The medal that my grandmother gave me for my First Communion has been sitting in my jewelry box for a long time. As a child I wore it on special occasions, and I remember clutching it as I mounted the stage for my first violin recital, praying that the Virgin would keep me from coming to grief as I played a Handel sonata. As an adult, however, I seldom wore it.
It’s not that my academic profession lacked in ceremonial occasions. But I can well imagine my colleagues’ reaction if I had showed up at, say, Phi Beta Kappa initiation wearing a small image of the Madonna around my neck. Irony would have been the mildest reaction I could have hoped for. Academia, in the last decades of the 20th century, was in the grip of rationalism, empiricism, existentialism, post-structuralism, and what have you. It was a world stripped of mystery, and you knew better than to mention your feelings about God, let alone the Virgin Mary, if you wanted to get tenure.
Despite my birth into a devout family and twelve years of Catholic school, I was fine with this. Sure, there were some rumblings on the part of what I supposed to be my soul, but mostly I was content to be carried along by the agnostic tides. Although I was named after a Christian martyr, I did not have the makings of one.
But as in those cities whose convent bells can only be heard at dusk after the traffic noise has faded, now that life is growing quiet all around me I am starting to hear those rumblings, or perhaps those convent bells, again. (Note to French majors: yes, the bell image is from Proust.) Among other things, I find myself thinking about my grandmother’s medal, which I have before me as I type. At the center is an ivory bas relief of the Virgin in profile, surrounded by golden rays, the whole framed in miniature rococo-style swirls not unlike those in the newly decorated Oval Office. Even though it is only about an inch in length, it is impossible to ignore. It is definitely a Religious Object.
What does one do with such an ornament these days? Like many, I am revolted by the sight on TV of crosses hanging around the necks of persons whose messages are utterly at variance not just with Christianity, but with the entire perennial tradition. Will wearing my medal put me in the company of those Catholics in high places whose policies good Pope Leo decries? Also, although I am no longer in academia, none of my liberal friends wears a cross, a holy medal, a star of David, or any overt sign of their spiritual affiliation. Since I travel in exquisitely polite circles, I am in no danger of being mocked, but I worry about embarrassing people.
In our secular culture, wearing a religious artifact feels revolutionary, somewhat the way that sandals and long hair, miniskirts for women and beards for men felt like in the 60s. In that era, if you showed up in a tie-dyed shirt and bell-bottoms nobody mistook you for a Nixon devotee. Today, alas, wearing anything remotely Christian may get you classed with people who don’t always love their neighbor as themselves.
I never would have dreamed that putting on my grandmother’s medal would become a countercultural gesture. But if any sparks of the spirit of the 60s still smolder within me, not only will I boldly hang the medal around my neck, but there is also a cross in my jewelry box that hasn’t seen the light of day since 1969….
One Response
This struck a chord with me from two very different perspectives. I was raised by a devoutly Catholic mother and partly schooled by nuns and priests. I never had faint rumblings at least with respect to Catholicism. I realize that even at 6 years old, I was a rationalist and from that cold, hard light so much of the language and tradition of the Church seemed made up. (There is an old African saying, “God would not exist if we did not exist.” The Gods of the Bible sounded suspiciously human in both their failings and beauty.) But with perhaps the wisdom of age, I am not so quick to judge other people’s experience—and most importantly, I have developed an abiding humility about the limits of my knowledge of existence—of nature in its vastness and complexity. So the second perspective: no judgement from me of any sort if I see you sporting your beloved medal.