Devouring

 

Wolf at the Table, the family saga by Adam Rapp spans 1951 to 2010. A withdrawn, hardworking  veteran of World War II and a devout Catholic mother raise six children in their middle-class home in Elmira, NY. The mother is a tough taskmaster, compensating for the husband's PTSD. A portrait of Jesus overlooks the dining room table, but the mother is in command. Catholicism is a rote requirement, practiced with little reflection or care.

The novel skips through the years, the chapters loosely tied to key historical events and narrated by the various family members. Each adult child displays a steely resilience, an individuality honed by a desperate urge for privacy that comes from growing up in a large and intrusive family. 

Four of the children emerge from the home with strong personalities, secrets and unresolved issues. With the haphazard choice of years and the multiple narrators, Rapp gives his characters privacy, ensuring that readers achieve limited understanding of each character's motivations.  

Myra is a central character, a key narrator who manages to maintain family connections. The novel starts with her furtively reading her copy of The Catcher in the Rye at a diner near her home. She meets a young man that afternoon who drives her around in his car, abruptly displaying reticence when she mentions the size of the family. That evening a nearby family is slaughtered, but Myra does not mention the stranger or this prying questions. 

Myra eventually becomes a nurse, working at a state corrections facility while failing to care for herself. She marries and raises her son as a single mother after her husband develops schizophrenia and flees. Her angry brother Alec suffers sexual abuse as an altar boy from the parish priest that goes either unrecognized by the family, or perhaps unacknowledged. He also lies and steals, and the parents banish him from the family home.  The youngest sibling dies as an infant. Joan has developmental challenges and never leaves home. Fiona aspires to to be an actress while living a hedonistic and impoverished lifestyle in New York City. Lexy, the most ambitious, pursues an education and manages to escape the family’s unhappy choices. Her brief time as narrator role ends after she marries a man who can and does assist other family members through illness and other difficulties. The couple is generous, but also keeps a distance and sets boundaries. 

The story takes a disturbing turn in the pre-internet 1980s when Alec sends his mother a series of postcards from various towns with names, two-digit numbers along with an ominous message, “Saying hello and goodbye.” Years later, Myra finds the cards. The internet is widely available in 2000 yet she shows no curiosity, seeks no proof. Instead, she simply writes, expressing her suspicions: “If you are hurting these boys you need to stop yourself. I implore you to take a long, hard look at your life.” There is no call to the authorities – and the reader can only wonder how much blame the family, especially Myra, should shoulder for Alec’s many crimes. 

The children grow up, well practiced at masking true feelings from a disapproving mother, and as adults delude themselves about the problems at hand and the past's influence. The siblings are not close and occasional family get-togethers are similar to Catholic rituals, rote and meaningless. Mental illness is rampant and no character is truly at peace. There is more than one wolf at the table. 

No surprise

A pedophile scandal in Massachusetts - and more importantly, the response from church leaders - prompted me to abandon Catholicism in 1992. A decade later, I wrote about my decision in an essay entitled "The Church Must Change" for The Hartford Courant.

The decision was one of the toughest, but also best that I have ever made. I described growing up in a devout Catholic family in a Pittsburgh suburb, first in Ingram and Crafton, Pennsylvania, and later moving to another neighborhood that surrounded Our Lady of Grace Church in 1969. We attended church for about six months but soon afterward, my father, brothers, sisters and I started volunteering in a nearby county nursing home, Kane Hospital, assisting patients in wheelchairs to and from the Masses. The priest was one of the most compassionate men I have ever met - and in the essay, I described his tolerance and kindness. "We trusted and admired him completely and he never took advantage of that trust," I wrote, adding that many young Catholics had been less fortunate.

So I have only the vaguest memories of the parish priests assigned to Our Lady of Grace parish. The 900-page grand jury report released by the Pennsylvania state attorney general references Leo Burchianti at the church from June 1968 to May 1973: "Burchianti was alleged to have had inappropriate contact with at least eight young boys," reports the Grand Jury report, page 600. "These allegations included but were not limited to Burchianti: having anal or oral sex with them; inappropriately touching them; making suggestive comments to them; providing alcohol to them; allowing them to use drugs in the rectory; and inviting some to stay overnight to sleep in his bed with him."

Because of our volunteer work at the nursing home, I did not know Burchianti other than to watch him preside over a few Masses. I heard no stories of abuse. I had already come to view religion as more a practical means of reaching out to help others and less for personal introspection and prayer. 

