Virginity and a shrivelled arm

One of the great things about being a writer (or pretending to be a writer) is that you can spend all day sitting at your desk – or in bed - with your computer or pen and paper, and pretend you are working. People are so gullible.
How are they to know you are playing Solitaire on your laptop, or memorizing poems by William Blake, or reading old Pogo comic strips on line, or researching the pros and cons of having your cuticles clipped at the nail salon? Sure, the choreography of your fingers over the keyboard may give the impression that you are writing a book. But in fact you are composing an irate letter to the village trustees about the waste of taxpayer dollars that will be the Stroller-derby; or to the president of Delta airlines about the problem of insufficient air circulation on airplanes, and how you start having religious visions if you are deprived of oxygen. No one knows. Because you are alone, and that is the way you like it. That is a big part of the reason to write. You can legitimately work alone. You don’t have to make polite conversation in an elevator or at lunch. You can invent impolite conversation and put it on a page.

But my agent, who is exceptionally nice and a really good agent and so I would like be agreeable, invited me to this grand party to celebrate the agency’s 40th anniversary and I thought I really should go. Even though I knew it would be a party full of unrelated writers, whose only connection would be that they were all represented by one of the agents at the agency. Writers who, like me, prefer to be alone with their thoughts and their private hells and myriad forms of procrastination. I would not know any of them. I would feel awkward and then gulp down the first glass of wine passed my way, probably much too fast. But I would still feel awkward.

Still I went, and because the party was at the Morgan Library it was possible to look intently at a bookshelf or a manuscript on display and thereby obviate the problem of making small talk with complete strangers. I could be entranced and preoccupied, and not look entirely like the pimply four-eyed wallflower at the Middle School Dance.
Then I came upon a genuine treasure.
A little backstory: After years of miseducation at an elementary parochial school, and then more years as an adult obsessed with hagiography, I thought I was aware of most of the weirder aspects of early Christianity. Obviously, to think such a thing is simply delusional. One would have to study far more than I ever have to grasp even a solid fraction of the weirder aspects of early Christianity.
So, to my shame, I knew nothing about the apocryphal Gospel of James. And there in Morgan’s elegant library, under glass, was a page from an illuminated manuscript of this very Apocrypha. According to the label, the page on display featured the scene in which a midwife delivered the baby Jesus, of his mother Mary. The midwife then denied the virginity of Mary, and promptly her arm shriveled up. Later, she held the baby Jesus in her arms, and her arm was mysteriously restored. I had never heard this story before and had never heard of a midwife even being present at the Nativity.

From the Morgan Library website: Hours of Cecilia Gonzaga ca. 1470
Suddenly I actually was dying to tell someone about this Apocryphal Gospel and the midwife with the shriveled arm that I have never heard of before.

But how could I introduce this subject at a cocktail party full of strangers?

Someone brings up a book I haven’t read, and I might say, “While we’re discussing things we haven’t read, you should check out the Apocryphal Gospel of James and the midwife with a shriveled arm. Denying a mother’s virginity has its risks.”

OR, Someone comments on the subdued elegance of Morgan’s library, and I could interject, “But some of those illuminated manuscript are racier than you would think. Why, I just saw a midwife with a shriveled arm because she had her hands in the Virgin Mary’s private parts, and said she wasn’t a virgin.”

OR, I bump into someone and spill their cocktail, and while apologizing and attempting to wipe up the mess, I could say, “Well at least my arm isn’t shriveling up, which was what happened to the midwife in Bethlehem who had the temerity to suggest that Mary wasn’t a virgin.”

Virgin forests are one thing, but what about the Immaculate Conception?

Much later that evening, home alone with my laptop, propped up in bed in my favored position for ‘writing’ and ‘research’, I looked up more about the Apocryphal Gospel. At www.gnosis.org, the website of the Gnostic Society Library, I found the actual text. The story was a bit more complicated, as stories often are.
It wasn’t the midwife who doubted, but her friend Salome. After delivering the baby, the midwife ran into Salome, and said, “Salome, Salome, a new sight have I to tell thee. A virgin hath brought forth, which her nature alloweth not.” Salome was dubious, and went to see Mary and tested her with a finger. Because of her blasphemy and doubt, Salome’s hand – not the midwife’s – then shriveled up. This upset Salome enormously, as it would anyone, and then she went to touch baby Jesus, and lo, the shriveled arm was restored.

