind and soul and heart as I can, no matter how much in the world my body has to be. (125)

Not that she discounts the importance of her earthbound body. In typical medieval fashion, she values asceticism rather more than we do today, but she also accepts her body’s needs. Up for prayer in the middle of a cold night,

shivering as she went, she thought wryly of how strongly the body fought to prevail over the mind’s soul-longing. Whatever her mind’s intent, her body did not want the cold church and more prayer; it wanted the warm kitchen and more sleep, wanted them very badly. . . . Only for a saint, she supposed, would the desire for God be so great they could not only forgo but even forget the body’s desires. She also thought, equally wryly, that if that were the way of it, she was assuredly very far from sainthood. (54–55)

Such practical realism is typical of most of the sisters at St. Frideswide’s, with the exception of the maddeningly ethereal Dame Thomasine. Eventually even she admits to fatigue. “You haven’t been kind to your body, you know,” the ever-direct Dame Frevisse tells her.

And yet our bodies are God’s gift to us. Shouldn’t we treat them with at least a little pity, with a little kindness, in what little time they have to be alive? . . . Our flesh is the vessel that carries the fire of God’s love. You have no right to break your body, either on purpose or through plain carelessness. (233–34)

Still, these are not books of theology. The characters are well developed, and the stories are entertaining even after a hard day’s work. At first I thought Dame Frevisse would be a pale imitation of the hearty Brother Cadfael, a 12th-century Benedictine monastic who similarly pursues murderers and hangs out with a herbalist. The more I read, the more I preferred Dame Frevisse. Simultaneously flawed and virtuous, she’s believably wise and delightfully opinionated, and she deserves her own TV series. Thanks to the Britain’s ITV, Derek Jacobi is Brother Cadfael. I’ve always thought Queen Latifah would make a fine Mma Ramotswe. But who should be cast as the forthright Dame Frevisse--it's a mystery. Nominations?

Learn more

News article about Gail Frazer: http://erstarnews.com/content/view/2618/141/f

Interview with Frazer: http://jeriwesterson.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/08/interview_with_.html

Frazer's own website: http://www.margaretfrazer.com/index.html

Plot summaries with spoilers: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/philipg/detectives/frevisse.html

Book descriptions:

http://www.margaretfrazer.com/books/frevisse.html

A Little Daily Wisdom

Paraclete Press has just published a book of daily devotions edited by Carmen Acevedo Butcher, A Little Daily Wisdom: Christian Women Mystics. I'm not a fan of the devotional genre, though I've written two such books myself--but this one is unusual. There are no canned prayers, no chirpy little inspirational thoughts, no Scripture texts taken out of context, and no--thanks be to God--application questions. Instead, each day offers a few lines, freshly translated, from a woman writer who lived sometime between 1098 (the birth year of St. Hildegard of Bingen) and 1582 (the death year of St. Teresa of Avila).

When I first picked up the book, I narcissistically turned to my own birth date and read words by Gertrude the Great that seem to turn today's common wisdom on its head. Acknowledging the close relationship between body and soul, she sees an inverse relationship between them:

When your body is touched and troubled by pain, it’s like your soul is bathed in air and sunlight, coming to it through the painful body, and this gives the soul a wonderful clarity. The greater the pain, or the more general the suffering, the more purification or clarification goes on in the soul.

I've long been familiar with the slogan mens sana in corpore sano, "a healthy mind in a healthy body"--I think it was the motto of a school I once attended--that goes back to the Roman poet Juvenal. I've always thought it meant that the healthier the mind (and the soul), the healthier the body, and vice versa. Want to increase your resistance to disease? Practice gratitude! Want to lift depression? Exercise!

But Gertrude the Great turns this relationship around. I doubt if she ever suggests that a sick soul produces a healthy body (though I haven't read the whole book yet), and yet here she seems to be saying that a troubled body produces a pure soul. Would Juvenal approve?

Possibly. I checked out the source of his bon mot, and it turns out that he wasn't expecting good health and comfort to follow him all the days of his life:

It is to be prayed that the mind be sound in a sound body.
Ask for a brave soul that lacks the fear of death,
which places the length of life last among nature’s blessings,
which is able to bear whatever kind of sufferings,
does not know anger, lusts for nothing and believes
the hardships and savage labors of Hercules better than
the satisfactions, feasts, and feather bed of an Eastern king.

