Poor banished children of Eve

How this cynical and impure Gen X'er came to find solace in the Rosary

The month of January was a difficult one for me. I was moving home, selling a home and renovating a home, all at once. My husband was in London for work. My son had his usual routine of school and sports to keep up, and we had to prepare for the arrival of an exchange student. Money was extremely tight. I was out of my routine of writing, departed from a home that I had loved very much, and very much out of my comfort zone.

During last month — and still now, as the renovations trundle on and we enter into Lent— I sought refuge and calm for my overstressed brain in a very unexpected place. So unexpected, in fact, that I am reluctant to say it out loud.

I began to say the Rosary. As I write those words, I feel a huge resistance and embarrassment, like I’m sharing the most personal thing I have ever shared. 

Why is it so uncomfortable for me to state this fact? In part it’s because I fear that I’m doing something wrong, appropriating something sacred that I have no rights over. Am I — an extremely secular, modern woman with a penchant for swearing and wine and a long history un-Christian behaviour— committing an act of mimicry to get some temporal relief?

I suppose others can judge for themselves. All I know is that it gives me comfort, it allows me few moments of the day to reconnect with my ancestral tradition in a world that feels increasingly out of control.

As I was going through all this soul-searching, I came upon a podcast with a woman I was unfamiliar with but for the fact that I followed her page, Theology of Home, on Instagram. Theology of Home reminds me a bit of Gwyneth Paltrow’s site GOOP, but for traditional Catholics instead of rich yoga moms. And I don’t mean that in a snide way at all— I love beautiful things, I like to have beautiful things, I try to be beautiful myself. 

But Carrie is a theologian, not a movie star. She has written a book called The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy has Destroyed Us, which caught my attention because it delves into the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th century writer I am very familiar with. I wrote much of my undergraduate dissertation about her and her daughter, Mary Shelley, author of of the horror classic Frankenstein. My dissertation was tinged with youthful leftism and feminism (even though I have never called myself a feminist) — it was an analysis of Frankenstein as an allegory of childbirth. Wollstonecraft, considered by many to be the first feminist writer, died from blood poisoning she contracted while giving birth to her daughter. Gress takes a similarly biographical look at the work of Wollstonecraft, but comes to the conclusion that her feminist beliefs stemmed from a deeply troubled early life in a violent and loveless family, which taught her to view family as an oppressive, imposed structure and not a sacred place of succour and strength. 

I was intrigued by what Gress had to say. And while I do not share her stalwart faith — I’m just Catholic-curious, not Catholic — there was a lot she said that I agree with.

Contemporary womanhood is in a sorry state. I think almost all sides of the political spectrum would agree with that statement. For people on the left, it’s the fault of the patriarchy or capitalism. For those on the right, it’s cultural derangement brought about by the abandonment female modesty. But nobody claims that it’s a really great time to be a woman. 

Why are women so unhappy? For Gress, feminism has played a huge role, and I have thought the same thing for years. It’s never been clear to me how feminism “empowered” three generations of women, yet also produced a society in which #MeToo could happen —women seemingly totally clueless on how to negotiate unwanted sexual attention in the workplace; and just a few years later cheered as men and boys got access to women’s bathrooms and praised them for snatching our sports achievements. I thought feminism was supposed to make us all stronger? 

And it’s not just women and children who have been harmed. How many men have been destroyed by our new moral universe which tells us that we invent any identity for ourselves no matter how outlandish, we can gorge ourselves on explicit sexual content 24 hours a day, and we can wallow in our weaknesses and fears instead of overcoming them? 

We are all the poor banished children of Eve. 

There is a lot that I do not endorse about the traditional Catholic view of womanhood, but the power of the symbol of Mary is something that is worthy of respect and careful consideration, even for those outside Catholicism. “It’s not lost that what is being destroyed are women, who are really meant to be an icon of who Our Lady is. We’ve gotten to this point where we can’t even define what a good woman is,” Gress said in this interview. 

I don’t want to devote space here to the many ways in which I am not a true believer. I have not had a road to Damascus moment. I really struggle with faith, it does not come naturally to me. However,  concrete, material, reality is showing me that the old secular world where everything was explainable and normal is gone. Sanity in mainstream discourse has vanished. People doing patently evil things are celebrated, platformed, and enriched. And following on from that objectively observable truth, in a rational sense, the existence of demonic evil implies the existence of its opposite, God.

And I have seen countless examples of evil playing out across the world via social media. A few years ago, I watched a video of a man who claims to be the head of the church of Satan, cooly and rationally explain why his worship of Satan was the true path to enlightenment and that he should absolutely be allowed to go into American schools and spread his message to children. He was handsome in a chilling way, with sharp features and with one eye that was a strikingly different colour than the other and slightly gave him the appearance of a goat. His look was timeless, both very odd and somehow exactly as you would expect Satan to appear incognito on this earth. It made my blood run cold.

Just last week, activist Billboard Chris posted a video of altercation he had with a person who punched him because he was protesting the trans-ing of children. Billboard Chris chased this this person onto a bus, where the attacker screeched and wailed and cowered exactly as imps and demons in folklore or old religions do. Chris’s attacker screams for help and wails “stop hurting me” while at the same time grabbing at Chris, who he has just assaulted. While many people pointed out that this creature was trying to avoid the consequences of his violent actions, I also heard a sincere cry for help in his voice — because he is deeply, deeply, deeply messed up. He is crying out in pain from the poison that has infected him.

Or what about this looney-toon, a man pretending to be a woman and so obsessed with some twisted ideal of beauty that he walks around naked and mouths off to a female police officer about all the plastic surgery he’s had. This is the feminine ideal inverted, perverted, warped and monstrously disfigured. It is an abomination, an insult to our common humanity. And it has taken hold of so many of us. Why? These sick people are archetypal nightmares, not just adherents to an ideology. 

Atheists like myself must face up to the clear and spectacular failure of secular liberalism to protect against madness, cruelty, corruption and the degradation of society. My father, a man with honestly acquired anti-clericalism, always pointed to the fact that Christianity produced a society that could slaughter women as witches, burn astronomers at the stake, and allow priests commit abuse under the cloak of virtue. If he were alive today, I wonder would he be willing to admit that his beloved atheistic liberalism has also allowed the butchering, drugging and raping of children, and the denial of reality on a scale so vast it approaches the worst excesses of the church. Ideologies born in secular, modern Europe produced Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin. I adored my father, but he and other Boomers thought they had it all figured out: that they could have their cake and eat it too, and their offspring would enjoy the fruits of liberalism in perpetuity — because the only thing liberalism could produce was freedom from the shackles of dour tradition and superstition. They were wrong. That’s very obvious to me now.

But back to the Rosary. During the darkest, coldest, and most stressful days of January, repeating the prayer to Mary in the hours before the sun came up and the day’s challenges began was ballast for me. And as I wander through the wasteland of popular culture, which at this point is just an endless procession of the damned, I keep in mind the Rosary. Especially when I see things like a tranny funeral in St Patrick’s Cathedral, where my devoutly Catholic and blind grandfather would every week perform his solemn deacon duties until he grew too infirm to make the trip into the city.

These transgressions are deliberately flaunted to demoralise those of us who are still in possession of a moral compass, so that we abandon it altogether. Even without a full arsenal of belief, I can sense the importance of the Rosary in this climate, as a symbol of purity, love and hope. It doesn’t matter any longer to my cynical and impure Gen X heart that ‘purity’ is often used as excuse to abuse and castigate - that is not the fault of purity itself, rather those malevolent people who steal it for their own ends. 

In the madness, the figure of Mary — our life, our sweetness, and our hope — brings me a little bit of calm every morning.