Lourdes: A Den of Thieves

Everybody's faking it in Lourdes - everybody, that is, except for the thousands of sick pilgrims who converge on the famous town of some 18,000 inhabitants by the coachload.

They arrive desperately seeking a cure and depart clutching Virgin Mary-shaped plastic flasks filled with samples of the foul-tasting if putatively miraculous waters and with bags stuffed with other `made-in-Taiwan' relics. Amongst the hundreds of trinkets that the contemporary pilgrim can acquire in the crowded, tout-infested streets are glow-in-the-dark crucifixes, St. Bernadette ashtrays and drinks-mats, plastic snow-scenes and 3D viewers showing the miracle. There are even what look suspiciously like beer mugs and brandy balloons adorned with transfer-images of the ubiquitous saint.

What's more, it is not just commercialism aping piety; there is also religion passing itself off as modern consumerism. Take, for instance, the Pax Cinema offering as its current blockbuster "The Passion of Bernadette", not a film recently exhibited at Cannes (it has been off the circuits for quite a long time). One wonders if there is a free rosary given away with every bag of popcorn. It would, I think, demand a truly sincere faith or an equally profound lack of taste to find anything particularly moving in this place other than the pilgrims.

You approach the town with a sense of mounting expectation and the snow-capped Pyrenees that rise to greet you as you drive towards Lourdes enhance this feeling. It is only in hindsight that their majestic purity seems a mute reproach to the vulgar chicanery going on at their feet. However, as you drive into town passing the Rosary and Passion Hotels and forcing your way through narrow streets lined with bars and seemingly innumerable gift shops, this feeling of awe diminishes. Indeed, coming from Bangkok, one is almost reminded of Patpong, the only apparent difference being that here touts pimp for the Virgin and Bernadette. Reverence is rapidly replaced by macabre curiosity, and its difficult not to succumb to the temptation of playing `Spot the Terminal Case.'

The extent of the tide of human misery in Lourdes is almost overwhelming. Streets are crowded with processions of the aged, the crippled and the infirm all making their way down to the Grotto. You follow as what else is there to do? Even if one could afford the horrendous price of a drink in one of the cafés, it would be virtually impossible to get a seat, and it would take remarkable determination to fight one's way into the unspeakable shops. In any case, there remains a hard to acknowledge longing to find ones cynicism disproved, a vague hope of discovering some kind of spiritual reality behind the crass commercialism. Of course, one is to be disappointed.

On entering the grounds of the Grotto, tourists are warned against smoking, picnicking, littering and unseemly behavior, such as holding hands. The sign warning against the latter offence brings to mind depictions of Adam and Eve leaving Eden, the slash across the figures bearing a not too indistinct resemblance to the angel's sword. Passing the rather somber complex of 19th Century chapels, one is confronted by row upon row of candles, the price of lighting one being from 10 francs up. At the approach to the Grotte de Massabielle itself, there are more signs, this time requesting silence. A long queue of people stands behind a line of railings. There is a feeling of selfish intentness, with each pilgrim regarding the others as obstacles to his progress towards the cave. Shuffling along with the others, I found myself unconsciously reciting some lines from Eliot's Waste Land:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

This fragmentary recollection was more than a little unfortunate as the lines are generally taken as an allusion to the Inferno.

During the walk through the town, it is sometimes hard not to regret the fact that Disney does not have the rights to the Bernadette legend; at least there would then not have been quite such a promiscuous proliferation of unauthorized images of her. However, on eventually reaching the Grotto, you feel that old Walt must have a hand in it all somewhere. How else can one explain the insipid, doe-eyed statue of the Virgin that stands in pride of place? Surely, this rather vulgar statue cannot be the product of genuine piety. Surely, whatever vision the fourteen-year-old miller's daughter may have seen back in 1858 could have borne no resemblance to this overgrown cake decoration. One thing, however, seems distinctly `un-Disneyish': the collection of a couple of dozen rusting crutches suspended on a line above the Grotto. Given their obvious age and the lack of more modern devices, like pacemakers, they can hardly inspire the pilgrims with much feeling of hope.

