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Occasions
of Sin: A Memoir by Sandra Jean Scofield Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Pain If
you think the memoir genre is crowded with ghost-written vanity recollections
of the golden days, spend a few hours with Sandra Jean Scofield’s
memoir, Occasions
of Sin. You’ll conclude, as I did, that this book provides a rare taste
of the memoir at its very best. First, the writing is superb. Second, there’s
a transparency that refuses to hide from readers recollections that are
painful. Third, Scofield captures the time and
place of her youth with a lens that transports us, and with stories that
transfix us. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 4 (pp. 93-99): I was learning that men are occasions
of sin. Even boys are dangerous, because the morals of girls are fragile,
like the shells of baby birds. At the I sat up, eagerly attentive. The year
had been a threshold for me. I had inched my way past the childish,
recitative practice of devotions, struggling to discover or invent a more
personal practice of in~ faith, something that I thought of as “more real.” I
had been influenced by the presence of a new hoarder, Bonnie, a senior girl
from a farming town who was going to go straight into the None of the other older girls had any
patience with me, but during free time after supper Bonnie sometimes asked me
if I wanted to play catch or shoot baskets, and when the weather turned cold,
I was comfortable enough with her to sit and talk. By winter I had got up my
nerve to tell her that I was frustrated because I didn’t know what I was
supposed to do when I went to chapel at times other than services. She asked
me why I went, and I said because I wanted the company She patted my knee and
said that was fine, God had a big ear. She suggested that I talk silently as
if I were on the phone, and then after a while she thought the phone would
fade away and I would feel God’s presence and it would seem more natural just
to say what was on my mind, knowing that I was being heard. Then, she said,
I would learn, in time,
that I could sit in silence with an open heart and listen. For
what? I asked. She took my hand and squeezed it gently. I don’t know, she
said. It depends on what He has to say to you. Before long I became comfortable with
the silence of the chapel and stopped thinking that something had to happen.
It was such a beautiful room, just across the hall from the room where we
studied. it always smelled of wax and something
else, something I identified with the smell of the sisters. Once in a while
Bonnie would come in and sit down beside me for a little while and then we
would go out together. She made me feel less lonely. I wonder if I was a
project for her, an act of charity. We were divided at the retreat, boys and girls—this was the last year boys
could attend AMI before enrolling in public schools—so all day we paraded
past one another, alternating lectures, prayers, snacks, and silent
recreation (walks around the periphery of the grounds). Segregation allowed
the introduction of topics that might be inappropriate in mixed company. I
don’t remember who explained this, hut there was no need to belabor it. A
retreat was, by its very definition, special, with special rules, and this
was our first experience on a higher plane; two days without boys would not
bother us. Except for Denny McMurtry, who was
smarter than any of us in math, any boy in our class could be bested by
almost any girl. We worked harder; we cared more. We shed the boys with a
sigh of superiority, then inclined toward Father’s
instruction. We heard about God’s intentions for
women: marriage and motherhood, or the convent—nothing new there, My mind wandered.
I counted weeks until I would go to I lost track of what he said during the
rest of that session; I could not stop thinking of the open window. His very
words—window, stirring leaves—made my heart pound. It was the same
feeling that came over me when I knew I had to write. A scrap of poetry
(sorry rhymes), a story (fat with sentiment), such
things sometimes arrived like a letter to my door. There had been times I had
feigned illness in order to bundle up on my bed and scribble through the
school day. This was the first time, however, that the inspiration had been
for an essay. Oh, I was a good student writer, and I had hardly ever seen a
red mark on my papers, but academic compositions were dutiful displays
demanded by adults and evaluated by the absence of errors. This was
altogether new. This was an urgent need to argue something, and my
excitement came from the sudden awareness that what I thought I had not
thought before and maybe no one else had either. I did not yet have
the concept of the muse; I thought God, in some mysterious way had whispered
in my ear. I thought it was what
you got on retreat. A party favor, for paying attention. I decided to enter the diocesan essay
contest. The topic was vocations and the deadline was a mere three days away.
The principal had asked me every day for the past two weeks why I wasn’t
entering. She said that Denny McMurtry had done so,
and so had Madeline Laherty in the high-school
division. The school was counting on me. I could only reply that I had
nothing to say. Even though I had been professing for a couple of years now
that I wanted to be a nun—specifically, a Benedictine nun, to please my
mother— the topic of vocations had not interested me. Everything about it was so obvious. In every graduating class there was at
least one girl who fastened on the notion of the convent, someone pious who
was known never to sass or disobey. Then, too, recruiters came from various
religious orders once a year to talk to us about vocations (in the narrowest
sense), and they were known to sway a girl who had not vet made up her mind.
My classmate Mozelle Chambers, barely fourteen
years old, had already sworn to enter the Ursulines
four years hence, won over by an afternoon’s visit with a persuasive
advocate. Now, though, I thought that one might hear God’s call directly and
that the call might be particular to oneself. To me. Like Saint Joan of Arc,
called to dress like a boy and save The saint I knew and loved best was the
recently canonized Maria Goretti, who as a girl
only eleven years old had died defending her purity in an assault by a boy
from a neighboring farm. Of course I loved her! She could be me. She
was a saint of my century Smitten like millions of girls all over the world, I had recently chosen her for my confirmation
namesake. I had a clear picture in my mind of her heaped on the back of a
farmer’s wooden cart. I thought that her holiness lay not just in her
virginity (after all, I was a virgin and hardly holy at all), and not just in
her violent death (people are murdered every day), hut in her generosity (I
pray he will repent!), and especially in the way she saw clearly what she
had to do. Her vocation had been martyrdom and she had welcomed her bloody
death. I am appalled now to remember thinking of this eleven-year-old peasant
girl as capable of such self-aggrandizing projection—in the moments of a
brutal attack, no less!— hut not only
was I immature, I was a Catholic girl in 1956 and was enthralled with
the concept of holy purity. The hagiographers were pushing hard this child
who had died for virtue, and I simply couldn’t conceive of a girl around my
age being so good, so brave, and so full of conviction, that she would act without
having to think about it. I thought that what had made Maria
brave was her belief that she had been blessed with her violent fate, as
in~’ mother had been blessed with her afflictions. I loved that word, afflictions. (That
night I would write Mother these thoughts, and she would answer that I had
made her weep with pride and love.) Those brave, good girls who were martyred
for their faith (Cecelia, Agnes, Perpetua) had
been at that window when God called. Simple acceptance-that was how you
learned to do the right thing, even if you didn’t understand everything about what you embraced.
Somehow acceptance became faith; your patience and humility got you God’s
prize—bestowed, not won (Sainthood!). It was heady romantic stuff, a kind of
Prince Charming story in which God himself came along to rescue you, not from
death, hut from anonymity I was thrilled by the simple virtue of having a fresh thought of my own at age twelve.
I wasn’t mature enough to turn around
and evaluate it, too. I wish there had been someone to tell
me on the spot how naïve I was, that it
is possible to do everything you
are “supposed to do” and gain
nothing. That Maria was a victim perfect for her time, an icon of
Catholic sexual politics. That a girl waiting for a prince—even
God—is a person of no moral consequence. Even
a male reader will lose some breath when reading a sentence like the last
one. Many women will find that Occasions
of Sin will resonate with their own coming of age experience. Those women
who struggle in difficult mother-daughter relationships may find solace in
the pain Scofield experienced at age 15 when her
mother died at age 33. All readers will come away from Occasions
of Sin deeply moved, with some emotional drain. Steve
Hopkins, March 23, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Occasions
of Sin.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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