Short life, suffering, hardship, hard work--these are givens, and one can only pray for the strength of mind and body to endure them. That's a long way from my usual way of thinking, but it's not so far from Gertrude's call to endurance as a means of purification:

This is especially true of the painful problems of the heart. When these are endured, humbly and patiently, they give the soul a splendid luster, the nearer and better and closer they touch it.

I like the way Gertrude sums up her counsel. After observing that suffering leads to clarity, she suggests another route to the same end:

But remember that kind actions—more than anything else—cause the soul to shine with brilliance.

Kind actions under any circumstances are virtuous. Kind actions while suffering are saintly.

In my experience, most devotional books do not plant little ideas in my mind that keep popping out and making me examine my assumptions. This one does.

I have only one minor complaint about A Little Daily Wisdom. It has those dumb little fold-back flaps that keep the book from lying flat but definitely do not work to mark one's place. I've hacked off the front flap and am using it as a bookmark. If the back flap keeps getting in the way I'll hack it off too, though I hate to do so because it bears a lovely picture of the author, plus the information that she has a Ph.D. in medieval studies, teaches at Shorter College, and has written books about Benedict (of Nursia) and Hildegard of Bingen. It also gives directions to her website.
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In spite of the Pornocracy

The papacy was so bad in tenth-century Rome that it became known as the Pornocracy. How could the church survive?
Oddly--providentially--the church did quite well in spite of its corrupt leaders.
Roman misrule didn't have all that much effect on the rest of Europe: everyone was too busy repelling Norsemen and Magyars.
A monastery was founded at Cluny, in France, that would spearhead major reforms throughout Europe.
Missionaries were active. Poland, Russia, the Slavic nations, and Hungary became Christian.
The medieval renaissance was about to begin . . .

Frail children of dust

I grew up singing "O Worship the King," a 200-year-old hymn written by Robert Grant, a British MP and social reformer. It includes this concise description of the post-Edenic human condition:

Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail . . .

Now, I don't think we're frail because we are dust--Adam and Eve and Jesus were dust too. Nor do I think that our frailty is limited to our dust component--fallen spirit does every bit as much damage as fallen dust. But frail we certainly are, and our feebleness is especially distressing when it shows up in church.

Like, for example, when religious leaders (not always Catholic, by the way) sexually abuse children, or when they wage their internal wars ("We're more scriptural!" "We're more loving!") in the press and courts of law, or when they fleece their followers to support their own lavish lifestyles.

Is this the church against which "the gates of hell shall not prevail" (Matthew 16:18)?

Well, yes. We're a mess, as imperfect dust-spirit creatures are bound to be, but we're not nearly as messy as we once were. Consider the state of church leadership in the tenth century:

In 904, Sergius III had his two rivals, Leo V and Christopher I, incarcerated and killed. He had come to power with the support of one of the most powerful families of Italy. This family was headed by Theophylact and his wife Theodora, whose daughter, Marozia, was Sergius' lover. Shortly after the death of Sergius, Marozia and her husband Guido of Tuscia captured the Lateran palace and made John X their prisoner, subsequently suffocating him with a pillow. After the brief pontificates of Leo VI and Stephen VII, Marozia placed on the papal throne, with the name of John XI, the son whom she had had from her union with Sergius III. Thirty years after the death of John XI, that papacy was in the hands of John XII, a grandson of Marozia. Later, her nephew became John XIII. His successor, Benedict VI, was overthrown and strangled by Crescentius, a brother of John XIII. John XIV died of either poison or starvation in the dungeon where he had been thrown by Boniface VII, who in turn was poisoned.

--Justo González, The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1: 275

One might read such horrors and conclude that religion does more harm than good. However, despots such as Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao do not raise one's trust in atheistic benevolence. Here are some ideas I draw from our frail and feeble church:

• The Catholic reform movement Call to Action is right in emphasizing that "we are the church, the people of God." We are not defined by our leaders. Jesus said our leaders are our servants, not our lords (see Mark 10:42-45).
• At the same time, we must keep in mind that we too are feeble and frail. "Not the preacher, not the deacon, but it's me, O Lord / Standin' in the need of prayer."
• People who want an authoritative church to decide, legislate, direct, and control should read more history.
• People who think John-Paul II and Benedict XVI are going to destroy the church should read more history.
• Justo González's two-volume set, The Story of Christianity, is a good place to start.
  

Robert Grant does not leave his frail dusty hymn singers quivering under the bed. His next line puts the emphasis where it should be, especially when the messy church threatens to block our view of the horizon:

In Thee do we trust, nor find Thee to fail.