Graceful Exits: Catholic Women and the Art of Departure

3 Be-ing is Be/Leaving

The sermon was dedicated to the subject of Bingo, and as I gazed around at the blank-faced, lily-white congregation in easter attire I experienced an overwhelming desire/need/decision to leave. We were sitting near the front. Just as I stood up and strode alone down the long aisle to the exit, the organ began to play. Unbelievably, the hymn that resounded through the church as I departed was“Daily, Daily, Sing to Mary”—that paean which my teacher had found it amusing to tease me with in my childhood. I had considered the joke unfunny and boring. At this Moment of Be/Leaving, however, I Heard the hymn take on dimensions of cosmic hilarity. For years I had been struggling to avoid church. This, however, was a Great Departure and Debut. I was Moving Out—Leaving/Leaping further in this First Spiral Galaxy of Outercourse. —Daly 1992, 94 Mary Daly, the self-proclaimed Radical Feminist Pirate, has made a career of writing about leaving. There is a sense in which her entire corpus [ 79 ] 3 be-ing is be/leaving deals with departures of one kind or another. Some of Daly’s departure narratives, such as the account of Easter 1968 quoted above, could have happened to almost anybody. (Didn’t most Catholic feminists lose patience with traditional worship services during the late 1960s?) Yet even the narratives that start out as almost anybody’s story can take a wild turn in midstream when Daly revisits her past and reinterprets it, using insights gained from the moment under examination and later discoveries. Then we encounter Be/Leaving as only Mary Daly experiences it.A formerly irksome traditionalist hymn gives way to a cosmic joke; an impulse to leave an embarrassing sermon becomes a theophany; a mundane walk down the aisle of a St. Petersburg parish church ends in a new mode of be-ing. Daly’s many stories about leaving fit into a larger framework, her own highly idiosyncratic discourse on life as a Be-dazzling Journey, Outercourse , a “Voyage of Spiraling Paths, Moving Out from the State of Bondage” (Daly 1992, 3). This framework, which Daly constructed in stages in her later works Gyn/Ecology (1978), Pure Lust (1984), Outercourse (1992), and Quintessence (1998), encourages and empowers readers to enter the New Time and New Space that Daly has found and embraced on the Boundary in a realm beyond the confines and constraints of patriarchal social, political, and ecclesiastical institutions. Daly maintains that it is only on the Boundary that women can realize their Power of Presence and their Archaic Futures (Daly and Caputi 1987, 84). The central axis around which Daly’s spiraling pilgrimage and the New Space and Time on the Boundary revolves is Be-ing: “the Final Cause, the Good who is Selfcommunicating , who is the Verb from whom, in whom, and with whom all true movements move”(Daly and Caputi 1987, 64). In order to embark upon the Be-Dazzling Journey, however, one must cross a threshold, the first in the endless series of boundary-crossings encountered on the voyage . These boundary-crossings constitute acts of Be/Leaving (Daly 1992, 94, 121), the performance of Originally Sinful Acts that question and challenge the patriarchal order and display “a Prude’s Self-centering Lust” (Daly and Caputi 1987, 86). Spelled with a slash in the only two references to the word in the index of Outercourse (Daly 1992, 94, 121), Be-Leaving can also be hyphenated, because it is part of a whole network of related words associated with women’s participation in Be-ing, such as Be-Falling, Be-Longing, and Be-Monstering (Daly and Caputi 1987, 63–64). Mary Daly is the incarnation of Cixous’s vision of women “flying in language and making it fly.” In their tone, content, substance, and syntax, Daly’s published works convey her “pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning g r a c e f u l e x i t s [ 80 ] propriety upside down” (Cixous 1975, 887). Like Monica Baldwin, whose use of language and capitalization became unpredictable in the course of her journey beyond the convent and the drawing rooms of her aristocratic friends and family, Daly’s language and capitalization Be-Speak her Spiraling Voyage beyond the constraints...