Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  Every other Thursday we had a quiz, either multiple-choice or true-and-false. Not for Mr. Skinner the thought-provoking, anxiety-inducing ambiguity of essay questions. He was apparently not interested in interpretation, speculation, or protracted rumination. He wanted the facts. I was quite comfortable with this black-and-white version of the world and got 98 percent on the final exam. I was quite content to be operating under the assumption that history was a fixed commodity, something you could count on, put your faith in, bet your bottom dollar, if not your life, on. That facts were facts and that’s all there was to it.

  It was not until I got to university that I learned there is more than one way to tell the story of the past; that there is, historically speaking, more than one way to skin a cat, if the cat is the past and the skin is the shape into which it has been poured.

  In my first year I was required, as a student in the General Arts Program, to take one history course. I chose Ancient History 101, mostly because it was offered on Friday mornings and so fit in well with the rest of my schedule. But partly also because the professor, Dr. Sloan, was rumoured to be an eccentric and entertaining character.

  On the cool September morning of our first class, the lecture hall filled just before ten o’clock with at least a hundred freshmen. There was the usual noisy preamble of organization: shuffling, coughing, chatting, the scraping of chairs, the unzipping of jackets, the crinkling of chocolate bar and cigarette wrappers, the slapping open of notebooks, the clattering of coffee cups, ashtrays, and writing utensils. But as a group, we fell silent on the stroke of ten. We waited. We watched the clock and the door. We sighed, doodled, and grumbled. At 10:25 a handful of students mutinied: they packed up and left. The rest of us continued to sigh, doodle, and grumble. We told each other that we had better things to do than sit around all day and wait. But still we waited.

  At 10:45 the door opened and Dr. Sloan strode in. He was a tall thin man with wild white hair like Albert Einstein. He wore a red tie, black trousers, and an extremely wrinkled white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He had a lit cigarette in his mouth and was pushing a metal cart stacked high with papers. He did not apologize for being late. In fact, he did not even acknowledge us but began placing on the desk in front of each student a stapled sheaf of pages covered with small black print. As he made his way up and down the rows, his cigarette continued to dangle precariously from his lips. He screwed his face up against the smoke curling into his eyes and did not look at any of us.

  When the cart was empty, he flicked his cigarette butt into a nearby ashtray, went down to the front of the room, and hoisted himself wearily onto the desk.

  Without introduction, he told us that Hammurabi was the king of Babylonia in the first dynasty, having reigned from 1795 to 1750 B.C. His great Code was carved in cuneiform in the Akkadian language on a black stone monument for all to read and obey.

  I stared down blankly at the pile of papers in front of me.

  Our assignment, he told us, was to write an essay on the Code of Hammurabi. It must be five pages, typed and double-spaced, and we were not allowed to consult any secondary sources in the process. He said he wanted our thoughts and only our thoughts. The essay was due in one week. He stood up and walked out of the room without a backward glance.

  Eccentric? Indeed. Entertaining? Not so far.

  Hammurabi in hand, I trudged back to my room. Heavy-hearted, I had to admit that I did not even know the meaning of the word cuneiform and had only a vague idea of where Babylonia had been. How could I be expected to have knowledge of, let alone an opinion on, something about which I knew nothing?

  That evening I began with Hammurabi’s bombastic introductory enumeration of his own many stellar accomplishments. Then I read his laws, all 282 of them, dealing with various high crimes and misdemeanors involving property, livestock, crops, slaves, mercenaries, merchants, sailors, wives, children, prostitutes, paramours, and virgins. Those convicted of the most serious crimes were to be exiled, impaled, burned, or tied up and thrown into the water. Other punishments included the knocking out of teeth, the breaking of bones, the putting out of eyes, and the sawing off of appropriate body parts such as tongues, breasts, ears, and hands, this last amputation to be performed upon sons who struck their fathers and surgeons whose patients died.

  I had been a straight-A student all through high school, but nothing I’d learned there had prepared me for this. I knew that now I was in well over my smart little head.

  I have absolutely no recollection now of what I found to say to Dr. Sloan about the Code of Hammurabi. But I did manage to come up with the requisite five pages, typed, double-spaced, on the blue Brother portable my parents had given me that summer for my birthday.

  I handed in my essay the following week. The number of students present in the lecture hall that morning of our second class was, I noted, considerably smaller.

  As Dr. Sloan collected our essays, he was muttering happily to himself, something about winnowing the wheat from the chaff, and then he started on the Epic of Gilgamesh. At the next class, our third, our numbers had shrunk still further, and Dr. Sloan was positively gleeful as he returned our Hammurabi essays, each marked with a big red A on the front page and nothing else.

  By Christmas, we had studied, among other things, the creation myths of India and Iran, the development of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Phoenician alphabet, the Carthaginian Law of Sacrifices, lists of kings (Hittite, Assyrian, and Sumerian, of which one, Alalgar, was said to have reigned for 36,000 years), and lists of gods and goddesses (Roman, Greek, and Hittite, of which one, Hannahannas, was also known as the Queen of Heaven). We worked strictly according to Dr. Sloan’s two edicts that secondary sources were verboten, primary sources were all, and that in the beginning, history was an art form (awarded its own muse, Clio, by the ancient Greeks), a complex combination of myth, chronicle, and literature that was neither pure fiction nor pure fact but a sophisticated hybrid of the two.

