37: The heroine's journey
Reconsidering the story of Saint Dymphna's life
This is part 37 of the Geel series. You can find the start of this series here.
I considered the Dymphna story with one specific goal: discover the causal connection between Dymphna’s life and adult foster care.
The other option I’d worked to resist was simply dismissing religion itself as lunacy. The story of Dymphna’s life is disturbing and illogical. I kept finding myself feeling the way I had during a tour of catacombs outside of Rome. When I heard the story of the religion I’d been raised in — Christianity, not Catholicism specifically — explained by the tour guide in her strange accented English1 inside these winding underground tombs, I heard it as if I was an outsider. I was stunned to realize I was part of a zombie cult. Which is true in a certain way and isn’t how it seems at all.
As I read the Dymphna story, my vision keeps sliding to see the duck and I keep reminding myself to see the rabbit. They are both there. Yes, it’s silly, but people don’t treat it as if it’s silly, so it’s not silly.
Then I read this post on Holy Doodlebug and found myself considering the Dymphna story again. This time I read it as the story of a young woman who has left home without her father’s permission:
“There aren’t a lot of stories about female seekers, in no small part because for a very long time — most of recorded human history, as it happens — women have been expected to remain pretty strictly in place. In the home, mostly; the private sphere of care and family, which is a very fixed place. Whenever women have been encouraged to seek the kingdom of God/the gods under any faith, that seeking has ordinarily been expected to remain restricted to prayer, to soul-searching as it were, and even then, it has generally deemed best that they not to search too deeply. When women have ventured beyond the strict confines of their assigned place and embarked upon journeys of discovery (and they have), their stories are usually ignored, buried, or rewritten. This is why the Hero’s Journey is such a limited frame for any idea of a universal story; this is also why the idea of a Heroine’s Journey is so fraught with difficulty—in a world where to be a hero is to quest, and only men legitimately, publicly quest, what might it mean to imagine a heroine who isn’t just walking a version of a masculinized path? Isn’t heroism itself just a function of patriarchy? (It is.)”
I’d skimmed dozens of versions of the Dymphna story and variants of the Cinderella story like a psychology intern coding things for a study. I had breezed through them, noting slight differences and evolutions, until all of them formed a blur in my mind. I hadn’t found anything to personally connect to in any of the versions, since none of them give Dymphna any personality. She remained an outline of a person. I studied Dymphna without feeling any pull to her as a source of inspiration, which is perhaps why the idea of her as the inspiration for so many generations of adult foster care was so baffling.
This is how my reading about beguines and anchorites was, too. I remember my CouchSurfing hosts in Ghent showing me the beguinages and clearly being disappointed by my lack of visible excitement. Imagine, these women finding ways to carve out independent lives for themselves so long before women had modern rights!
My lack of enthusiasm was about the ways sometimes a place is just a place. I couldn’t imagine the lives of a beguine by looking at the walls enclosing their homes. Yet each time I return, I still go to the remaining beguinages. I’ve turned down narrow streets, slipped past gates, sat in gardens waiting for something to click. I pulled up real estate listings and clicked through photos to see the inside of carefully restored homes. I stayed up late reading scans of archival documents, looking for something beyond the basic facts.
Like Dymphna, these women remain obscure to me. Beguines, nuns, and anchorites escaped their homes and family responsibilities by locking themselves away into another life. What was that life like for them? They are a concept — a few sentences to whet our interest and few further details — that I can’t penetrate further.
Saints become symbols for what we want them to be.2 As much as I find the Dymphna story weird and off-putting, clearly there’s something deeply compelling that it taps into. The story of Cinderella is ancient and it remains popular.
Dymphna stepped out of the confines of her life as a princess. She had a socially acceptable excuse — she was disobeying her father in order to follow the will of God. Only she could not escape her obligation to her family, her place in the home, or her destiny. It wasn’t her fault that she had to choose between the will of God and the will of her father, but she still had to be punished for it. These rules for storytelling predate the Hays Code.
I ask myself, would legal authorities today view Dymphna’s flight as truly necessary for her safety? Her father did not force her to do anything. He asked for her hand in marriage. He agreed to give her time to consider it and to prepare. He fulfilled her requests for gifts. She wouldn’t qualify for a restraining order.
We aren’t told of the other options she considered. Nunneries served as a refuge to young women who refused an arranged marriage. They would certainly take one who was at risk of being married to her own father, especially a princess arriving with a dowery to pay for her place. But Dymphna did not choose to join a convent. She struck out on her own and created her own project.
Dymphna was a young woman who was willing to risk everything and travel very far to do things her way.
Was she, though? Was she following her desires or doing what the priest told her to do?
It’s interesting how the story claims it was her dead mother who requested Dymphna’s father only remarry someone as beautiful as her. It was also her dead mother who secretly baptized her as a Christian and had the priest agree to take care of her. Her father is vilified, but her mother is ultimately the source of all of Dymphna’s troubles.
As much as I have picked apart the story of Geel, I agree that stories can be true without being true. Not all lies are untruthful. The important things often cannot be quantified or fact checked. It is both a duck and a rabbit. So many of life’s most profound moments sound, well, just plain silly if you try to explain them. Life is, ultimately, about magic, not facts.
