The Devils Speak In Tongues-With Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood In Mind    

By Bart Webber

 

Jesus, and maybe you and I had better not even invoke that name as common as it is even for agnostics and atheists brought into the world with such expressions in common usage to utter, one best not speak of religion, any religion but particular the Church, you know, the Roman Catholic Church, around Sam Lowell. You are very likely to get a ration of crap, maybe two rations if he has his heels dug in, from one Samuel Francis Lowell who despite hiding behind a common WASP name, a name out of the Puritan brethren that landed in Plymouth a while back, actually a good while back, was brought up as nothing but a wet-behind-the ears little Church heathen, that church again if you were not paying attention a minute ago was the universal apostolic Roman Catholic Church you hear about a lot these day because the guy who runs the operation, the Pope, which means the Roman Catholic Pope, Francis has been busy as a beaver trying to  bring the organization into the 19^th century or some time like that with all kinds of forgivenesses to bring the flock back after lots of crazy and ugly happenings inside the organization. In the interest of full disclosure I also was brought up in the Church, and now I know I don’t have to tell you what church, but unlike Sam when the dogma, the tenets, and for that matter the ritual of the Church lost its appeal to me as a system of belief I just kind of walked away, stopped going to the services, stopped believing, and stopped worrying on a day to day basis about whether I would go to heaven or hell but then I was brought up by parents who were only nominally church members and so I didn’t inherit a lot of Sam’s scars. But enough of my “conversion” this is Sam’s story after all.  

See Sam was brought up in the matters of religion by his mother’s side of the family, his mother Delores nee Riley and that surname, that Irish surname added to the hard fact that Sam was brought up, as I was, in the hard knocks Acre section of North Adamsville, the working class Irish section which had three you know what churches, and that hard fact tells you almost all you need to know about why you will get a ration or two of crap from Sam if you dare to mention religion around the man. The neighborhood was so Church-infested and clannish that people in town would judge whether you were fit for human companionship depending on which parish you belonged to. Saint Anne’s was for the Mayfair swells, the white collar workers, Saint Joseph’s was for the tradesmen types and Sacred Heart, our parish was for the lowest of the low, the desperately working poor. Many fights got started by young buckos like Sam and I and the other corner boys who hung around Salducci’s Pizza Parlor across the street from Sacred Heart when guys from others parishes, just because they were from other parishes, tried to swagger around the Acre, and Acre girls but that is a different story that can be told some other time because it does not concern why Sam Lowell was so bitter against the Mother Church.     

 Now his mother Delores was not more than nominally a Catholic, or at least she didn’t lay out a big blueprint about what Sam was supposed to do with what the Church had to offer. But Delores was half a heathen anyway according to the real villain of this piece, Grandmother Riley, Anna, since she had actually gone out and not only married somebody not Irish, somebody not from North Adamsville, but somebody who was not Catholic. Yes, Sam’s father, Fritz, may he rest in peace because he was no question a good guy despite all the arrows life threw at him, was not only not from North Adamsville in the days in the 1940s when such things mattered around town before half the population left for the leafy golden age suburbs but was from some Podunk town down south, down in Kentucky and had been born a Baptist. Quickly, Delores and Fritz had met during World War II when she worked at the Naval Depot as a civilian clerk at Portsmouth and he, back from the dastardly Pacific wars as a Marine, was stationed there before being discharged. They met at a dance, fell in love and were married in short order. That marriage though had to be performed not in the Church as one would have suspected but in the rectory because in those days, maybe now too, Protestants could not be married in the main church.

That benighted marriage (Grandmother Riley’s term), not sanctified in the Church is why Delores as part of getting permission from her parents had to agree that the children of that marriage would be instructed in matters of religion by her mother (her father Daniel was also a nominal Catholic but in matters of doctrine had always, if for no other reason to keep peace in the family on an issue he could as he said give two figs about, let Anna have her way. If only he had put his foot down as he did in virtually every other matter maybe Sam’s world would have looked dramatically different as least that was Sam’s take on the matter.)                            