You stand beneath the statue at the Grotto, a little uncertain about what to do next, there being, I believe, no standard ritual laid down for such situations. Some pilgrims touch the moist wall and cross themselves; others stoop down and kiss it. Their faces express sentiments ranging from grim determination to piety. Few appear ecstatic, but then as far as I can see no one in the queue has been granted a miraculous cure. A non-believer but sensing that something is expected of me, I gingerly pat the wall and quickly make my way to the line of brass taps to taste the waters, feeling a little out of place. A sense of anticlimax descends. So, that's that then. After all the buildup, after all the pious stories of ones childhood, after all the expectations raised by a Roman Catholic education, to find a small, damp, empty cave at the heart of it all is a trifle disappointing.

Lourdes is a place saturated with signs. Billboards, directions, advertisements, warnings, interdictions and so on confront the visitor at every turn. Then, of course, there are the signs that so many of the pilgrims bring with them: the all too visible symptoms and ravages of their various terrible illnesses. Still, there is one sign that is conspicuously absent for most people: a unequivocal sign of some divine purpose; a sign that behind all the misery there is an omnipotent and beneficent will. This, perhaps, is the point of it all. Miracles not taking place everyday, Lourdes demands immense faith; without it, all you have is a garish statue and an empty grotto.

Copyright ©1995, 2010 Mark C. Squire

Eat your heart out Hilda Doolittle

Whilst walking
in your orchard
I stepped
upon
a cow-
pat

Sadly the stain
on your white
shag pile
car-
pet
cannot be
removed


-

The Death of Illusions: Posturing Atheism & Faith

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

Alexander Pope "Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot"

Quiet Atheism – A Personal Preamble

Despite an absurdly devout Anglo Catholic childhood, leaving the Faith was neither particularly difficult, especially dramatic nor in the least agonizing. If memory serves the moment of decision was made just after Mass on or around my 12th birthday. I recall that during the service there had been some stuff about weeping for Zion and this had struck me as more than a bit odd given that we were in Torquay and the congregation of Our Lady of the Assumption consisted largely of middle class shopkeepers.

“It’s all nonsense, isn’t it?” I asked as we left the church. After a moment’s thought, my father replied that it probably was and that I needn’t go along any more if I didn’t want to. That was more or less it. Downside was off, much to my relief, and I had to have a chat with a delightful old and strangely boisterous priest, the late and much lamented Canon O’Reilly. This exceedingly holy father confessor made a mild effort to convince me by using the design argument, but when I pointed out to the rose he was using as an illustration had black spot and thus didn’t say much for the Almighty’s gardening skills, he desisted and we parted amicably.

I look back on my early Catholic years and education with considerable affection. Being hauled off to confession most Saturday evenings was a bit of pain mainly because it got in the way of Dr. Who but otherwise I’ve no real complaints. The nuns in my first school were sweet and kind; I learnt a lot about art – true it was mainly bad, highly sentimental art – from the devotional cards they used to foist on us; and I picked up a lot of interesting stuff about saints, especially my favourite, Thomas Aquinas. As for the priests, there was one incident in which a priest expressed a fervent desire to brain me for causing an incense burner to explode over my fellow altar boys (see Pious Pirates and Swinging Thuribles); however, most priests were as kind as the nuns and, unless I have remarkable powers of suppression, I can’t recall being sexually assaulted or savagely beaten by either.

Doubtless had I been brought up in the reign of Bloody Mary, or in Spain during the Inquisition or even in Ireland under the Jesuits or Christian Brothers, my feelings might be different. As it is, I tend to regard my erstwhile fellow believers and members of the Christian clergy as slightly simple minded. Religion provides them with the same sort of comfort that a mother gives a weeping child when she tells him that everything is going to be alright. One doesn’t insist on revealing to the child that things are going to be very far from alright and mummy, daddy & he are sooner or later going to turn into insentient compost. Similarly, one doesn’t mock the dying believer by telling her that when she says her desperate prayers she is simply talking to an imaginary friend; or at least one doesn’t unless one’s name is Sam Harris (see the utterly fatuous and unspeakably vile Letter to a Christian Nation) .