  Dr. Sloan took great pains to make it clear that the word history itself (from the Greek historia, meaning “knowledge discovered by inquiry”) has since become loaded, a double-edged sword referring both to the flow of events unfolding and to the written record of them. We talked about History with a capital H as opposed to history with a small h and the more colloquial ways of using the word, the way you might use it when discussing your medical or personal history: I have a history of sinus trouble; there is a history of cancer in the family, or heart problems, or mental illness; I have a history of insomnia, of low self-esteem, of hating myself and/or the people who love me.

  We learned how the meaning of the word history has changed over time, moving from “a story represented dramatically” through “a series of events (of which the story has been or might be told)” to “the aggregate of past events; the course of human affairs.”

  We stumbled along and Dr. Sloan occasionally despaired of our utter doltishness, at which point he either smoked furiously and paced vigorously or left the lecture hall in a huff. But mostly he was patient with our halting forays toward an understanding of what history really means. He was obviously a brilliant man and usually magnanimous enough to tolerate, perhaps even to take some measure of pride in, our small breakthroughs as we each labored through what must have been to him our own reinventions of the wheel.

  The rest of Ancient History 101 was taken up with the Greeks, of whom there were many. Although Dr. Sloan graciously left the more familiar names to the Philosophy Department, still there were plenty of others, most, like the dinosaurs, with unwieldy difficult names: Hecataeus, Xenophanes, Anaximander, Pisistratos, and the rest. Dr. Sloan had a way of bringing these men to life. And they were indeed all men and the events and issues of which they wrote were all the province of men. It was as if the ancient world consisted of one gender only. I could not help but wonder what the women were doing while the men were so busy philosophizing and trying to solve the mysteries of the universe.

 
This question was at least partially answered the following year in my Ancient Greek Theater course when we studied Aristophanes’ comedy, Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens get fed up with their husbands being off fighting all the time and go on a sex strike to force the men to vote for peace with Sparta.

  Dr. Sloan clearly had his favorites among the old Greeks, Pythagoras being one. I had already encountered Pythagoras by way of his famous theorem: in a right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Or, to put it more succinctly: a2 + b2 = c2. (This information was one of those pearls of wisdom I had garnered in high school that I did not expect to ever find a use for. So far this has proven to be true.)

  To me and the rest of the class, Pythagoras was (merely) a mathematician, but Dr. Sloan spoke not of his geometry but of his creation of a secretive celibate utopian community at Croton in the boot of Italy where people were said to live according to a set of philosophically determined laws. Pythagoras’ beliefs in reincarnation and the transmigration of souls led to the establishment of some rather bizarre rules for the residents of Croton, not the least of which was the prohibition of eating beans, not because they caused flatulence but for fear that a migrating soul might inadvertently take up residence in a bean. Dr. Sloan found this extremely amusing.

  Studying the Pythagorean theory that the entire universe was a closed system built solely upon numbers, we examined his idea that everything could be explained by a Table of Opposites which included ten pairs: Limit and the Unlimited, Odd and Even, Unity and Plurality, Right and Left, Male and Female, Straight and Crooked, Square and Oblong, Rest and Motion, Light and Darkness, Good and Evil.

  This provided Dr. Sloan with a handy segue to the philosophy of Heraclitus, of whose writings only a hundred sentences survive. He believed that the constant conflict between opposites ultimately resulted in a harmonious whole. The struggle between opposites was everywhere and determined everything: winter and summer, night and day, war and peace, man and woman, love and hate, good and evil. Although we mere humans are prone to seeing only the opposites, God, according to Heraclitus, sees the harmony instead. With everything in flux, Heraclitus observed, one thing was always changing into another, often into its own opposite: ice into water, day into night, life into death. He concluded that nothing is stable or permanent, that change, with fire as its symbol, is the only thing you can ever know for sure. It was Heraclitus who said you can never step into the same river twice.

  I began to see what Dr. Sloan was getting at: that history can only be lived once and any written record of it that follows must be read as a reconstruction, a simulation perhaps that must be deemed more or less accurate according to any number of variables.

  I also began to appreciate how the study of history involves a constant slippage into other disciplines: mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, science, literature, and theology. I wondered why we call them disciplines anyway, discipline being a word so evocative of being made to stand in the corner because you colored on the wall, said a bad word, or tried to flush your teddy bear down the toilet. Why do we call them disciplines when they are so decidedly undisciplined?

  After Heraclitus, we moved on to two writers who are customarily recognized as the first great historians: Herodotus writing on the Persian Wars and Thucydides on the Peloponnesian Wars. Both lived in Greece in the fifth century B.C. Their books were big, difficult, and daunting.

