By the waters of Disneyland
Lodge, David
By the waters of Disneyland A STORY DAVID LODGE IN AMERICA, Ruth traveled from city to city, from.convent to convent, like a medieval pilgrim, making notes about the changes that were taking...
...I didn't like to waken you," he said with a smile, chafing his numbed arm...
...She felt that she was in the middle of some spiritual quest that could not be abandoned, though she did not know where or when it would end...
...Lord, you make the sun shine and the flowers grow, you made everything...
...I don't even know about myself...
...American nuns, she soon discovered, were in a state of upheaval that made England seem quite tranquil by comparison...
...The MC introduced a speaker evidently well known to the audience, who applauded him vigorously...
...The customers had an air about them of believers who had finally made it to Mecca, to the Holy Places...
...Copyright 1980 by David Lodge...
...Cut and run...
...Ruth felt hungry and thirsty, but there seemed nowhere suitable to go, only drive-in hamburger places which she felt self-conscious of approaching on foot, or dimly lit bars advertising topless dancers...
...Music filtered from loudspeakers concealed in the trees and fountains played and the Stars and Stripes hung limply from a hundred flagpoles...
...Charlotte hurried out into the lobby behind her...
...You soon get over that...
...The two of them were drinking coffee out of paper cups in a bus-station automat in the middle of the night, waiting for their connections...
...We really love you, Lord...
...The stout woman said, "I don't think Ruth is really telling us about Disneyland...
...Suddenly, from the back of the hall, a voice was raised high in some foreign language, a strange, barbaric-sounding dialect, full of ululating vowels, like a savage chant...
...The real reason why Mother Superior wanted her back was because two more nuns had left the convent and morale was low...
...It seemed such an obvious gimmick to create an illusion of togetherness...
...Hey, I wouldn't have made a pass at you if I'd known...
...As for Sixth Form science suffering, that was all rot...
...Ruth was hit in the chest and pushed to the ground, screaming "You cad...
...Why not join a small group this afternoon, huh...
...He was a shoe salesman, recently retired, going to spend a vacation with his son and daughter-in-law in Denver...
...I'll meet you back here at four, all right...
...at her attacker...
...Come home, her Mother Superior urged, you are needed...
...said the worker who picked her up and dusted her down...
...Gee, I get so depressed after one of these rallies...
...He wore a sports jacket and slacks with a collar and tie...
...The place was run by a diminutive red-haired nun called Charlotte who generally wore training shoes and a track suit...
...The MC invited any of those present to pray aloud as if they were in their own homes and to share their thoughts with others...
...I suppose that after a number of years in a convent your taste buds get anaesthetized...
...My husband used to be a Christian Scientist, didn't you, Al...
...It sounds ridiculous, but I don't think I ever had it before...
...She looked at the crowds ambling along in the smog-veiled sunshine, from one fake sideshow to another, chewing, sucking, drinking, licking, and was seized with a strange nausea and terror...
...Several people obliged...
...I felt faint...
...In Texas, Ruth visited a community of nuns who came down to breakfast with their hair in huge plastic curlers...
...He took out his wallet and tried to press a donation on her...
...Thank you, Jesus," the congregation echoed...
...Well, we're seeing a lot of other places as well," said the woman, "but this is the high-spot of the vacation, isn't that right, Al...
...Expect Him to come to you...
...No kidding...
...Could we pray for an interpretation...
...I mean, I believed in Him with my head, and I believed with my heart in doing good works, but the two never came together, I never believed in Him with my heart...
...This afternoon it'll be the small groups...
...Could we pray for a healing...
...Why don't you plan to stay over in Denver a whiles...
...I'll make no bones about it," she wrote,' 7 left to get married, and not to anyone in particular...
...Husbands, wives, families...
...What d'you think about this charismatic business, Charlotte...
...She received no reply...
...Walt Disney was a good man, a god-fearing man," said someone, a shade reproachfully...
...Take a little walk outside, you'll feel better...
...After half an hour she dared a look sideways...
...I think she's telling us something about herself...
...Praise Jesus...
...She froze, wondering what to do...
...While the rally's going on, you feel just great, right...
...Yeah, it is kinda stuffy...
...At last she came to the coast of California, which seemed as far as she could go...
...Something about the atmosphere...
...used to them, and indeed came to rely on such gratuities for her pocket money...
...When I tried to cook a dinner for John and the children he said it was the worst meal he had ever had in his life...
...I've been baptized in the Holy Spirit, and I've never felt so calm, so happy, so sure of my vocation...
...The stout woman nodded eagerly...
...She went from room to room, looking for Charlotte through the little observation windows in the doors...
