Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  —The woman they wanted to come and lead them was Mother Saint Michel, a well-known Ursuline educator, Mary said. She very much wanted to go to New Orleans, but her bishop, who did not want to lose her, made it virtually impossible by saying that only the pope himself could give her the necessary permission. But at the moment, Pope Pius VII was being held incommunicado by Napoleon in Rome.

  Mother Saint Michel writes her letter to the pope anyway and then begs Mary for help. She promises that if Mary will see that the letter is delivered safely and that it receives a prompt and positive reply, she will have her honored in New Orleans as Our Lady of Prompt Succor. She sends the letter on March 19, 1809. Six weeks later she receives an answer: yes, she may go to New Orleans.

  Keeping her promise, Mother Saint Michel has a small statue of Mary carved in Paris and carries it with her to New Orleans. She arrives on December 31, 1810, and the statue is immediately installed in the chapel of the convent. Miracles soon follow.

  In 1812, Louisiana becomes an American state; the United States declares war on Britain; and back in France, with which the Ursulines continue to maintain close ties, Pope Pius VII, along with the rest of Europe, is still in the grip of Napoleon Bonaparte’s megalomaniacal ambition to control the world. His invasion of Russia that same year, however, proves unsuccessful and Napoleon returns defeated to Paris. Only 20,000 of his original army of 550,000 have survived the disastrous campaign.

  Also in 1812, the French astronomer Pierre Simon de Laplace proposes a mechanistic model of the universe. According to his theory, the entire history of the universe can be determined by knowing the position, velocity, and mass of every particle. This theory of determinism, which reduces the universe to a system of equations, implies that both history and the future are ultimately and absolutely knowable. This theory, which effectively changes world thought for the next hundred years, apparently escapes the notice of the Ursulines who, it seems safe to assume, simply carry on teaching, worshipping, and praying just as they always have.

  —Obviously this theory, Mary said, left no room and no need for God, miracles, mystery, or faith.

  Also in 1812, part of New Orleans is ravaged by fire. Whipped into a virtual conflagration by high winds, the fire advances rapidly and soon threatens the Ursuline convent. Terrified, the nuns prepare to abandon the building. As they are about to leave, a lay sister places the statue of Mary on a window-sill facing the approaching flames. Mother Saint Michel prays: Our Lady of Prompt Succor, we are lost unless you hasten to our aid.

  In an instant, the wind changes direction and the convent is saved.

  Three years later, in 1815, the Battle of New Orleans takes place, the final conflict of the War of 1812. Although the war between the British and the Americans officially ended two weeks earlier with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent in Belgium, this news, lamentably, has not yet reached New Orleans. On Sunday, January 8, 1815, British troops attack the city. The American general, Andrew Jackson, gamely confronts them with his ragged band of volunteers. As the battle rages on the swampy plains of Chalmette just south of the city, women and children gather in the convent to pray with the nuns. They beg Mary to provide assistance to Jackson’s men. The statue of Our Lady of Prompt Succor is placed above the main altar in the chapel and the nuns promise to have a Mass of Thanksgiving said every year if only Mary will see to it that the Americans win the battle.

  At the exact moment of Communion, a courier runs into the chapel with news of the overwhelming American victory.

  —In historical accounts of the battle, Mary said, the numbers vary. Some said there were two thousand British casualties with only eight Americans killed and thirteen wounded. Or there were twenty-five hundred British casualties and seventy-one Americans killed. Or there were thirteen Americans killed and thirty-nine wounded, as opposed to 858 British deaths and 2,468 injuries. One cannot help but wonder who counted the bodies. Anyway, afterwards, General Jackson himself went to the convent to thank the nuns. He then made public acknowledgment of divine intervention in the outcome of the battle.