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” wrote Eliot in Four Quartets. This, I think, is largely true. The bleak reality that we are merely a rather tatty bunch of apes clinging to a rock in space or that our mothers give birth to us astride open graves is rather too much for most people. The death of a child or partner is beyond agonizing and would render most of us somewhat simple minded. Even at the best of times, religious faith is an emollient for the great mass of not especially bright men against the meaninglessness of existence and the certainty of extinction. Unless there is a good reason, it would be an act of great cruelty to remove this comfort.

Noisy Posturing Atheism – Dawkins & Co

Richard Dawkins always strikes one as a somewhat quaint or even faintly comical ersatz 19th Century figure. He has suddenly discovered there is no God and is so endearingly anxious to tell us all about it all. It is easy to imagine him gleefully chip-chip-chipping away at the bedrock with his dear little geological hammer or skipping manfully across some fossil-rich Dorset beach, oversized top hat in one hand, ammonite in the other and a maniacal, almost messianic glint in the eye. To complete the picture, there would have to be a beard (we'd give the little chap a clip-on one). They all wore them, those hideously relentless and dangerously naïve Victorian proselytizers. Charles Darwin had one, and so did Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Psalmist’s fool was there first. He was there well before Hume, he was there before Marx & Engels, and he was most certainly there before latecomers like Dawkins & Co. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God”. Actually, the fool is right on two counts: first, there is almost certainly no God, or at least not in the naïve bearded, ‘something up there’ sense (pace people like Don Cupitt there may well be no other). Second, the fool is dead right in keeping this dangerous truth to himself. It is a truth to be spoken very, very softly in one’s heart; it is not something to be yelled from rooftop, pulpit or television studio. To be fair to Dawkins’s hero, Charles Darwin had some reservations about publishing his findings; not so the others. “God is dead” cries Zarathustra at the top of his voice “I teach the superman”. “Hear! Hear!” bleats little Dawkins from the platform of his utterly daft atheist bus.

The folly of these 19th Century proselytizers is and was to replace one blind faith or superstition with another. Liberate the masses from their illusions, smash the mind-forged manacles, take away the opium of the proletariat and all shall be well (one is tempted to add "and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well"). Having knocked off God, the bearded ones hoped to locate omnibenevolence or, at least, perfectibility in Man. They blithely assumed that with the removal of Original Sin, man’s natural goodness would ineluctably rise to the surface like some sort of richly nutritious cream.

With the 20th Century we moved from theoretical to applied scientific atheism; from the study to the test bench. There was little cream and the Übermensch was considerably less than super. Indeed, the only instance in which man proved himself in any way divine was in the creation of circles of hell. The liberated ‘blond beast’ did this on an unprecedented scale in places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, the Soviet Gulags, My Lai, or – stretching blond a little – in Nanjing and in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. In the face of such evil one can only echo the words of Conrad's Kurtz:

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—"The horror! The horror!"

If the 19th Century saw the death of God, the 20th witnessed the demise of the apotheosis of Man.

Preserving the Noble Lie

Richard Dawkins notoriously described atheists as ‘brights’. Well, the tediously vocal atheist is slightly brighter than the average Christian but not by any appreciable margin. Part of the trouble is that his battle was won centuries ago; the blunt truth is that no one of any intellectual account is an old-fashioned theist. Given this and given that a moderately intelligent 12-year old can see through the teleological argument why does a pint-sized Zarathustra feel the need to waste so much ink refuting it? It is as though a pub bore were constantly wittering on about he had disproved the existence of Santa.

Christianity acts as a prop for the feeble minded (the vast majority of any population); it is a needless cruelty to attempt to kick it away. It comforts the majority by giving some sense of meaning to their otherwise empty lives and by assuaging the horrors of death and agony of bereavement. The claim that the unconsidered life was not worth living only holds true for those capable of sustained reflection on life; for others, a flat-pack cosmology supplied by Rome or Canterbury will more than suffice.

