Family Takes Care of Family

When one thinks about family secrets, the usual interpretation is that it’s a family that is comprised of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, children and elderly, and so forth. In other words, the family members are blood relatives, or married into the blood line. The secrets they want to preserve can be of all sorts and there is no need to list them. The only thing to keep in mind is that the secrets are usually cause for shame or danger.

I am of the opinion that this is a rather limited definition of family, this one that is based on shared blood. In fact, I would like to explain why I believe that monks in a monastery or nuns in a cloister are also family. After all, they live in a very defined space and share many activities. They spend years, decades, together. They never move away. Blood families have no limitations of that sort and so children may move far from their parents to pursue a career or grandparents may be shuffled off to a home so someone else can take care of them. Nuns apparently tend to the statues of the saints on altars, or dress the Child Jesus, care for the chapels as if they were rooms in a home.

Why not consider these religious communities to be families? I for one would love to have people who share similar ideas around me, so we could carry out tasks together, talk, keep each other company so the dark nights don’t spook us.

What secrets do all the religious communities have? The Corner That Held Them is one example. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel of 1948 tells the story of a convent founded in the twelfth century up through the fourteenth century. It is a place full of human emotion, struggle, hope, desires. In a word, the nuns, while cloistered, still have bodies and minds. They are not puppets of God; they act and not always act the right way. Still, they are a close-knit group. They also have secrets. Big, important secrets. Things they don’t want anybody to know.

Sometimes secrets are kept out of a love for contemplation and solitude, as well as a love of knowledge. This might sound rather lofty, but it was really quite frequent, especially for women. We can mention the Mexican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or the Spanish Santa Teresa of Ávila. There are many women who took to the convent because the world was full of things they did not like or could not do if they remained in that outer world. Those were not the secrets of illicit passions, of lives gone astray, of loss or loathing, rejection or poverty, but rather the desire for learning. 

If I were a woman living in the twelfth century, or the thirteenth, or the fourteenth, I might well have chosen to live in a place where I could safely leave books and papers beside my bed. I have always loved libraries and reading, yet can remember when people didn’t think I needed to go to college because I was a girl, or could do math because I was a girl, or could go on to graduate school because I was going to get married and would not continue my education. 

Nobody ever understood me. I was the girl who watched The Wizard of Oz in black and white and sang along quite fervently with Dorothy’s companion when he sang “If I only had a brain.” I believe that was Scarecrow, whose head was full of straw (so was his body). I had a brain, I guess, but nobody wanted me to have it. And since I wasn’t pretty, you might say I was up a creek without a paddle.

I can remember all that, and it is no joke. It really happened to me and it really hurt. A lot. A woman in a cloister has escaped an abusive marriage, death in childbirth, or annual babies. Instead, she has place and time to put her mind to work. I know I’m not saying anything very original here, but perhaps it’s worth repeating where I stand on this matter before I tell the story of the nuns at San Paio de Antealtares, in the center of the City of the Apostle, Santiago.

I’d like to provide a little history about the convent and those who reside in it, because it really is relevant. Note that the cloister came about after San Paio had been a monastery. Founded by Alphonse the Chaste in 830, it was originally meant to keep watch over the Apostle’s remains. In 1495, Lopo Gómez de Marzoa organized a plan for educating poor students, a colexio, in the monastery. This colexio would be the kernel for the very important, most excellent, University of Santiago de Compostela. This is definitely relevant to the story of family secrets.

The Benedictine nuns entered the picture in 1499. Now you should know that the Benedictine Order had been founded in the sixth century by Benedict of Nursia, Benedict being the twin of Saint Scholastica, Santa Escolástica. The Order believes in the importance of study study. Are things becoming clearer now?

So now that we know the Benedictines are linked to education, we turn to the paintings of Escolástica in the museum of San Paio. (We discussed the museum elsewhere, but it’s good to remind people. The saint’s name says it all.) The nuns in Santiago have their mandate, but one wonders whom do they educate? I don’t really know if they have taught children, because it appears the colexio plan did not last. Marzoa died soon after founding the school.

The nuns formed their own group to study. That is my theory and until somebody can disprove it, I am sticking to it.

What will they do to preserve secrets? You might be wondering how study and education tie in with secrets, but it’s right in front of your face. They studied. They learned things and wrote things. They preserved documents and art. Behind the high, austere walls of the building that would later be erected, they grew more and more learned. They also were aware that such an amount of knowledge, held by women, was frowned upon by religious and lay leaders alike.

Was there an early generation of nuns with secret knowledge of one sort, then a second generation, with more modern secrets? The earliest nuns may have focused on religious doctrine, but this cannot be assumed to be true. There were always scientific experiments being performed, and we have the writings of many devout ladies as evidence of their questioning minds. Naturally, these experiments and inquiries were rebuffed by the Church Fathers, and women like Sor Juana resorted to irony and self-humiliation to deflect the blows (mental or physical).

Today’s nuns, good sisters that they are - see the family reference coming into play? - might well be addressing concerns regarding women’s issues of all sorts. Let’s take this a bit further, too. What is there to the stories about tunnels that extend deep below the surface from a religious edifice to another building or out to an area where the person using them could escape? Had the cloistered women created a second wall, albeit a subterranean one, where they could gather if the convent were ever attacked as sometimes happened? Did they use the tunnels to hide volumes of knowledge or the records of discussions that might be deemed heresy and lead them to their execution by fire or sword?

Once again, I think this is completely possible, even if I can’t prove it. Yet.

