OT and I, heathens both, were each raised by lapsed Catholic mothers, with Grandmothers who took us to Mass. For me, midnight Mass on the night of Easter Saturday – Christ has risen again, the annually renewed Easter candle is lit, we will shake hands with our neighbours and wish one and other the peace of Christ, then walk from the small Church holding tapers, out into the sanctified Masterton night.
These early experiences of ritual (it would be wrong to call them experiences of religion, as the real possibility of any of it relating to anything beyond itself never occurred to me) established a sense (no doubt facile and undeserved) of understanding and belonging in the high church. It is natural, on entering a Catholic or Orthodox Church, to pay over a small coin, take a beeswax candle, light it from those already burning and place it upright in the sandy dish.
These last few days I have been lighting candles for Grandpa Jim – an action that would no doubt cause dismay, or at best incomprehension, in his plain Protestant soul. However. As I always felt eating the apple and honey for a sweet life on Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), we can all use each and every blessing we can lay our hands on.
Jim Tocher, my husband's grandfather, died at 5:30am on October 22, 2009. He left a large and loving family.
Death, even, as in this case, where expected and with elements of a merciful release, is a shock and a sorrow to those left. The body changes, as the breath leaves it: from beloved object to be cherished, touched, cared for, enjoyed, sought out, to the cooling macabre.
When my own Grandma died, her face, wracked and drawn by long illness, was plumped and reshaped by the undertaker. She looked, as my auntie said, “like a nice little old lady” - but some other little dear, not herself. At the funeral home I kissed her polished cheek. The chill alien sensation hung on my lips for hours.
This strange modern world we live in provides so many opportunities for us to physically separate ourselves from those we love. New Zealand parents with children in London or Sydney (or children with parents who abandon them!), partners on business trips or long holidays, siblings who move away – we miss them, and no amount of skyping, writing, phoning makes up for the distance. This is what George Monbiot tries to face up to when he writes about 'love miles' – the recognition that indefinite physical separation may be unsupportable, that traveling to place your body across the table from family and friends, to wipe pumpkin from your granddaughter's chin or smell the familiar mix of perfume and human that means 'dear friend' may be, might be, in a category of its own. Can any of it be justified? – perhaps not, but love miles tries to divide what is essential from what is not. It is a very human excuse.
The love of the physical body takes another form in the tradition of reliquaries.
Reliquary:
A receptacle, such as a coffer or shrine, for keeping or displaying sacred relics.
[French reliquaire, from Old French, from relique, relic, from Late Latin reliquiae, sacred relics; see relic.]
1. Something that has survived the passage of time, especially an object or custom whose original culture has disappeared: "Corporal punishment was a relic of barbarism" (Cyril Connolly).
2. Something cherished for its age or historic interest.
3. An object kept for its association with the past; a memento.
4. An object of religious veneration, especially a piece of the body or a personal item of a saint.
5. or relics A corpse; remains.
[Middle English relik, object of religious veneration, from Old French relique, from Late Latin reliquiae,sacred relics, from Latin, remains, from reliquus, remaining, from relinquere, rel
qu-, to leave behind; see relinquish.]
qu-, to leave behind; see relinquish.]With the Catholic Church's crazy beautiful literalism, there in that golden arm, a single finger pointing upwards, is the femur of St Catherine, in this boxed monstrance a shred of skin from John the Baptist is visible, this silver shoe holds, hidden but strongly present, St Lucy's foot.
The Museum of Religious Art in Zadar was room after room of these relics. The Church of San Petronio in Bologna too, had a chapel on one side devoted to reliquaries. These scraps of flesh and bone are the ultimate profanity – an abandoned body – made sacred, the object of veneration and pilgrimage. The pilgrims' journeys to this place, to kiss this gold, inside which is this particular bone, another type of love mile, a no more or less irrational belief.
Relinquish:
1. To retire from; give up or abandon.
2. To put aside or desist from (something practiced, professed, or intended).
3. To let go; surrender.
4. To cease holding physically; release: relinquish a grip.
[Middle English relinquisshen, from Old French relinquir, relinquiss-, from Latin relinquere: re-, re- + linquere, to leave; see leikw- in Indo-European roots.]
I.M. Jim Tocher. Safe travels.
I think it's from the Old Norse...
ReplyDeleteThanks darling, these are good words.