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4 The Maiden and the Monstrance Thus the Women’s Secrets I have surveyed And let them see how curiously they’re made: And that, tho they of different sexes be, Yet in the Whole they are the same as we: For those that have the strictest Searchers been, Find Women are but Men turned Outside in: And Men, if they but cast their Eyes about, May find they’re Women with their Inside out. From Aristotle’s Masterpiece The retreat at Belvedere college having been concluded, Stephen Dedalus anxiously seeks a church where he can confess his sins anonymously. And, indeed, he succeeds in making the heartfelt confession quoted in the previous chapter. Prior to the confession, however, as Stephen enters the Church Street chapel, “the candles on the high altar had been extinguished but the fragrance of the incense still floated down the dim nave” (P, 141), indicating that a benediction service has recently ended. Although Stephen misses this particular service, he will surely attend many a benediction devotion in the weeks following the retreat , for this is the period when “his daily life was laid out for him in devotional areas” (P, 147). Earlier, young Stephen had served as “boatbearer,” carrying the “boat” of incense during what appears to have been a benediction service at Clongowes; later, in “Telemachus,” as memories beset Stephen’s “brooding brain” while he holds Mulligan’s nickel shavingbowl, he recalls carrying “the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and yet the same” (U, 1.265–66, 310–12). In spite of his earlier extraordinary piety, as we know, Stephen ultimately refuses a priestly vocation. Recalling one of the performances prescribed for the priest during the benediction service, Stephen decides “he would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest” (P, 162). The Maiden and the Monstrance 105 For Thomas Merton, on the contrary, just such a service had provided the final epiphanic inspiration for his entrance into the priesthood: I found myself in a lower church and . . . the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in a monstrance on the altar, and at last I realized what I was supposed to do, and why I had been brought here. It was some kind of novena service . . . nearly ending. Just as I found a place and fell on my knees, they began singing the Tantum Ergo. . . . I fixed my eyes on the monstrance, on the white Host. And then it suddenly became clear to me that my whole life was at a crisis. . . . So now the question faced me: “Do you really want to be a priest?” . . . The hymn was ending. The priest collected the ends of the humeral veil over his hands that held the base of the monstrance and slowly lifted it off the altar . . . I looked straight at the Host, and I knew, now, who it was that I was looking at, and I said: “Yes, I want to be a priest, with all my heart I want it.” (SSM, 309–10) As Merton’s disciple, Paul Elie, remarks, this benediction-inspired epiphany constitutes the “climax” of the second part of SSM. (Given the thrust of my argument in this chapter, Elie’s choice of the word “climax” to describe Merton’s account of the benediction experience is fortuitous). Elie aligns the event with “what Flannery O’Connor would call ‘a moment of grace’ . . . akin to the moment in O’Connor’s story ‘Temple of the Holy Ghost’” (111)—about which I will have much more to say in the next chapter. The spiritual transformations occurring in both Merton’s and O’Connor’s narratives, Elie contends, are given “dramatic emphasis” by the benediction service. The Roman Catholic service called benediction is nothing if not dramatic, and it was especially popular during the Catholic crisis in modernism until, in 1965, Vatican II deemphasized nearly all popular rituals with the exception of the mass, which was drastically altered. Prior to Vatican II, however, the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia had deemed benediction—“one of the most generally popular of Catholic services” (Thurston, 1). Understandably, then, the devotion had lodged itself in the imaginations of numerous writers ranging from Oscar Wilde to Terry Eagleton. Currently, it is experiencing a rebirth of sorts. In brief, I propose that benediction constituted for Joyce and the other writers I am considering an efficient, precise, and elegant practice such as Foucault describes in The Uses of Pleasure: “[a practice] by which individuals were led [3.17...

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