By now I hope you can see the ties to the Graystockings, who are not cloistered but who do have to use intelligent tactics to both protect themselves and educate the world about important issues. (We all know the type of issues to which I am referring, so they will not be. Detailed here.)

Why keep certain things away from outsiders’ eyes? You might be asking that, because the world has changed a great deal since the Benedictine nuns started their residency in San Paio, a residency that has been uninterrupted for over five centuries. Well, for one thing, the sisters knew the history of the Inquisition, knew there were rules that could not be broken without bringing the wrath of the Fathers of the Church down upon them. They knew that before the Inquisition there was Muslim rule, such as the one that killed Pelagius - San Paio - in the tenth century for refusing to convert and also for rejecting the caliph’s sexual advances. It was safer inside the convent walls. Safer for women, but did not keep them from being human, from thinking, feeling, and knowing.

It is important to make an aside here. Paio is Galician for Pelayo in Spanish, which is Pelagius in English. We’ve established that already. What we haven’t explained in that Pelagius means “one who wishes to choose.” In this case, it melds perfectly with the idea that there were women who wished to choose the life of the mind, which as you know is my theory. I will go further than that now. 

In the intimate religious museum of the San Paio convent there are paintings of Saint Rita, Patroness of Lost Causes and of abused women. She lived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Like Scholastica, Rita was from the part of the world that today is known as Italy. Her life was extremely difficult and, yes, included an abusive husband. She went to great pains to enter the convent after he was killed (not by her, though she must have at least thought about it). 

Do you really think the art depicting these two female saints from Italy before it was Italy ended up in San Paio with the Benedictine women just by coincidence? I don’t, not at all. I think Rita and Scholastic gave the nuns in Santiago a lot to think about, and write about.

What were the Benedictine community members willing to do to maintain the silence around what was occurring inside the grim, lofty walls that face the Quintana dos Mortos, the Square of the Dead? That is the question that intrigues me the most, but all I can offer is pure speculation. We can give it a whirl.

First of all, we should ask: Do they fear anyone in particular? Logically, they might incur the wrath of the Church Fathers. We have already mentioned that. The Church still has not allowed women in high-ranking positions, remember. The men call the shots, unless there’s a female Pope. The Vatican has good radar; misbehavior is not tolerated. Thus, silence and secrecy are still part of the plan, although there have been rumblings among the nuns that something needs to change.

 This leads us to the parallels with the nuns and the zgraystockings, who also wear habits of sorts on occasion, despite there being no religious significance to that. How do the Benedictine sisters work with the Graystockings? Are the two groups aware of each other? How did they meet and when? There are so many unanswered questions here and we don’t want to speculate too much at this point.

Nevertheless, I will go out on a limb and propose another part to my theory of the WWW (Women Within the Walls). I think they were fully aware that they had counterparts in the city. Those counterparts also had kept the vow to build a repository for women’s materials. They too had needed, and constructed, a tunnel. Maybe more than one. I suspect they had several, which served chiefly as storage areas for the books, handmade items, and documents they had been accumulating.

What I am getting at here is a bit outlandish yet still within the realm of possibility. I definitely think there are tunnels honeycombing the entire subsoil of Compostela. So many, in fact, that if they were to be discovered, some people - the Church Fathers, say - would panic. They would want to control the voices that had been protected for so long. Others, like architects and archaeologists, would want to inspect the secret spaces, study them, then reseal them, closing them off to all access. Both possibilities would be tragic.

Now we are coming to the final bits of my theory. I am fairly certain that the nuns are responsible for the creation of the famous shadow pilgrim visible on certain nights on the Quintana. There are various aspects to the legend, but people swear they have seen him. I think it’s just the right combination of rooftops, streetlights, and the moon that casts a shadow on the massive stone doorway that is only opened when July 25, Saint James’ Day, falls on a Sunday.

The legend is hardly believable and people, even those claiming to have seen the shadow cross the square and enter the cathedral by passing through very thick granite, don’t really believe it. They say they have seen the shadow cross the open space, but in the end the vision is laughed off because it’s too ‘fake’. The shadow is frequently associated with the legendary tunnel they say extends from the convent to the cathedral, so by making fun of the nocturnal apparition, they are also making fun of the tunnel along which he supposedly walks until he is near the huge door and passes clean through it.

Smart ladies, those nuns. They want to debunk the myth that is actually not a myth but real. They want people to say of course there’s no tunnel, of course there’s no human shadow. Yet the tunnel really is there. If you ask one of the sisters, as I have, you get a wry look and a denial, or something like, “Maybe there was one once, but not any more.”

I am pretty sure the nuns have had a meeting with the Graystockings in order to create a plan. Most likely they have Discussed the urgency of a site for the library each group has been constructing.

Obviously, there is more going on here than meets the eye. For now, I have not been authorized to reveal any more information. You may take my theory as the truth or as just the machinations of a deluded soul who really does claim to having seen the pilgrim or lover or escaping cleric in shadow form. I cannot clarify anything at this time, but I do hope I’ve made you think about the real story.

So, now comes the real ending:

1. The reason for keeping important ideas behind walls or under ground needs to be studied.
2. The right time for bringing the ideas out in the open is yet to be determined. Why is  that? When will they be revealed?
3. How does the procedure of reflection and inquiry practiced by the cloistered women mesh with feminist activism? 

Until we have the answers, we are always going to be stuck in the Middle Ages.

I am definitely not in favor of that, so I will get back to you when I know more.