  Fourteen years later, in 1829, Andrew Jackson becomes the seventh president of the United States and sixty-six years after that, in 1895, by decree of Pope Leo XIII, Our Lady of Prompt Succor is officially crowned in the first such ceremony to be held in North America. She remains to this day the beloved patroness of the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. Each year on January 8, as the Ursulines promised, the archbishop of New Orleans celebrates a Mass of Thanksgiving at the convent.

  This story, like most of the stories Mary told me, left me with more questions than answers.

  I thought about Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins: all that untouched skin, all those graceful necks, slender shoulders, dainty little hands and feet, all twenty-two thousand of those luminous eyes. I imagined all those unkissed lips: full, moist, ripe for the picking. I wondered why we automatically think of all virgins as beautiful, timid, and slim, carrying their virginity always with them like some precious possession: a necklace, a tiara, a purse. Virginity is not a thing but a state (state of body, state of mind), one that women have traditionally and historically gone to great lengths either to keep or give away. I was puzzled but not unduly dismayed by this paradox.

  Being neither virgin nor martyr, I contemplated virginity and martyrdom anyway and came to no conclusions. I, like most women of my generation, lost my virginity more than two decades ago (“lost” it, we say, as if it were a mitten, an earring, that extra ten pounds gained over the winter). At the time, I did not think of myself as bravely sacrificing or magnanimously giving away something precious but rather as gratefully (and none too soon) giving up something burdensome and unnecessary. At the time, I thought of my hymen as being much like my appendix: a dead-end body part that might have been important once but now served no known purpose or function. My appendix, useless though it might be, remains intact, but my hymen is long gone. I loved the man I gave it to and, although we did not stay together, I have never regretted this.

  I pictured the bodies of Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, hymens and all, hacked apart by the Huns, all that unresisting flesh butchered, all those fine bones scattered, all that red blood spurting into the sunlight, dripping, gushing, oozing onto the banks of the Rhine.

  I thought about New Orleans, where I have never been. Considering my aversion to travel, this is hardly surprising. But I found that I carried a vivid, if rather stereotypical, picture of it anyway. The very name of the city brought to mind impressions of voluptuous sensuality and extravagant decadence, of antebellum buildings, sprawling plantations, and swampy bayous, of a sinister underworld of voodoo priestesses, alligator wrestlers, and preening drag queens. The air there, I imagined, was always hot, hazy, and humid, perpetually sultry with the sounds of jazz music and the odors of Cajun cooking.

  What I knew of the city I knew in some subliminal way from television and newspaper stories I’d seen, from an article about Mardi Gras I’d read once in a travel magazine in my dentist’s waiting room. I remembered from the article that Mardi Gras, which means Fat Tuesday in French, is the raucous, flamboyant, unbridled culmination of Carnival which is actually a religious celebration that begins on the sixth of January, Twelfth Night, and ends on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. In this part of the world, many people call Shrove Tuesday Pancake Day, the day when thousands of church halls and basements fill up with people gorging themselves on stacks of pancakes slathered in butter and maple syrup before moving into Lent, those forty days before Easter which is supposed to be a time of giving things up, including food and fun.

  I thought about human nature and its inherent tendency to go to extremes: from feasting to fasting, from love to hate, from wild hope to abject despair.

  Sometime later, after Mary had left, I, being neither astronomer nor physicist, thought about Laplace’s 1812 mechanistic model of the universe as best I could and then I looked it up. Acco
rding to this theory, nothing would be uncertain and everything about both the future and the past of the entire universe could be absolutely known for sure. I have trouble enough thinking about the universe as it is at this very moment, never mind its future or its past.

  What am I supposed to think when I read that the volume of the sun is 1.3 million times that of the earth? What picture can I possibly have in my mind when I read that, much as the earth is 93 million miles away from the sun, the planet Pluto is 3.7 billion miles away and takes 248 years to complete a single orbit? Bear in mind that in Laplace’s time, the known universe was smaller: these measurements had not been derived and Pluto had not even been discovered yet. Imagine living in a time when people still believed they could know everything there was to know.

