A Marginal Life 1 comments

By Ann Conway

All my life, I’ve walked on the frontier of one community or another.

“What’re you doin’ that for?” Father Beirne cried, leaning toward me. I was at my Aunt Gabe’s wake; I had just told my uncle’s curate that I was enrolled in a sociology PhD program at Brandeis. I was frightened by his red, set face, which seemed to say that I was in with the Communists now. In with the Jews. I had betrayed my tribe of blue collar, Catholic conservatives.

“What’re you doin’ that for?” I heard when I attended a WASP college and learned about aspirations; when I moved to Maine, which seemed a redneck tundra to my urban pals.

I got used to being an in/outsider, living on the edges.

Then I decided in midlife to apply to an MFA program informed by the Christian tradition. My decision caused quiet consternation in my circle of middle aged, highly educated old friends, who tend to be either humanists or embittered ex-Catholics, who see the seal of baptism not as an enduring gift, but a festering wound.

After a couple of charged conversations, particularly with the not-recovering Catholics, I didn’t talk about the MFA much. When I did, I said it was a program that melded the spiritual with the literary. This rendered my studies more acceptable and cowardly.

My worlds still collided. An old friend came to the SPU MFA graduation in Santa Fe last year. She brought her cousin Vicky, a minister’s daughter, a nice woman my age, a Unitarian.

I mentioned to Vicky that some of my fellow MFA graduates came from relatively conservative Christian backgrounds. As, of course, I did.

“They’re wonderful people,” I said, wondering why I felt the impulse to defend them, these Christians. Then I knew, as I watched her lively face turn hard and implacable. I realized that I had again violated the stark rule of my childhood and adolescence: stay with your own kind.

But what is my kind?

Recently, I read an article in Slate, “Pop Goes Christianity,” in which Hanna Rosin explored the “parallel universe” of contemporary Christian popular culture—anything in literature, music, movies “lowbrow to middlebrow,” according to Rosin. The writer quoted extensively from Rapture Ready, by Daniel Radosh, joking that these genres present a “Christian version designed to satisfy...the same (cultural) needs in a cleaner form.”

I know little about the world of which she writes, although I understand its rise. The world I grew up in—the world of Catholic institutions and fellowships, books, movies, music—was an encompassing universe, whose intent was similarly to combat discrimination and keep faith alive.

Stay with your own kind, this world said, a world which, if not vanished, is greatly transformed.

I did not obey this rule, because I saw what obedience to it did to people whose longing for beauty sometimes shriveled in the confines of religiously insular neighborhoods. I saw what happened when faith became a matter of duty and conformity, unconnected to emotional and artistic largesse.

Not much great literature has emerged from that urban Irish Catholic world. Respectability has its cost. But respectability does not merely pertain to religion. These days, the artist finds rigid adherence to standards in the oddest places. Just try reading a piece about faith at many writers’ conferences and you will see how thoroughly decorous they are.

Perhaps then, the frontier, where I have always lived, is the logical country for the artist of faith. Writing of Robert Lowell in Elegy, Seamus Heaney speaks of his “course set wilfully across / the ungovernable and dangerous.” That perilous country is where I wish to live: writing from the freedom of the margins, with the hope of making them disappear.