  These two men are traditionally perceived as being on opposite sides of the historiographical fence. Their aims no doubt were similar: to chronicle past events in a truthful manner; to bring to bear upon them some kind of shape, order, plot, some analysis of the forces of cause and effect; to investigate a particular part of the past in hopes of illuminating lessons and caveats that would prove useful in both the present and the future. The means they used to accomplish these rather lofty ends were, however, quite different.

  Herodotus of Halicarnassus is known as the father of history, but he has also been called the father of lies. Belonging to the romantic school of writing, he treated his subject in a grand manner, making full use of vivid description, lively characterization, colloquial speech, and lyrical language to dramatize and invigorate the raw materials of his research. He did not underestimate the importance of factual accuracy but felt free to engage in invention and conjecture when the facts were not available. He made no clear distinction between history and myth. His descriptions of Greece and Persia included elliptical, sometimes prolix, digressions into the details of their respective histories before the wars, as well as of climate, geography, commerce, religion, literature, and the other arts.

  A generation later, Thucydides of Athens took a totally different tack. The ruling principle of his more scientific method was that facts, once unearthed by laborious research, must be rigorously scrutinized and then strictly adhered to. He apparently never questioned the ultimate importance and the intrinsic value of the facts. A champion of objectivity, he allowed himself no digressions, no anecdotes, no material that could possibly be construed as subjective or irrelevant. He was documenting an event, not a period, and so told nothing of the arts, commerce, religion, or manners and mores of the time. His was a cold-eyed chronological account, resolutely logical, intellectually focused, with no apparent interest in charm, drama, or entertainment.

  Dr. Sloan, as usual, made no attempt to hide his bias. He had warned us early on that bias, in history no less than anything else, is inherent and unavoidable. It was best, he said, to declare yourself at the outset and make the most of it from there on in. He pointed out that, although carrying a concealed weapon is a crime according to American law, driving around with three or four rifles on a rack in the back window of your pickup truck is not.

  Planted firmly in the camp of Herodotus, Dr. Sloan dismissed the critics who pilloried the man as a gossip, a liar, an altogether untrustworthy source, the original unreliable narrator. He admired Herodotus’ jolly nonchalance and his unabashed assumption that his readers would be happy to indulge him, just as glad to be entertained while also being instructed.

  I, too, found myself favoring Herodotus. I imagined him as a cheery, gregarious fellow who was most welcome at any dinner party. A jolly raconteur, he would amaze the other guests with his far-ranging knowledge and entertain them with anecdotes of the strange customs and creatures of foreign lands. I pictured him topping off the evening with his story of the Giant Gold-mining Ants of India, a tale that appears in his book. He said that when the Indians went out on their camels (which, he said, had four thighs and four knees in the hind legs) to gather the gold the ants had unearthed, they did it with stealth and speed in the hottest part of the day when the ants had gone underground and so would not give chase and eat them alive, camels and all. I imagined that, as a dinner guest, Herodotus would come early and stay late, help out with preparation and clean-up, and partake liberally of both food and drink all evening long.

  On the other hand, I pictured Thucydides as a stuffy, stodgy man who was seldom invited to dinner parties. But when he was, he would spend the whole evening looking down his Grecian nose at the other simple-minded guests. He would place tiny tidy portions of food on his plate (nothing touching!) and then refuse seconds. He would not have another glass of ouzo. He would not, absolutely would not, gossip. I imagined the other guests’ eyes glazing over while he droned on and on about the military strategies of the Peloponnesians. I could just imagine how relieved they were when he had to go home early and get a good night’s sleep.

  In retrospect, I can see that the most important thing I learned from Dr. Sloan and Ancient History 101 was that there is more to history than facts, more to truth than reality.

  In retrospect, I can see that this is a piece of knowledge that will change your life if you let it. But once upon a time, I thought that history was carved in stone.

  History (2)

  We normally think of history as one catastrophe after anot
her, war followed by war, outrage by outrage—almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence…But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.

  —Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews

  In the reading I’ve done since Mary left, I have discovered many interesting and unusual facts. For instance:

  In the chapel of Our Lady of Altötting in Germany, the hearts of twenty-four Bavarian dukes and kings are preserved in silver urns. These men bequeathed their hearts to Mary as tokens of their undying devotion.

  On special occasions, the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Spain wears a headdress decorated with 30,000 precious jewels.

  In a pilgrimage that took place on July 14, 1950, the statue of Our Lady of Miracles at St. Omer, France, was visited by forty other statues of Mary carried on the backs of the faithful from shrines throughout the region.

  In the Brides Corner of the church of Our Lady of Monte-vergine in Italy, there are hundreds of wedding gowns, complete with veils and bouquets, that have been dedicated to Mary in thanks for a husband found and in petition for a happy marriage.

  In my reading, I have also discovered that some of Mary’s appearances are much better documented than others. Typically, it is those apparitions that were eventually sanctioned by the Catholic Church that have generated the most literature. These frequently skeptical volumes come complete with lots of footnotes and references to many obscure sources in foreign languages. I looked at one especially robust book that, in its five-hundred-page examination of just one apparition narrative, included 2,020 footnotes and a twenty-three-page bibliography.