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I know that the old ladies forever praying rosaries at the back of the Church don\u2019t really<\/em> live in the sacristy. I know that the women who eternally surround the Mary-statue didn\u2019t come with a \u201cBuy Our Statue, Get an\u00a0Aging Filipino!\u201d\u00a0deal. I know that the \u201cChurch-lady\u201d is a person like the rest of us, chock full of her own doubts and insecurities, and yet \u2014 the Church-lady is also a type<\/em>, just like the \u2018hero,\u2019 \u2018celebrity,\u2019 or the \u2018starving artist.\u2019 I want to investigate the creature.<\/p>\nThe best way to understand the Church-lady is through the joke that \u201cshe lives in the church.\u201d You and I, we enter our houses of the holy in spurts, bursting open the doors in moments of crisis or lighting candles in weeks of enthusiasm. The Church-lady observes these interruptions from the back pew where, wrapping up her 900-day novena to St. Gertrude, she prays for our sorry souls.<\/p>\n
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Don\u2019t question her as she moves flowers or tidies hymnals, don\u2019t ask her how, exactly, she has a key to the tabernacle, and for the sake of your eternal salvation, don\u2019t think that she has a \u201cjob\u201d at the church. She is no more \u201cemployed\u201d by the priest than a daughter is employed in her house, no more a \u201cvolunteer\u201d than a man is a volunteer in his own vegetable garden. She moves about the parish with the reverence, familiarity and crankiness of a homebody. The priest has no real say in the matter. Is it any wonder that the children imagine\u00a0she pulls at a cross, opens a secret panel, and reveals her room? Or that the confessional serves as an elevator to her lair?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a joke, but it\u2019s a true joke: The Church-lady lives in the Church. But to \u201clive in the Church\u201d isn\u2019t simply to spend a lot of time within its physical structure. There are janitors, youth ministers and even religious who, putting in equal hours, will never amount to the exemplary status of the Church-lady. To really live<\/em> in a place to cease considering\u00a0that place as a theoretical object detached from our experience, a \u201cpoint on a map,\u201d an \u201capartment,\u201d \u201cbungalow,\u201d or some other repeatable structure. When we\u00a0live<\/em> in a place we\u00a0saturate it with our\u00a0experience, making it inseparable from the joys and sorrows of life, until\u00a0we are unable to reduce the place back into \u201cjust a building\u201d or \u201cone house among many.\u201d We make the house our home, wrapped up in and inseparable from our being.<\/p>\n The constant geographical presence of the Church-lady is a physical manifestation of a spiritual\u00a0presence to the Divine, one that reeks of audacious familiarity, unrepentant companionship, and a confident being-with<\/em> the Lord \u2014 a being-with that has ceased to consider His House as some extrinsic, conceptual place, and has begun to consider it as Home. The Church is\u00a0inseparable from her being. She cannot reduce it back to a theoretical object, an institution she may or may not devote herself to, or a possible place in a world of possible places.<\/p>\n This becomes obvious when we consider how easily the \u201cChristian of the world\u201d is embarrassed by the Church-lady. A young man tells a Church-lady that he is an atheist. She responds, in all earnestness: \u201cTalk to God about it.\u201d Another says, with all the papal superiority of a Catholic Reporter reader, that the practice of praying to the Saints is a decadent, merit-based, medieval disruption of the early Church\u2019s pure concept of Unity in Christ. She says: \u201cPray to St. Thomas, he\u2019s the patron saint of skeptics.\u201d Another\u00a0tells her that he doubts the Real Presence. She responds: \u201cHe\u2019s used to it.\u201d<\/p>\n The Church-lady is impossibly bad at entertaining positions outside of the Church, even for the sake of argument. She argues from the Church. God is so far from being a \u201ctheory\u201d or a \u201ctopic of debate\u201d that he cannot be held in suspense or treated \u201cas if\u201d non-existent. Such a position might work for the concept \u201cGod,\u201d a God extrinsic to my being, a God \u201cout there\u201d who I may affirm or deny \u2014 it doesn\u2019t work for the God who lives with us, who speaks to us, who cares for us. It\u2019s as if one were to say \u201cI don\u2019t believe in the existence of your husband.\u201d The husband is so real, so suffered, so lived-with, that it would hardly occur to us to respond from this idea of his non-existence. We would hardly begin by arguing, \u201cWell, if<\/em> my husband didn\u2019t exist, who\u2019s gin am I buying?\u201d We\u2019d assert the obvious daily experience of his existence: \u201cOf course he exists, go talk to the fool yourself!\u201d<\/p>\n This is the critical method of the Church-lady, for whom Church is home and God is companion. She suffers the divine, lives with it, eats it, and, as a result, seems foolish in our secular age, for whom the divine\u00a0is an option<\/em>, but never a given<\/em> \u2014 a possibility among other possibilities, never simply lived with<\/em> beyond doubt.<\/p>\n We look for heroes of apophatic mysticism in the caves of ascetics. We should be looking to the ladies at the 3p.m. Divine Mercy Chaplet. The transcendence of our concepts of God does not result in a speechless encounter with the One, a stripping away of all our profane knowledge until we are left with an awe in the face of \u201cthat of whom nothing can be said.\u201d Those are still concepts anyways \u2014 the concept of \u201cthat of which nothing can be said,\u201d the concept of \u201cthe One.\u201d No, we trade in our all-too-human ideas of God, not for an inhuman idea, but for a relationship with<\/em> God. We know God as we know our friends: by transcending all that can be said about<\/em> them and entering into a sphere in which we actively relate to<\/em> them \u2014 loving them, speaking to them, consoling them.<\/p>\n The atheist gets told to \u201ctalk to God about his atheism\u201d because the Church-lady is unwilling to take his stance and consider God as an object, a possible, and a theory available to affirmation and denial. She lives in and with the reality of God \u2014 and asserts it foolishly. She is \u201calways at Church\u201d and she refuses to leave \u2014 even for the sake of a suave apologetic. This is the price for really believing \u2014 it becomes harder to entertain the skeptical proposition in order to build a proof of the Creator, harder to intellectually suspend our certainty of God\u2019s existence. As we ascend the divine ladder to Church-lady status, we become more likely to proclaim than argue, more likely to shout \u201cHe is risen\u201d than consider the question of the Resurrection according to the discipline of the academic historians. We are in love, and it\u2019s easier to doubt my own existence than that of the beloved, making it that much harder to argue from the blank space of modern secularism, in which God\u2019s existence is hung perpetually in doubt.<\/p>\n Of course, the Church needs to give reason for its hope, coherent testimony to the Sacred in a secular age \u2014 but a love of reasonable argument that leaves behind the validity and efficacy of the Church-lady is unreasonable. When God is suffered rather than merely believed in, we become foolish, but it\u2019s holy tomfoolery, evangelically cunning beyond all attempts at cunning. The Church-lady proves God as a wife proves her husband, her status of being-with the divine giving testimony to the divine as a person to be lived with beyond every possible \u201cgod\u201d we can prove. She makes no arguments, or she makes bad arguments \u2014 but only because she already is an argument. May she live forever.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I know that the old ladies forever praying rosaries at the back of the Church don\u2019t really live in the sacristy. I know that the women who eternally surround the Mary-statue didn\u2019t come with a \u201cBuy Our Statue, Get an\u00a0Aging Filipino!\u201d\u00a0deal. I know that the \u201cChurch-lady\u201d is a person like the rest of us, chock […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism-2","category-the-erotic-phenomenon"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i.telegraph.co.uk\/multimedia\/archive\/02091\/santa1_2091453b.jpg\")
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