Time travel

I shall caution my readers that this is likely to be a post filled with loose associations. I have fallen behind in my writing, and decided that, were I to wait until I had something interesting to say, it may well be the judgement day. I keep intending to write about the wonderful feasts (can one top Corpus Christi?), but I cannot help feeling sad. When I was a young woman, I was a gifted lecturer - I still am, but with no place to take it. Preparing such comments makes me sad, now and then, for knowing that I myself have had enough of soup kitchens, yet churches which would welcome talks from one with theological knowledge would have no interest in a 'nobody.'

I have always had a weakness for literature in the 'time travel' genre. It ranges from the profound to the silly (actually, the only one who did it reasonably was Dickens - and notice that Ebenezer was able to change the outcome), but the common threads always are there. One cannot change what has happened, or how what happened in the past affects conditions today or in the interim.

I have never desired to, for example, live in the Middle Ages, to be sure - yet I sometimes wish, when I think of incidents in history, of how I'd love to have a monitor to peek at how it really was. Documents are wonderful, but tell us so little compared to the totality. Here is a simple, perhaps trivial, matter of which I was telling someone this week. She had asked me about certain circumstances in the religious life a quarter century ago. I was saying how I know many things from the hundreds of Sisters and varied communities with which I had contact, as well as from my own experience. Yet things, however pertinent, are long forgotten or cannot be mentioned. One needs to use references in writing, and past conversations, 'workshops,' articles in obscure publications, or letters do not have that 'validity.' (Unless, of course, one was important enough to have influenced the outcome and have such things documented.)

The 'time travel' theme often includes having the visitor from the later period wish to warn those in the past of a negative outcome. It cannot happen, of course - one cannot change the past. Yet I can only imagine being transported in a time machine! "You'll all be slaughtered in that battle... This will split the Church in pieces... You'll be poisoned if you go there... The effects of the radiation and the blast will be utterly devastating... You are going to hit an iceberg!... Throw the money changers out of the temple and that will be a last straw - you'll be crucified."

I find studying various periods totally fascinating. As I have grown older, I have found, for example, that the patristic period in theology beckons even more to me than it did in the past. It is more difficult for me than the mediaeval and renaissance periods, not only because I know those so well but because many of the matters of conflict which existed in 1500 still are alive today. I need to focus very strongly to go back to the early centuries of the Church - Rome and France pagan, North Africa strongly Christian - empire booming theb crumbling, etc..

I have yet another challenge now, which makes the early Church nearly contemporary in my mind by comparison. I have just begun a thorough study of the Hebrew Scriptures. One of the hardest parts for me, as it indeed was for the Fathers, is not to 'read in' the Christian element. I must not read the first chapter of Genesis and immediately 'hear' the first of the Gospel of John. :)

Last week, when I went to the library to begin some of my reading, the Jewish division was closed. Naturally, 90% of my reading will be in that library, but, not to lose a day, off I went to Humanities. I read some very inventive words about Genesis, to say the least. They were not even Christian, but were 'literary criticism rather than history or theology,' aimed at making Eve a feminist hero. In one book (probably someone's dissertation - all dissertations, including mine, are farfetched and boring by definition), God seems far more helpless and confused than the might Eve.

Well, I'll get to the Jewish scholars this week and begin to find out what Genesis really means. But the treatment of Eve, so slanted by having to show that misogyny was based on her being misunderstood (a nice change, I suppose, since most of the time it is the big, bad males' interpretation of either Mary or Mary Magdalene which is responsible for all evils afflicting womankind), was rather too imaginative...

Lord have mercy, if I only could quote all of what I heard in my Religious days! One cannot climb into the time machine and, by changing, let us say, perceptions of Eve, Mary, or Mary Magdalene, make centuries of misogyny disappear. But neither can one 'make up for' the past. We only can work with what we have now. Attempts to make up for past injustice are doomed to fail, because there is unintentional but inherent dishonesty.

Many nuns suffered at the hands of superiors or other Sisters - in the 1970s, that had to be shelved, because all had to be blamed on the men. A false image, as if 'you' could know exactly how 'I' feel merely because we are of the same sex, meant a boycott of the men from whom we could have learnt a great deal, and women being automatically qualified for anything by virtue of their sex. (I must make this plain! Many women were highly competent, and I'll include myself in that number! I am referring to cases where, for example, suddenly just being female made one qualified as a spiritual director.)

The lie is that, whenever one tries to make up for the past, whomever was the 'loser' in the past becomes a victim. History can become distorted, as if the 'victims' were blameless or perfect. Whomever oppressed them becomes the enemy - and, if those oppressors are long dead, the guilt has to carry to the innocent of much later generations.

I'd best not go on about this, because I just don't have the wits about me at the moment to express myself clearly enough. I'll just ask my readers to say a prayer for me. I cannot go into even a small scale time machine and recapture the talent and zeal I had in youth. :) The intervening years cannot be cancelled. Pray for me, not only that I develop enough gratitude that the past (and my present pain) not distract me, but that I somehow find ways to use these gifts today rather than feeling my past failures make that impossible.