Mindless hectoring atheism is also exceedingly dangerous in that religious belief acts an instrument of social control – a kind of Noble Lie. Looking back at the unprecedented horrors of the last century and at the near total breakdown of order in our modern urban wastelands, it would seem that depriving the masses of their opiates was profoundly unwise.

Moral rules are obviously not grounded in the authority of a divine being. This is a point made over & over by the born again atheists and is entirely valid (such a shame it was first made over two and a half thousand years ago by Plato). However, there is a snag: the alternatives are somewhat intellectually demanding. A frenzied mob is unlikely to be particularly influenced by consequentialist calculations. Nor is it going to be especially easy to persuade it to embrace deontological ethics; Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is pretty heavy going.

Science cannot step into the breach as it is morally neutral. A scientist might be engaged in the quest for a cure for AIDS or developing higher yielding crops; he might equally well be weaponising anthrax or vivisecting Jews. On the other hand, religion can provide moral guidance even though this is imposed though irrational or false doctrines and a reward/punishment mechanism that is ultimately specious. The thug’s boot is poised over the pensioner’s head – does it really matter if he is restrained from kicking through a fear of hell fire or an internalised albeit artificial belief in the sanctity of human life?

The Rapier & the Blunderbuss

There is no doubting that Christianity has had a pretty chequered past. However, Savonarola and Tomás de Torquemada are long dead and, much as one might sometimes regret it, it is exceedingly unlikely that Richard Dawkins will be charcoal grilled à la Jeanne d'Arc . True there are things about the Church that raise politically correct hackles and it is doubtless deeply unfair that we are unlikely to see a lesbian Archbishop of Canterbury or a single mother holding the Keys of St. Peter for a good few years. Who gives a damn?

There are lies & there are damned lies. As I see it the born again atheist would be far better advised to forgo the blunderbuss and take up the rapier. Religious extremism and bigotry rather than religion should be the targets. Here there can be no quarter and no pusillanimous attempts at appeasements like the Incitement to Religious Hatred Act.

A Clunking Fist Full of Flaws: Gordon Brown & the Mock Heroic

We may feel intensely sorry for the hopelessly beleaguered and utterly hapless Gordon Brown. But our sympathy is mixed with an equal measure of irritation and even a degree of Schadenfreude. Our pity is that which one might feel for a petulant wailing child who has spoilt the only toy he has ever really, really wanted, the premiership. We are not mourning the downfall of a great tragic hero. Gordon is neither Sophocles’ Oedipus nor Shakespeare’s Othello. And despite his absurd claims of a few years ago, he is most definitely not Heathcliff. For one thing, the latter broods; Gordon sulks.

Oedipus was a noble character brought down by a couple of somewhat unfortunate misjudgements: killing Pa & marrying Ma. His nobility of character is demonstrated through his acknowledgement of guilt and acceptance of responsibility. Once certain of his guilt, Oedipus blinds himself and then demands that he be sent into exile. Gordon Brown shows no such nobility. For one thing, saying sorry appears to be complete anathema for him; for another, he seems to more than unwilling to allow himself to be sent into exile. Indeed, if rumour has it, the door of Number Ten is now firmly barricaded and superglued against the likes of Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt

There are a few genuinely Shakespearian characters in the Cabinet. Sadly, Hoon and Hewitt may have failed their recent auditions as Cassius and Brutus, but think of Jack Straw cast as the feckless and ponderous Polonius; Peter Mandelson as the deeply sinister and malevolent Iago; or John Prescott as the linguistically challenged and plebeian Bottom. However, one suspects that Gordon was not born to play the Dane, the Moor or any other hero. There are far too many flaws, too many misjudgements. Indeed, the mere thought of him sweatily strutting his stuff in hose and codpiece prompts one to hurriedly move on.

I suppose the issue comes down to one of scale as well as basic integrity. Gordon Brown lacks moral stature and belongs to the subterranean world of the Nibelungs not to the world of heroes. To return to Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights: on the blasted moors above Haworth, the silhouette of a great granite crag might be seen, its massive outline broken by a single great fissure. Barely discernable beside it is the silhouette of a small heap of gravel.