Author: Elisabeth

The dark box

On my way home from visiting my mother the other night, I
listened to Phillip Adam’s Late Night Live on the radio.  
Adams was interviewing a man who had once been a Catholic, a priest even, but who then became an atheist and more recently
reconverted back to Catholicism.
 
This seems to me a difficult thing to do.  To shift from Catholicism to atheism is
easy enough – my path and many others I know – but to shift back. 
What happens to your doubts?
 
This man, John Cornwell, still harbours doubts
and he is critical of Catholicism in the institutional sense.  He’s written a book, The Dark Box: a
secret history of confession.  In it he talks about the fact that the
confession he and I grew up with was not an issue until 1903 when the then
pope – one of the Pious  ones – decided one way of stopping the falling numbers of
Catholics was to reinforce the church from within.
 
To this effect he ordered that children as young as five
or six start to prepare for First Holy Communion and confession.  
Pious the whatever had no idea of the trauma these
sorts of teachings would have on the minds of children – the horrors of hell and
the relentlessness of a need to stay free from sin.
 
Before the nineteen hundreds the only ones to undertake
confession and communion were at least in their teens, a stage which I suggest
was also fraught, but  it was preferable to early childhood.
 
John Cornwell also described the confessional as a place
for childhood abuse because the priests who came into the priesthood grew up immature, stunted by their training, as
if still school boys after the boot camp quality of their life in the seminary. 
Cornwell described something of his own experience in the
seminary training to be a priest.  
There was a popular priest in the seminary who had been instructing young men in the ways of the priesthood. 
This priest was popular because he offered seminarians cigarettes or even the
occasional sip of alcohol.  He was
popular because he seemed to be one of them.  
In those days the popular priest held confession in his
room.  One day John Cornwell went along to have his confession heard.  
The popular priest locked the door
behind Cornwell who sat nearby in order to begin his confession. 
The popular priest then asked John to take out his
penis.  He needed to look at it,
the popular priest said in order to examine its size and constitution. He
needed to establish whether such a penis might more readily cause Cornwell to
masturbate.
Cornwell had the presence of mind to get up from his chair,
unlock the door and leave the room, never to return.
 
I tried later to retell this story to my husband and daughter over
dinner on Friday night.  My daughter recoiled.
‘Who wants to hear about sexual abuse over
dinner.’  
So I stopped telling the
story mid track, but it has stayed with me.  This take on abuse and the strange history of the dark box
in which so many secret atrocities have occurred.  

Damaged goods

‘People blame mothers too much,’ my daughter said the
other day when I was trying to justify some of her troubles on the basis of my
absence when she was little.
 
‘It’s not fair to always blame the mother.’
In my mind, cause and effect go back to early childhood
and a person’s experience of being parented, but my daughters reckon there’s
more to it than that.
There’s a dog bone in the middle of the room hidden behind
the pattern of the carpet. The dog must have snuck it in while no one was
looking. 
We impose a no-bones-inside rule out of a sense of
order.  The dog refuses to leave
his bone in a bowl.  Instead he
carries his bone with him to all rooms of the house a child clutches her
comfort blanket in order to create the illusion that he has control of what he
needs given his lack of control over his mother. 
Our dog hoards his bones and hides them and we hurl them
back outside.  If only I could
grind away my worries the way the dog pulverizes his bone.
The dog of my childhood ate his bones outside on the
grass.  One of sisters once fell
and her hand landed on the sharp edge of a bone which went through her wrist
and came out the other end.  She
came into the house wailing and held her hand up to my mother’s horror.  A hospital visit later and all was restored. 
It is one of our many childhood accidents.  One brother ripped a hunk out of his
leg when he fell down a cliff wall and snagged his foot on a tree, another
sister wound up in hospital when someone opened their car door on her
bike.  I nearly drowned and twice I
was skittled by cars.  The list is
endless. 
If I were my mother I would have gone mad with the worry,
all those children, all those legs and arms and hands and heads, all ready for
damage, all open to accident and death. 
‘We are so lucky,’ my mother says.  ‘Such a healthy family.  No one gets sick.  No cancer.  No drug addiction.’  
I
tell her this is not true and remind her of her own mother’s death from stomach
cancer, aged 67.  I remind her of
my father’s death of a heart attack through too much smoking and drinking, aged 65.  But my mother shrugs it off, as if alcohol is
to blame, rather like some folks in America defend the presence of guns.  The guns are not the problem, it’s the
people who use them. 
‘This house is the epicenter of worry,’ another daughter
said to me when I was off loading some of my most recent concerns.  She reciprocated by telling me about this dreadful customer she had encountered
at her work, a woman who was unhappy with her purchase – a round shelf
unit.  She had been promised a
brand new one but there were none left so they gave her one from the floor. 
‘It’s damaged’ the woman said, for which my daughter
apologized and offered a refund, but the woman huffed off to think about
it.  Then she rang back to complain
that she had lost her receipt, convinced now that my daughter had kept the
receipt in order to prevent the woman from exchanging her goods. 
My daughter searched everywhere for the receipt which
could not be found, not on the desk in the wastepaper basket nowhere.  The woman rang off with threats of
further action and my daughter caught the contagion of paranoia. 
Then the woman sent an email complaining about the
treatment she had received while acknowledging she had since found her receipt
– ‘human error,’ she wrote, as if to mock my daughter’s original apology for her ‘damaged goods’.