Perhaps it is just as well I didn’t know the full story that night at the Morgan, because I might have felt compelled to share it.

How long has it been since I have written about a saint, any saint, in SQD? A very long time, and while there are some of my readers who have perhaps not bemoaned this hiatus, and while perhaps not a single one of you has woken in the middle of the night with a craving for a hagiographic tidbit, I am going to plunge back into the haloed fray.
This has nothing to do with the fact that on Sunday (21st) the Pope will canonize 6, or 7, depending on your source, new saints, thus rendering my compendious Lives of the Saints even more out-of-date than it already is.
It has more to do with the fact that today is the feast of René Goupil, a deaf French Jesuit who came to North America in 1639 to missionize among the Hurons, a group not known for their fondness for missionaries. However, it was the Iroquois, fierce enemies of the Hurons, who killed Goupil. The method was a tomahawk to the head, and on account of that dispatchment, he is the patron saint of anesthesiologists as well as patients who receive anesthesia.
This remarkable – is it literal or magical? – linkage-giving-rise-to-patronage made me want to suggest a patronage group for another of today’s saints: Peter of Alcantara. He was a 16th century Spanish friar and until today’s exciting discovery, I only knew him as a friend and mentor of Teresa of Avila. Early in his monkish career, Peter was put in charge of the refectory at his monastery. After six months of his regime, the other monks finally complained that they had not been given one piece of fruit in all that time. Peter replied that he hadn’t seen any fruit. A fellow monk directed his eyes just slightly upward, and there were grapes and apples and figs hanging in profusion.
Peter’s taste buds had not felt the lack. Monks, as we all know, have a great sense of humor, and once for fun they gave Peter a bowl of water with vinegar and salt and told him it was soup. He never knew the difference.
Based on this story, I am recommending to the Vatican that Peter be made the patron saint of school cafeteria workers who, no doubt, need all the help they can get.
St Frideswide, an 8th century virgin, is the patron saint of Oxford, England, but that is never here nor there. Her story gets interesting about 500 years after her death, when England was in the throes of reformist zeal. For those hundreds of years, Frideswide’s relics had been resting undisturbed in Oxford. Then in 1561 came Calfhill, of whom even the laconic Alban Butler writes: “[he]went to such trouble to desecrate them [Frideswide’s bones] that it would seem he must have been insane with fanaticism.” For the purposes of his nefarious desecration, Calfhill dug up the bones of an apostate nun (She had married a friar) and mixed them up with the bones of the virginal Frideswide, and then reburied the mélange back in the church.
This performance piece was written up in Latin and German, and given the rubric: “Here lies Religion with Superstition.” History does not tell us what Calfhill did with the rest of his life, nor the manner of his death.

Fooled

Well I didn’t play a single April Fools joke but my favorite son Tristram did, and was rather successful.
I returned from White Plains mid-afternoon (and trips to White Plains always leave me shaken and disoriented, as if I’d barely escaped the underground laboratory of Balkan jellybean manufacturers) and there was a message from one Sam Rodman, who identified himself as the rector of St Michael’s who would be marrying Tristram and Nika in May. He said he wanted to “better understand Tristram’s religious background” and would I call back at my convenience.
I completely believed this.
But I did not call back immediately and for that I am grateful, because had I called I would very likely have said some rude and inappropriate things about Tristram’s amusing and brief career as an acolyte as well as alluded to my struggles to teach my children the most elementary hagiography in the face of opposition from my ex, the Unitarian.
I was saved by Tristram’s sister who got the same call and spoke at some length to the putative rector. Then, upon hanging up, she realized – and clearly her intuition is better than mine – that it was a hoax.
She shrieked with indignation, but also admiration. She had been truly had.
(Later, CSB pointed out that I should have turned the tables and told Tristram that I lost the phone number (it was Nika’s brother’s cell number, it turns out, their partner in foolery) and looked up the number for the real rector and spoke with the real Sam Rodman who disavowed the whole thing and was rather annoyed.)

We gave Ned B a year off, resting on our laurels from previous successes: the Incident of Parking Enforcement Officer Uriah Binfuled (U. Binfuled) and The Visit of the Green Egg™.