...Did you know that Bishop Fulton Sheen and Cardinal MclnCommonweal: 618 tyre were traveling to the Holy Land for a Charismatic Congress and the Cardinal said to the Bishop, 'If you're going to speak in tongues, I'm going to be walking on the water.' " The audience laughed and clapped...
...Isn't that right, honey...
...She nodded and sniffed, groping in her handbag for a Kleenex...
...She wired her Mother Superior: "BY THE WATERS OF DISNEYLAND I SAT DOWN AND WEPT STOP HAVE FOUND WHAT IVE BEEN LOOKING FOR STOP RETURNING IMMEDIATELY" Commonweal: 620...
...She sat down...
...Louis, Ruth interviewed a sister who was secretary-general of an organization dedicated to opposing male chauvinism in the church...
...He was a tall, bony, middle-aged man, with flat hair combed back from a tanned, wrinkled face...
...The euphoria, the inspiring sense of solidarity with one's brothers and sisters, that was generated by marches and demonstrations, soon evaporated...
...he said, staring...
...It stopped abruptly...
...Don't ask me...
...Encouraged by the prospect of a large gathering in which she could be an observer rather than a participant, Ruth agreed to go...
...Sometimes she donned her habit and gave talks about the Roman Catholic church in England to parochial groups...
...I'm afraid it wouldn't be my cup of tea...
...At the time, this episode distressed her, but afterwards she was vexed to think how upset she had been, or "uptight" as the feminist nun in St Louis would have put it...
...Thus attired, she stood among a crowd of two thousand on a college campus at the height of the Cambodian crisis, chanting, ' 'Pigs out...
...And what did you think of it...
...She had been awarded a six-months' traveling scholarship for this project, but when her time was up she felt that she had only scratched the surface of the subject and wrote home for permission to stay longer...
...Charlotte, seated a few rows ahead of Ruth, looked back at her expectantly, but Ruth kept her hands clasped firmly in her lap...
...But she must have spoken the words aloud, for the woman from South Dakota turned to her enquiringly...
...When, some time later, an ugly but genial man tried to pick her up at Dallas airport, she didn't panic, but waited patiently for an opportunity to mention that she was a nun...
...You mean you actually go to one of these prayer groups?'' "Sure...
...Ruth ignored the summons...
...On the stage, which was festooned with banners declaring "JESUS LIVES" and' 'praise GOD," was a small band of guitar-and-accordionplayers dressed in jeans and plaid shirts, and a priest MC at the microphone who led the assembly in hymns and prayers...
...Everybody's embarrassed at first...
...7 take it you have severed your connection with the Order," her Mother Superior wrote, "No, still looking for an answer," Ruth wrote back...
...Al gave a sickly grin and said they ought to be getting along...
...You're sure you're not fighting something, Ruth...
...Blue strip lighting bleakly illuminated the Formica tables and the littered floor...
...Al said it was right...
...This was not the first testimony Ruth had heard to the growing prayer group movement, or Charismatic Renewal as it was sometimes called, but it was the most impressive...
...The others laughed uncertainly...
...At first she was embarrassed by these gifts, but after a while she got...
...Quieter...
...Ruth opened the letter fully expecting that it would announce that the writer had left her Order, probably to get married...
...she asked anxiously...
...The woman stared...
...Her life before America, dull and orderly, seemed like an album of monochrome photographs in her memory...
...Scream...
...There was a surprised silence...
...I mean the emotional atmosphere...
...Most of her neighbors had their eyes shut and were swaying in their seats...
...Those mothers are mean-looking mothers, ain't they...
...After a hasty grace,("Good food, good meat, good God, let's eat") they tucked into hot cakes and bacon...
...Come and join us...
...Charlotte's was not one of them...
...Then the speaker asked if there were any Britishers present...
...One nun had just left the community and another was on the brink...
...On the wall behind her head a poster depicted Moses telling the Israelites: "AndShe's black...
...You OK...
...she gasped to a startled fellowdemonstrator...
...At this point Ruth got to her feet and left...
...This is the darnedest time," said Josephine, a Paulist sister from Iowa, on one such occasion, just after a big peace rally in San Francisco...
...D'you think I should get out before I'm totally screwed up by this life...
...That night she began to pack her bags for the journey home...
...I'll think about it...
...Slowly, carefully, Ruth lifted his hand from her knee and restored it to his own...
...In St...
...That must be real nice.'' Ruth nodded sympathetically, knowing that Josephine's community did not approve of her radical activities and would not want to know anything at all about that weekend's demonstration.' 'Whereas, for us, it's just an anticlimax, going back...