I left the church years later while living in the suburbs of Boston. In 1992, the former Catholic priest James Porter was accused of molesting more than 100 children in Massachusetts New Mexico and Minnesota. Church leaders in the area did not respond well to criticism that they hid the actions of a pedophile by transferring him to new locales. In May of that year, Boston's then Cardinal Bernard Law lashed out not at Porter, but at the journalists covering the priest's crimes: "By all means, we call down God's power on the media."

That was the moment I lost all trust in the Roman Catholic Church. The leaders sought to protect an institution rather than little children. As a parent, I was immensely grateful for the media reports.

My essay for the Courant was published a decade later, March 24, 2002, when the entire nation and church reckoned with another more far-reaching scandal. I wrote about how religion, like everything else in the United States, must compete under the free-market system: "In this country, we have the privilege of free thought and speech, and we can decide which 'moral" rules imposed by religious leaders, mere mortals, should be kept and which are meant to be broken."

At the time, I was confident the Catholic Church would change: "I have no doubt that within this century, priests will be free to marry and women be encouraged to value life by using birth control." I also concluded that "if the Church waits very long, it will only be a shadow, a minor religion in this country, as it loses credibility and more Catholics discover that other religions can offer both spirituality and truth."

Ultimately, my books about religion, women and life in rural Afghanistan, Fear of Beauty and Allure of Deceit, were based on my own experiences with Catholicism and religious controls.

Once again, the church must change.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

Common home

Muslim scholars are joining Pope Francis suggesting that climate change is caused by humans and threatening Earth.

"The views of the scholars – some of the strongest yet expressed on climate from within the Muslim community – are contained in a draft declaration on climate change to be launched officially at a major Islamic symposium in Istanbul in mid-August," reports Kieran Cooke for Climate News Network. "The draft declaration has been compiled by the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences, a UK-based charity focused on environmental protection and the management of natural resources. The declaration mirrors many of the themes contained in a recent encyclical issued by Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church."

Criticism is directed at the world's most advanced economies as well as oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia.  The declaration includes quotes from the Koran, such as 16:65:  "And Allah has sent down water from the cloud and therewith given life to the earth after its death; most surely there is a sign in this for a people who would listen."

Regardless of faith, all people share a common home and should have an interest in protecting and caring for the Earth. There is no escaping climate change. "The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change,” the pope writes in his encyclical. “Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home.”

The pope mixes a scolding with eloquent respect for the Earth's land and waters: "The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish. Industrial waste and chemical products utilized in cities and agricultural areas can lead to bioaccumulation in the organisms of the local population, even when levels of toxins in those places are low. Frequently no measures are taken until after people’s health has been irreversibly affected."

Researchers are studying climate change and producing models to forecast impacts. Models for the United States are specific and the National Climate Assessment offers projects for each region of the country.

Challenges for a underdeveloped nation like Afghanistan include a lack of baseline data, lack of meteorological stations in most parts, low literacy rates and a lack of trained personnel, explains Ghulam Mohd Malikyar in "The Impacts of Climate Change for Afghanistan."  Key hazards for the country include droughts, abrupt heavy rainfall, flooding doing to fast thaws in snow and ice, rising temperatures, heavy winds, severe storms and desertification, he writes, adding that all this disrupts agriculture. Other challenges include a "Lack of linkage with regional and international climate change networks" and "Low levels of awareness of the current and potential impacts of climate change" as well as "Limited analytical capability."

The country is working to promote awareness of future variability and potential for extreme events, as well as the need for sustainable development.

These trends along with the unnerving signs of climate change - volatile temperatures that destroy crops, dust storms, drought, water shortages, and even unusual snow - run throughout Allure of Deceit and Fear of Beauty. The villagers of Laashekoh do not have the benefit of weather reports, and must take each day as it comes, and the land means everything to Parsaa, the protagonist of Allure of Deceit. From Allure:

....Paul declined. He had to visit other village and expected snowfall.
"Surely not yet," Parsaa said. "The air is not that cold."
Paul smiled. "You will see over the next day... temperatures will plunge before tomorrow evening."

As noted the prologue notes in Fear: "We live in a land where extremes reign." Climate change is a security and economic issue, no longer easy to shove to the back of our minds. Modern literature increasingly reflects these concerns.

Photo of small village nestled in the mountains of southern Afghanistan, courtesy of Mark Ray, USACE, and Wikimedia Commons.