Now a lot of people in this country particularly, in America, have a pretty good idea of what mainstream Christian church services look like even if they are not co-religionists. A priest or minister of some sort performs a ceremony, gives a sermon, gives blessings, maybe offers blessed communion, breaks bread, and then dismisses the flock until next time. That would be my snap take if asked anyway. And the Roman church works pretty much that way as well. That’s the easy way that I remember the experience. But in all the various denominations, Catholic or Protestant, there are little quirky covens.

That is where this story takes an odd twist. Sure Grandmother Riley followed on a day to day basis the basic Church tenets, the weekly observances, the special occasions, the little extra heavenly rewards stuff too. Tilted the damn collection basket too which did raise old Daniel’s ire since it took dough out his pocket, drinking at the Dublin Grille with his cronies, or being a sporting man a few bucks on some football, usually whatever the Irish of Notre Dame were up to. But Grandmother early on in her life, right around the time she had emigrated from Ireland had been a follower of the Brethren of the Common Life, the renegade followers of Bishop Devine, who had been condemned in Rome. Grandmother never talked much about what he followed in Ireland of blessed memory, her blessed memory anyway although if things had been so rosy there why did she grab the first steamer out when she had the chance.  She would only say that when she was fourteen she had been in a meadow tending to the sheep when she started to have a violent headache which could only be relieved by shaking herself violently (in other words around the time she got her period, her “friend” is what Sam speculated later, pure speculation since no way would he have known where she was telling him the tale would he had put two and two together for himself and certainly no way would he have later mentioned the s-x world in her presence since he would have been feted to a serious mouth-washing, literally, since “bad thoughts” were cured not only by confession but by a good mouth-washing to purify the soul). The dour parish priest when she asked about it, asked if was some message from God only smiled and said she was blessed, and told her if it happened again, and it would throughout her life into old age, to let the spirit move her.      

 

See though whatever one was to make of Grandmother’s “shakes” Bishop Devine and his followers including Anna “spoke in tongues,” laid hands on the religiously afflicted and sought a sign by the “speakings. Grandmother was totally ignorant, and probably it would have not mattered if she had known, that there was a rich if eccentric tradition within some Protestant denomination of such speakings, of the shakes, of the laying on of hands, hell, of snake-handling to drive the damn devils away.  At least that was the way Sam tried to explain it to me when he was older, when he would gladly give anybody a ration of crap if they even spoke of religion in his presence.

Week after week on Sunday night Sam (and later his four brothers and two sisters) would go to Riverdale with his grandmother and partake of the “tongues” ceremony, watch as Father Devlin, the local organizer of the Brethren called one and all to “speak.” Sam was ordered out most weeks until he was fourteen or fifteen by his grandmother to “speak” to heal the afflicted, to cast out the devil. If you know Sam these days, Sam the no nonsense lawyer who has stirred more than one jury with his vocal evocations you could just imagine what he went through when “called” to perform in the days when he was a believer. Calling down brim fire and damnation on those who would not repent. Speaking one to one with the devil in some poor misbegotten fellow Brethren until the demons were purged. “Out Satan, take the door and be gone,” Some redemption stuff too about taking God’s graces and holding tight to them when the devil is at the door, at sin’s command.         

Then one day Sam was attending the service when he called out that he could not speak, he could not hear the cries of the wounded, that he could, as he told me later, give a fuck about the whole thing. That last part not expressed or he would have had his mouth washed out daily for a week to purify him.  Then he walked out, walked all the way home thinking that there would be hell to pay for his transgressions, that the devil was winning the battle but he was willing to take his chances. His grandmother insisted he return the next week but that next week and several weeks thereafter he would shout out the same sentiments. After several of these outbursts Father Delvin suggested to Anna that she not bring Sam along (his siblings continued to believe at least until adulthood with his two sisters raising their children in the Brethren way and who continue to believe to this day, although the kids, Sam’s nieces and nephews dropped away as young adults telling him that he was their savior, that his “give a fuck” attitude let them walk away once they left their respective family houses). That was the easy part for Sam but it took him another several years to stop “hearing” the tongues, to stop laying his hands on people. And you wonder why today you and I best not mention religion in his presence. “The devil speaks in tongues” is the answer I got right after the one time I made the mistake of asking about the subject.