...Hallelujah...
...At this time, in the early summer of 1973, Ruth was earning her keep helping in a residential institution for mentally handicapped adults near Los Angeles—or perhaps it was in Los Angeles—she never quite knew where the sprawling city began and ended...
...After talking for a while on the power of prayer, and the difference it had made to his own life, he led the congregation in his favorite hymn, "Oh, the love of my Lord is the essence.'' When they had sung the words of the last verse, he continued to hum the melody into the microphone, and the congregation followed suit, modulating into a variety of strange noises, keening and coaxing and crooning sounds, harmonized like a humming top, punctuated with occasional ejaculations—"Amen...
...I've been to Disneyland," Ruth said, closing the door behind her, and joining the circle of chairs...
...Well, I don't go much on religion, myself," she said, uneasily...
...The stout woman who had sat next to her in the assembly hall smiled at her...
...Jesus—sorry—wow...
...It's not just that...
...A few hands went up among the audience...
...Like, people are really digging each other, the barriers are down, and when everybody's singing 'We Shall Overcome,' or "They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Love,' you feel it's really true...
...She did substitute teaching in schools, auxiliary nursing in hospitals, helped look after senior citizens and mentally handicapped children...
...There was silence for a moment, then the stout woman beside Ruth stood up and said,' 'The Lord says, 'If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation...
...He seemed almost afraid that they would rise up out of the past to punish him...
...A big affair, folks from all over coming to it...
...Ruth herself did not suffer unduly from the pangs of frustrated sexual and maternal longing, but she did feel that there was something missing from her life as a religious, and that she had to find it before she returned home...
...Eventually she found herself among crowds converging on Disneyland, and thinking that this would be as good a place as any to kill time, passed through the turnstiles...
...She did not want to go home...
...The perception at first pleased and then depressed her...
...Where have you been...
...You're so wonderful, Lord, you lift us up when we're down, you comfort us when we're sick, you rejoice with us when we're happy...
...After that experience, Ruth wore her habit on demos and enjoyed a certain immunity from assault, though an element of risk remained...
...Well, said the speaker, they would know that the British had an airline called British European Airways, BEA for short, and it had struck him when he was on vacation in Europe and flying BEA from Amsterdam to London that those letters could also stand for true Christian faith: "Believe, Expect, Accept...
...For all their superficial amiability and decency they were benighted, glutted with unreality...
...Lord, I just have to tell you that I think you're really great...
...I thought it was like the world must have been before Christ came...
...What's the matter, Ruth...
...I'm taking cookery lessons...
...Only nausea...
...You're welcome," said the man...
...Fending off the proffered dollar bills, Ruth glimpsed a woman on a nearby bench observing them with disapproval...
...The letter was fretful and discouraged...
...Afterwards people would come up to her and shake her hand warmly, sometimes pressing into it a large-denomination dollar bill "to help with your expenses, sister...
...She did not know whether she had been suspended...
...By the waters of Disneyland A STORY DAVID LODGE IN AMERICA, Ruth traveled from city to city, from.convent to convent, like a medieval pilgrim, making notes about the changes that were taking place in the lives of nuns...
...I couldn't exist without it...
...You'd have a lot in common...
...Sixth Form science is suffering...
...Her Mother Superior wrote reluctantly agreeing to a three-month extension of her leave...
...She was a Judo black belt and sometimes she needed to be...
...We praise you, Lord, simply because you're alive and with us, and that makes all the difference...
...She wore a trouser suit and scattered words like "crap" and "bullshit" in her conversation...
...In Detroit, Michigan, a nun in high boots and a mini-skirt ran a free school for juvenile delinquents and led a successful rent-strike against profiteering landlords...
...She wrote back to her Mother Superior: "/ am going through a crisis about my vocation...
...Children ran about with balloons, ice-cream, candy-floss, and popcorn under the complacent eyes of their parents...
...The others on the demo, ordinary people, have got homes, real homes to go back to...
...I usually wind up giving myself another kind of Southern Comfort, you know what I mean...
...She hurried back to the school...
...But still she hadn't found what she was looking for...
...We can be like newborn babes in the Spirit...
...I must see it through over here...
...The accepted mode of prayer was highly informal, personal, intimate, speaking to God as though he were another person present in the room...
...No," said Ruth, truthfully...
...To her surprise, Josephine wrote: "After I got back from San Francisco I nosedived intd the usual pits...
...It is everyone's chance to be born anew...
...Most of the shops were shut, as it was Sunday...
...You'd really like them," he assured her...
...Not just to see Disneyland...
...But it doesn't last...
...Believe in God...
