Losdt in the Land of Oz/I am of Ireland
Kelly, Mary Pat
MYTHS OF DOMINATION LOST Of THE LAND OF OZ The Search for Identity and Community in American Life Madonna Kolbenschlag Harper & Row, $16.95, 204 pp. I AH OF IRELAND Women of the North Speak Out...
...It is such bypassing of ordinary ecclesial charity that leads me to label CUF as integralist...
...Here in the words of Elizabeth Shannon, men "sanctify war...
...Each tells the story of women imprisoned by bankrupt myths and failed metaphors...
...One year after she spoke to Shannon, Maired Farrell was shot dead in the streets of Gibraltar by an antiterrorist unit of the British Army while she was on an son from his mishandling by the Inquisition...
...i.e., under the norm of Scripture...
...The sophisticated wife of Peter Robinson, Ian Paisley's chief deputy, refers often to "Rome" and its involvement...
...Moreover, they bypass the ecclesial rule of Matthew 18: 15-18 which demands that we confront each other directly in charity before going to the whole church (or to the Vatican with denunciations...
...Shannon shares her appreciation for the essential beauty of both the land and its people and a concomitant frustration with the "addiction for revenge" that destroys and chokes off potential...
...We also listen with Shannon to women who are putting their lives together after prison terms...
...Kolbenschlag uses L. Frank Baum's O: stories to elaborate her theme...
...Nowhere is the need to find nurturing, life-affirming myths more acute than in Northern Ireland...
...Some claim to be feminists, others don't even like the word...
...Some hold extreme views that justify violence...
...The militant unionist women feared not only the violence of the IRA, but anything that seemed to make a united Ireland possible...
...Evidently lots of folks out there think papal fundamentalism is, indeed, a real problem for our church...
...Catholicism itself was obscurely to blame...
...We meet them in the ranks of those who remain committed to nonviolence in the face of personal suffering...
...The story of Macha, who gives birth prematurely to twins after her husband's boasting forces her into a race, provides "a glimpse of the root cause of our wounded world...
...But the very accessibility of the stories helps in assimilating insights from psychology, Native American history, contemporary literature, movies, theology, and sociology...
...The magis-terium is normata...
...Women suffer to a disproportionate degree from myths that glorify domination and violence...
...This is not a cliche"d Northern Ireland where images of bombs exploding and tanks prowling burned-out streets explain everything...
...As these women speak we begin to get a picture of a complex people caught in a dangerously oversimplified conflict...
...Among genuine conservatives whom I admire or respect I would cite, for starters, Archbishop John R. Quinn and-among Catholic intellectuals-Toronto's J.M...
...Lost in the Land ofOz suggests that an urgent openness is needed in the search for new understanding...
...Some are politically involved, others are doggedly apolitical...
...wisdom from whatever source as they struggle to remake their lives...
...S.J...
...I AH OF IRELAND Women of the North Speak Out Elizabeth Shannon Little, Brown, $17.95, 264 pp...
...Dorothy and Baum's other characters become organizing symbols for a work that draws on insights from a wide range of sources...
...Shannon reaches this conclusion after many hours of listening to a diverse cross section of women, some Catholic, some Protestant...
...For her, the ultimate feminist goal in the North would be "to create unity among the women there and a common voice that rejects terrorism as a way of life...
...Kolbenschlag takes the story of the ancient Irish heroine Macha as a point of departure in "the search for identity and community in American life...
...Don't trust self-proclaimed traditionalists who truncate the tradition to the years 1870-1958...
...Anne and Eileen Gillespie who claim they were unjustly imprisoned as IRA terrorists in England tell their story...
...This breaks down the needed atmosphere of mutual trust in the church...
...He also belittles the received Catholic view of Scripture as a norm for the church, itself above all other norms (norma normans non normata was the classic way of putting it...
...I was struck by the determination of Kolbenschlag, and the women with whom she works, to wrest wayne A. MEEKS is Woolsey Professor of Biblical Studies at Yale University...
...Ash may think talk of "papal fundamentalism" an invention of progressives...
...We start with and presuppose trust in one another...
...These include "the abuse of the maternity of creation and of the deepest caregiving, nurturing instincts in ourselves...
...Thus, he stipulated as a presupposition formaking the spiritual exercises that we should be prepared, when faced with an expression of faith that puzzles us or which we suspect may not be totally orthodox, to put, as a first move, the best interpretation on it, unless we are absolutely compelled to do otherwise...
...We also hear the views of women, like (Continued on page 252) (Continued from page 247) Dodie McGuiness who belongs to Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Provisional IRA, and serves on the Derry City Council...
...Sadly, of all the women who speak out in the book, the one who captured the attention of the world did it not through the life she lived but by the violent way she died and the horror that attended her burial...
...Mothers of prisoners, for example, sometimes seem trapped into their political beliefs while the women "on active duty" have no doubts at all...
...We see devastation but also the courage and good humor of women determined to survive...
...This voice must counter the men who "recite...ancient wounds with monotonous regularity...
...In order to heal ourselves and our wounded world, we must look beyond the myth of the hero and consider "the archetype of the orphan...
...most abhor the violence...
...Kolbenschlag, author of Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye, contends that the myth of individualism embodied in the hero stories that have been used as "models of human existence for centuries" are "proving inadequate...
...Shannon remains there listening to the voices of the women of the North...
...JOHN A. COLEMAN...
...Mary Pat Kelly Both Madonna Kolben-Bschlag and Elizabeth Shannon begin their books in Northern Ireland...
...Her close and inventive readings of those much-loved, turn-of-the-century stories resonate with the women whp take myth workshops...
...This may seem risky...
...Neo-integralist groups such as Catholics United for the Faith start with suspicion...
...In the last paragraph of his letter, Joseph Crumlish discounts appeals to warrants based on human experience (thus, seemingly, throwing away a traditional Catholic-and magisterial-reliance on natural law) and recourse to the sensus fidelium (enshrined in one of the oldest Catholic theological formulas, lexorandi, lex credendi i.e., we test our doctrine against the spiritual experience and practice of our people...
...Now she turns to the women of the North...
...Cameron...
...As Shannon listened to these women, she concluded that even among those who support the "Provos," there are gradations of opinion...
...Crumlish's letter underscores a point in my article...
...MARY pat KELLY is a filmmaker currently writing a book about Martin Scorsese...
...Shannon's previous book, Up in the Park, covered her time in the Republic of Ireland where her late husband, William Shannon, served as Jimmy Carter's ambassador...
...Nothing I've written in recent years has brought to my door so many notes of thanks from Catholic university presidents, bishops, clergy, and laity in this country and abroad...
...We go into the homes of Protestant unionist women like Lucy Faulkner who wish to move beyond their tribe's dogmas...
...Anita Currie, Berna Mclver, and Brid Rogers of the Social Democratic and Labor Party are from the Catholic nationalist community...
Vol. 116 • April 1989 • No. 8
