Religion and language: and some holiday reading.

O most loving heart of Jesus deign to listen to the pleading supplications of Thy people for the sanctification of Thy pastors. ….Give them an excessive reverence for Thy pure body and a longing thirst for Thy precious blood,that having tasted of its sweetness, they may be sanctified,strengthened and purified in the consuming flames of divine love…..

This very lengthy ‘Prayer for Priests’ was added to the family Rosary every Sunday evening, so of course I know it by heart – I’ve left out most of it. Alice McDermott has written that the language of the Catholic Church provides her ‘often reticent characters with a language for the things they would otherwise be unable to express: hopes, dreams, yearnings, fears.’ The title of one of her books, After This, is taken from the Hail, Holy Queen (‘And after this our exile/show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’)

Another prayer we sometimes said after the Rosary, which used the words ‘ineffable’, ‘prostrate’ and ‘implore’ concluded: ‘and do thou o glorious patriarch St Joseph assist us by thy powerful patronage and offer by the hands of Mary our prayers to Jesus, Amen.’ Even as a child it struck me that we were offering our prayers to Joseph to hand over to Mary to give to Jesus – patriarch he might have been, but Joseph was very definitely third in the chain of command, a gentle intercessor, a bit like our own patriarch, I might add. That gentle imperative ‘do thou’ was echoed in the way our elders sometimes used the phrase ‘let you’, to soften an order: ‘When you’re finished the wash-up, go down to the shop, let you, and get me 10 Players No.6 and a box of matches.’ That ‘let you’ has completely disappeared from the language now.

I am not sure about the argument, sometimes made, that early exposure to the language of prayer helps to develop literary skills. A lot of the words we learned in those prayers were too formal and archaic to be usable, anyway – although mastering their complex syntax as our brains developed could have been very useful. Going a bit deeper, I think that a religious upbringing supplies language to express what is otherwise indescribable or ‘ineffable’. When Seamus Heaney was interviewed on RTE’s Morning Ireland after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, he described his ability to write poetry as ‘grace’. All over the country, in kitchens and cars (I was in the car) listeners sighed in happy recognition. Of course. Grace. We all knew what grace was, from the catechism – I can’t remember the exact definition but it was/is a God-bestowed gift, freely given if we have the wisdom to ask for it and the grit to work at it. At this stage Heaney was an agnostic, but he used religious vocabulary to convey the innate quality that drove him to work hard (to dig with his pen, as he put it) at using language in a way that made people look at the ‘ordinary’ in a fresh way.

Religious language also helped us to achieve special ways of understanding and seeing. We didn’t say the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary very often, because it was very long. But its tedious repetitiveness was always relieved by the sequence that went: ‘Mystical Rose, Tower of Ivory, Tower of David, House of Gold, Ark of the Covenant, Gate of Heaven, Morning Star.’ Even as a child I knew we weren’t saying that Our Lady was a rose, an ark, a tower, a house, a gate or a star. We were listing things that made us feel the same sense of awe that Mary herself evoked. Protestants familiar (as we Catholics were not) with the Psalms, Isaiah and other beautiful Old Testament passages would have been even more tuned into this kind of expression and description.

As children we didn’t always understand the language we heard; for years I thought that in the prayer for priests quoted at the top, we were asking Jesus to ‘dainty listen to the pleading supplications’ – and imagined Him crouched prettily with a hand behind his ear and a simpering expression. In the litany, the phrase ‘Mother Inviolate’ was puzzling too, because surely Our Lady’s blue was a much lighter shade than violet. A girl at school thought ‘to thee do we send up our sighs’ in the Hail, Holy Queen was ‘to thee do we send up our sides’ and, Limerick being a great pig town, envisaged sides of bacon on a kind of conveyor belt to Heaven. (The nuns thought that was hilarious.) But such misinterpretations and confusions were creative in their own way. From an early age that couplet from Hamlet was drummed into us (‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below/Words without thoughts never to Heaven go’) but we said so many prayers at home, at school and in church that our minds had to wander sometimes, and the rich vocabulary and imagery at our disposal ensured that they wandered by strange paths indeed.

Alice McDermott, ‘Faith and Literature’ in What About The Baby?: some thoughts on the art of fiction (N.Y: Picador 2021)

____________After This (N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006). Novel.

HOLIDAY READING:

Mrs Henry Wood, East Lynne (1861: I read it as a ‘classic’ reprint, borrowed from public library).

I started to read this as a historical curiosity, but I soon found it unputdownable and can understand why it was such a sensation in its time. The lovely Isabel Vane, mother of three, cherished but insecure wife of the lawyer, Carlyle, is misled by the dastardly Francis Levison to believe that her husband is being unfaithful to her with the beautiful Barbara Hare, whom he meets quite often in lonely places late at night. (He isn’t; they are talking about her brother’s wrongful conviction for murder. But Barbara seeks out and relishes these meetings with a man she believes should have married her, not Isabel.) So Isabel runs off with Levison, with the inevitable tragic consequences. She later returns to her husband’s house (he, thinking she is dead in the railway crash which conveniently killed the child of her union with Levison, has married Barbara)disfigured and disguised as a governess, so she gets to rear her own children. This stretches credulity but Mrs Wood pulls it off with great panache, down to Isabel’s outlandish blue spectacles and facial scar. There are various subplots involving the aforesaid murder, a by-election, characters’ relationships with each other and so on. There is plenty of humour. The author constantly reminds us that Isabel deserves everything that happens to her, but she makes us identify and sympathise with her too. Apart from Levison, and Isabel’s cousin’s horrible wife whose violence drives her into marrying Carlyle (long story), the characters are nuanced and credible. Miss Carlyle, a Holy Terror, is not all bad, Carlyle himself, a good man, has the kind of male stupidity that shades into insensitivity, the Judge is irascible but ultimately reasonable, his wife is a wimp but it’s hard to blame her. Barbara, while not ‘immoral’ like Isabel, has no scruple about flirting with the married Carlyle, and, when she marries him, is not as devoted to her stepchildren as she should be. Mrs Wood is determined to be fair but I don’t think she likes Barbara very much.

Most refreshingly, the servants, Joyce, Peter and Wilson, do not speak in dialect and are serious characters in their own right with their own hopes, desires and values. Interestingly, the upper-class families dine at 5 or 6 pm and have their ‘tea’ at 7 or 8. The book is crammed with this kind of incidental period detail – the song ‘When Other Lips’ from The Bohemian Girl (by the Irish composer, Balfe) features a few times – making it delightful reading for the social historian. This is highly recommended.