...Give the Holy Spirit an even break...
...Her picket line was broken up by thugs hired by the employers...
...Thank you, Jesus," murmured the rest...
...It was a world of appearances, of pastiche and parody and pretense...
...From these experiences Ruth emerged proud and selfreliant...
...Soon you're in some lousy automat, zonked out, and the party's over...
...It was a time of intense political activity in America, and priests and nuns were throwing themselves into the struggle for civil rights, for peace in Vietnam, for the protection of the environment...
...I'm going out with a nice fellow now, a widower with two boys, we met through an agency...
...Josephine looked at her with a strange expression—quizzical, sceptical, slightly wicked— 7 November 1980: 617 and suddenly Ruth guessed what she was talking about, and blushed vividly...
...The institution was lavishly furnished and equipped with the conscience money of the families who had dumped their defective dependents there, but the work was demanding and sometimes distressing...
...Ill STILL RUTH lingered on the coast of California...
...Eventually she slept herself and woke to find her head on the man's shoulder...
...The stout woman had her fists clenched and was muttering over and over again, "Praise Jesus, Praise Jesus...
...Later Charlotte said, "Hey, Ruth, next weekend there's a Day of Renewal over in Anaheim...
...But in spite of herself Ruth felt her skin prickle with the strangeness of it, the high, confident, fluent'tone of the utterance...
...Do you understand what I mean...
...I lie there for hours,taking a sip of Southern Comfort every now and then, and topping up the hot water in the tub...
...Me...
...How childish it was, just like abracadabra, anyone could pretend to do it...
...At the next rest stop he insisted on buying her coffee and doughnuts and telling her the story of his life...
...Stop the bus...
...D'you think I'm going crazy, Ruth...
...Even before the woman began to speak, Ruth felt a profound sense of bliss descend upon her...
...The speaker asked them all to join hands while he prayed with them...
...Half a dozen faces turned in her direction...
...They made a trip to London a few years back...
...said the speaker...
...the old has passed away...
...You wanna come along with me one evening...
...One of the women concerned had written to Ruth...
...This term of abuse, which she privately interpreted as a contraction of "Mother Superior," had rather caught her fancy, and she continued to use it freely until enlightened as to its true derivation by an amused Franciscan friar during a sit-in at a napalm factory...
...Ruth knelt, and the other people present clustered round and put their hands on her head...
...Ruth began to recite to herself the words of Isaiah: "For the heart of this nation has grown coarse, their ears are dull of hearing, and they have shut their eyes, for fear they should see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and be converted and healed by me...
...In each of the classrooms a small prayer group was in progress...
...II RUTH wrote home for a further extension...
...You think to yourself, gee, this is really great, this is the New Jerusalem, this is what it's all about...
...Listening to this drivel, Ruth felt herself burning in one big blush...
...chiefly celebrated as the home of Disneyland...
...Hey, I went to a parochial school myself, you know?I mean, I was taught by sisters...
...She relied on the religious communities she visited for food and accommodation, repaying their hospitality with whatever work was appropriate...
...Nothing was real except the people who perambulated its broad avenues, fingering their little books of tickets, patiently lining up for the Casey Jr Circus Train, the Peter Pan Flight, the Jungle Cruise, the Monorail Ride...
...For a while she walked aimlessly along the rectilinear streets of one-story houses, each with its little plot of coarse grass over which the sprinkler hoses plied monotonously, then through a commercial district of shops, gas stations, motels and funeral parlors...
...Could we pray for my sister's little boy who is seriously ill with a suspected brain tumor...
...Anticlimax and loneliness...
...There was certainly no shortage of refreshment inside—the only problem was deciding in what architectural facsimile you wanted to consume it: a Wild West saloon or a wigwam encampment or a space-ship or a Mississippi paddleboat...
...Thank you, Jesus," said the speaker...
...Wind up with Mass...
...She dined off the story more than once...
...There were few seats vacant by the time Ruth and Charlotte arrived, and they had to separate...
...It was refused...
...In the evenings they had dates with priests, who took them out to restaurants and movie shows...
...Pigs out!'' and fled from a charge of police dressed like spacemen, her eyes streaming from tear gas...
...Traveling through the night on a Greyhound bus, dressed, as was her custom now, in ordinary clothes, she realized that the man in the next seat had placed his hand on her knee...
...I'd just be embarrassed...
...One door had no window, and she opened it...
...When they got back into the bus, Ruth took a seat next to a black woman with a baby on her lap and pretended not to see the hurt and longing look the shoe salesman sent in her direction across the aisle...
...Ruth shook her head and left the building...