  I read somewhere once that the mass of the observable universe is 2 × 1051 pounds. That is twenty followed by fifty-one zeros: 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000. I have neither room in my head nor a name for a number this big. According to the same book, 2× 1051 is also the number of years it would take for a mile-high stone of a substance a million times harder than a diamond to be worn away by a holy man touching it just once every one million years.

  I have also read that if the DNA contained in a single human being could be stretched out in one strand, it would be long enough to reach from the earth to the sun and back again. Even more mind-boggling is the fact that the capacity of the human brain has been expressed as the number one followed by 6.5 million miles of zeros—a number so large that it would stretch from the earth to the moon and back again more than thirteen times.

  What manner of miracles are these?

  Clearly there are many kinds of knowledge that can only be taken on faith. I wonder why so many people find these outlandish and unimaginable pieces of information more plausible and easier to believe in than God.

  Laplace’s model of the universe was supplanted in 1927 by Werner Heisenberg’s proposal of the uncertainty principle. This twenty-six-year-old German physicist proved that it is impossible to know both the momentum and the position of a subatomic particle with complete accuracy. Heisenberg showed that in obtaining an accurate measurement of a particle’s position, the scientist necessarily alters its momentum, and vice versa.

  Also known as the principle of indeterminism, this discovery, coming close on the heels of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, had far-reaching implications for all areas of human thought, from physics to philosophy. Like Ockham’s razor six centuries earlier, it, too, resulted in an epistemological paradigm shift. It was a revelation of sorts, a whole new way of thinking about the world that produced new symbols, new metaphors, and vast new possibilities. Simply stated, Heisenberg’s principle means that when any system is observed, the observer necessarily exchanges energy with that system and thereby changes its original properties.

  I do not recall ever studying the uncertainty principle in either high school or university. I remember, though, a description of it in a novel called The Theory of Everything by Lisa Grun-wald, which I read two or three years ago. One character tries to explain Heisenberg’s principle to another by means of an analogy. He says it is like trying to figure out if the refrigerator light stays on when the door is closed. If you open the door to look, the experiment is ruined.

  I am no scientist but I can see how the uncertainty principle effectively made the idea of complete objectivity impossible and how the irrefutability of facts has been cast into question ever since.

  Consider an anthropologist who has traveled to a foreign country to observe a primitive ritual. Imagine that the anthropologist is from North America, the foreign country is in Africa, and the ritual is one of female genital mutilation, also known as FGM.

  The anthropologist, having done the required research, knows that this practice takes one of three forms. Sunna circumcision is the removal of the prepuce and/or the tip of the clitoris. Clitoridectomy, the most common form, is the removal of the entire clitoris, the labia minora, and some or most of the external genitals. Infibulation or pharaonic circumcision, the most extreme form, begins with the removal of the clitoris and the labia minora. Then the two sides of the labia majora are sliced off or scraped raw and sewn together with catgut. The entrance to the vagina is thus closed except for a small opening at the back to allow for the passage of menstrual blood. This opening is created by the insertion of a splinter of wood or bamboo. In some countries, acacia thorns are inserted to hold the two sides of the vulva together. The girl’s legs are then bound from the waist to the knees with strips of goat skin which are left in place and not changed for at least two weeks.

  The anthropologist, having studied the history of FGM, knows that it likely originated in Egypt more than two thousand years ago. The purpose of FGM, obviously, is to preserve the girl’s virginity, and it is most frequently performed on girls between the ages of six and eleven. It is also believed that the mutilation makes a girl more attractive and prevents her from disgracing her family by running wild sexually. Once she is married, she must be cut open again to allow for sexual intercourse and for the delivery of each child.

  The anthropologist knows that although FGM is usually thought of (if it is thought of at all) as a primitive ritual once performed in certain barbaric Third World countries, it is none of these things. It is still a current practice in twenty-six African countries, as well as in parts of Asia and the Middle East. Recent estimates put the number of girls and women mutilated in Africa at 127.33 million. Think again about large numbers, virginity, martyrdom.