...I was just thinking," said Ruth "that if Jesus really lives, you wouldrf't know it in here...
...Folks waiting to welcome them back, wanting to hear all about it...
...said Josephine...
...Ruth showed her the letter...
...Thank you, Jesus," said the speaker at the microphone casually...
...You'll maybe feel more at ease...
...I don't know," said Ruth...
...Ruth marched and demonstrated on behalf of the Berrigan brothers, Catholic priests jailed for burning draft cards and alleged conspiracy against the state, and was herself arrested and jailed for a night...
...All my life as a nun there's been one thing missing, the one thing that gives it any point or sense, and that's, well, real faith in God...
...Ruth glanced around her...
...said Ruth, with a smile, but they didn't seem to see anything amusing in the idea...
...D'you know what I do, Ruth...
...Look, I don't want to spoil your day...
...What will you do till then...
...She hitchhiked to Southern California to support the strike of exploited Chicano grapepickers...
...The following Sunday Charlotte drove them over to Anaheim, a dull satellite of L.A...
...Mean-looking mothers, aren't they...
...Ruth blushed crimson and muttered her apologies...
...So it was true: people really did speak in tongues at these gatherings...
...They left Ruth sitting alone on her bench, staring back at her over their shoulders from a safe distance...
...It struck Ruth that Disneyland was indeed a place of pilgrimage...
...He's always been crazy to see Disneyland," said the woman fondly, "ever since I started dating him...
...We really praise you...
...Josephine went on...
...behold, the new has come.' The Charismatic Renewal is the new creation...
...I really don't think I can take any more today, Charlotte.'' Charlotte eyed her quizzically...
...When the MC instructed everyone to hold their neighbors' hands as he prayed for the Spirit to descend upon them all, she stiffened in recoil and surrendered her hand reluctantly to the clammy palm of the stout woman sitting next to her...
...Huge grinning plaster figures of Disney characters proffered litter baskets at every intersection of paths...
...Oh," she said...
...Ruth got to her feet and walked rapidly in the opposite direction, to the Exit turnstiles...
...He looked as if he might be a salesman for something agricultural...
...Some two or three hundred people were gathered together in the assembly hall of a Catholic junior high school...
...then, immaculately coiffed, and clad in smart clothes, they swept off in huge shiny convertibles to their jobs as personal secretaries in downtown Houston...
...Whaddya say...
...In Cleveland, Ohio, she came across a community that had until recently been enclosed, supporting itself precariously by embroidering priests' vestments, and had suddenly decided to train all its members in chiropody and turned itself into a foot clinic...
...Ruth herself had adventures...
...You couldn't keep up that intense emotional pitch for long...
...There had been only two new postulants admitted to the motherhouse that year...
...Haven't you tried it...
...Would you like us to pray over you, honey...
...Mother Superior wired: "RETURN immediately...
...One day she had a letter from Josephine, the Paulist nun who flashed upon her inward eye every time she saw an advertisement for a certain brand of bourbon...
...Commonweal: 616 "Put your money away, you're giving scandal," she said, giggling...
...Josephine looked around, and although the automat was empty apart from themselves and a black soldier asleep in the far corner, lowered her voice...
...Ruth procrastinated, equivocated...
...said somebody...
...They had come to celebrate their own myths of origin and salvation—the plantation, the frontier, the technological Utopia—and to pay homage to their heroes, gods and fairies: Buffalo Bill, Davy Crockett, Mickey Mouse, and Donald 7 November 1980: 619 Duck...
...I woke up one morning and realized that I couldn't face the rest of my life on my own, without a man, without children...
...She did not greatly care...
...I just couldn't take any more," said Ruth...
...The man was asleep, his limbs limp, his mouth open...
...Then I started to go to a prayer group and it changed my life...
...I buy myself a little miniature bottle of Southern Comfort and then I fill me a big deep tub, very hot, and I have a long, long soak...
...There's plenary session in the morning, then small groups in the afternoon...
...To her astonishment and acute embarrassment, tears began to roll down Ruth's cheeks...
...First he relaxed the audience with a few in-jokes...
...One such couple, overweight, brightly dressed, festooned with cameras, sat down on Ruth's bench to rest their feet, and the wife volunteered the information that they had come all the way from South Dakota...
...I suppose it couldn't last, in the nature of things," said Ruth philosophically...
...Eventually the columns dispersed, the marchers went their"separate ways...
...Accept Him when he comes...
...Ruth was faintly reminded of a concert party at a Girl Guide rally she had attended many years ago: there was the same air of determined joyfulness and good fellowship about the proceedings...
Vol. 107 • November 1980 • No. 20