  The anthropologist knows that the procedure is not accompanied by any ritual or ceremony and is most often performed without anesthetic in the girl’s own home by a midwife, a doctor, or a barber using an unsterilized razor.

  The anthropologist knows that in 1859 clitoridectomy was advocated by British gynecologist Isaac Baker Brown for relief of hysteria, nervousness, catalepsy, dementia, nymphomania, and masturbation. The anthropologist has read an 1894 article called “Sexual Perversion in the Female” by New Orleans physician A. J. Block, in which he reported having successfully cured a fourteen-year-old girl of nervousness and pallor by excising her clitoris.

  The anthropologist has also read that the last recorded clitoridectomy performed in the United States took place in 1948. It was performed on a five-year-old girl as a cure for excessive masturbation. The anthropologist has not found this fact in any of the standard history textbooks written by men. It appears only in a book of women’s history, as if it were just another one of those marginal topics gathered under the umbrella of the phrase “Women’s Issues.” You know, all those little things that women worry their pretty little heads about: cellulite, stretch marks, wrinkles, facial hair, housework, child care, equality, breast cancer, rape.

  According to the uncertainty principle, the system being observed will be changed by the presence of the observer. Owing to the presence of the anthropologist as witness, the performance of the procedure will be altered in any number of ways. The mother of the girl being operated on will sweep the floor beforehand and put on a clean dress. The midwife who performs the procedure will sharpen the razor this time. The naked girl, depending on her nature, will scream more or less loudly. The female neighbors and relatives who attend the procedure will hold the girl down more or less firmly. They will wipe up the squirting blood more or less carefully. Afterwards, they will smile shyly or boldly at the anthropologist as they take turns plunging their fingers into the girl’s bloody hole to be sure the removal of her organs is complete.

  Maybe they will offer the anthropologist a turn. While politely declining their offer, the anthropologist will think about Doubting Thomas. Popular piety holds that he did not believe in the Resurrection of Jesus until he had touched the nail holes in Jesus’ hands and feet and thrust his fingers into the gaping wound in his right side where one of the Roman soldiers had sliced him open with his spear.

  Maybe the anthropol
ogist will remember Caravaggio’s painting, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. Three unkempt apostles cluster around Jesus. Jesus: dead, bare-chested, holding back his plain white robe, steadying the hand of Thomas. Thomas: alive, brow furrowed, shirt torn, fingernails filthy, index finger stuck up to the knuckle into the hole.

  The anthropologist will also contemplate the fact that the wood used to build the Ark of the Covenant, in which the stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments were carried, came from the acacia tree just like the thorns used to hold the sides of the girl’s vulva together.

  Now apply the uncertainty principle in the other direction: the observer of the system will also be changed by having thus observed it. It seems safe to assume that the anthropologist, having once observed the ritual of clitoridectomy, will never be the same.

  I spent many days thinking my way through (also over, under, around, and beyond) the uncertainty principle. I had not thought so long and hard about abstract concepts since university. I was relieved to discover that, with much concerted effort, I could still do it. Much as contemplation of the uncertainty principle often left me feeling uncertain, I was also occasionally dazzled by a sense of everything falling into place. I had a glimpse at least of the strings that connect one cornerstone of human thought and endeavour to another.

  History, like science, is limited by its own methodologies.

  Consider a historian writing about the Battle of New Orleans. The historian must consider the irony of the fact that this battle, now regarded as the dramatic climax of the War of 1812, was actually fought two weeks after the war was officially ended. Depending on how fond the historian is of irony and on which side the historian’s allegiance falls, the Battle of New Orleans can be cast as either a glorious victory or a gratuitous slaughter. Reading the story in a standard American history textbook and then in a British one would no doubt yield two very different stories. Neither one of them is likely to mention the Ursulines and Our Lady of Prompt Succor.