Bureaucracy works with forms and documents. The documents people have been most likely to leave behind are census records, tax records, court records. This is what we have to try to understand someone’s life. I think of the absurd errors I’ve found in my medical records. I think of the police report that left out any mention of the victim of the crime. I think of the cringy misquotes of sloppy journalists. Those misspellings and misunderstandings are what the historic record is made of. So often, looking at these documents, looking at the buildings people leave behind, tells us nothing of what their lives were like.3
When I went to Geel and tried to understand the story of Saint Dymphna, I did not consider the way it felt to be a weary sheep herder living in the peat bogs of the Campine. I did not think about how far they had to walk to worship each Sunday. I did not understand what it was like to live in a world run by the church.
The story of Geel is full of things so obvious no one thought to explain them to me. The people in Geel humored me and told me what they thought I wanted to hear. My wife and my father were raised Catholic, yet no one pointed out the things I was missing. The details that set the rules of reality are so big and obvious they’re easy to overlook. The things that have always been there are the easiest to take for granted.4
One of these things is that there is a requirement that an altar have a relic. I knew Catholic Churches had a lot of body parts and captured fluids and things saints had once touched, but I’d never really thought about why. I suppose I assumed they collected these things like sports fans get autographed uniforms and baseballs. People collect locks of hair and baby teeth, so why not the pinky finger of a saint?
That’s not it. A Catholic Church has to have a relic. No relic, no altar, no church. The saints intercede on behalf of worshipers, so having a church without a relic is like trying to use the internet without a modem.5 There is nothing to convert the signals into a usable format.
In order to get a relic, you need political connections (so it will be presented as a gift) or money (to make a donation in exchange). Peasants in the Campine lacked both.
How cute of me to think that peasants in the Campine uncovered so many saints as the area was settled because the increase in population pushed them to bring more land into agricultural use, disturbing ancient sacred sites. I spent so much time researching this. I thought they were exhuming bodies from places long held to be sacred and moving them to churches. I thought they were transforming pagan stories into Catholic stories. Or perhaps they occasionally uncovered perfectly preserved bodies in the peat and viewed it as miraculous. I read a lot about bodies that had been sainted based on deviations from the usual decomposition process.
I did not understand that if you didn’t have a body part from a saint, you would have to walk a lot more than if you had a body part from a saint. When people need a miraculous body, they will find a miraculous body. They will attach it to a story that’s worked before. Why risk a unique story when the local Catholic bureaucrats have approved other saints following the Cinderella formula? Tweak it a little bit and let’s not make things more complicated than they need to be.
The Gasthuismuseum Geel mentioned beggars and begging, but I lacked the background to understand their role in all of this. I did not understand that you needed a permit to beg. Today you need to be approved for SSDI and other official forms of support, but anyone can set up a GoFundMe. Begging is protected by the first amendment.
In medieval Europe the Catholic Church was responsible for all charity, even charity provided by individuals. Anyone begging needed permission from the church. If you were caught begging without a license and officials took pity on you, you would be required to go on a pilgrimage or undergo an exorcism to prove that you were a member of the deserving poor. This is why each pilgrim was given an amulet to wear. This is why Sint-Dimpnakerk maintained a book with the names of all pilgrims who participated in the noventa.
If your family could not afford your care, they would take you to Geel to be approved for charitable support. If you did not have family to live with, your neighbors would take you to Geel, where you would be certified and then the church would pay a family to take you in. Few cities had formal institutions like workhouses or asylums, so boarding out was the default.
Why was Sint-Dimpnakerk the church in the Campine responsible for deciding who was deserving? Why is the Social Security office that serves my area in Eatontown rather than in Belmar or Keansburg? Who knows.
Here is where things have changed a lot in the intervening years: the Eatontown Social Security Administration office doesn’t have a mascot with a weird story. It also takes a lot more than your weight in grain and nine days to get approved for SSDI.
Why did Geel shift from being a place that certified people as worthy of charity to a place that warehoused them? Because the local Latin school was forced to close right when the Gent asylums were being renovated and the guy in charge of finding a place to house all the mental patients had gone to that Latin school. All those families who hosted students had empty rooms and had seen most of their cash income vanish. Why did so many of New Jersey’s mental patients end up on the Jersey Shore? Because the tourists had vanished, leaving the boarding houses empty.
Why did the Geel system outlast so many similar programs? Because the Campine was rural and poor and an excellent place to put things residents might object to. Because if you help fund the construction of homes and provide income to a significant portion of families, those families won’t demand your program be shut down. Because Geel stayed Catholic and Belgium continues to rely on the Catholic Church to provide social services. Because the people running the Geel system removed patients who were disruptive, while authorities did nothing to manage disruptive patients in Ocean Grove until the town banded together to get rid of them. Because the custodial care provided by families has fared the test of time better than the various trends in medical treatment for those considered mentally ill.6
The Catholic Church has a lot more flair than the SSA. The rituals are just as detaield and arbitrary. When I went to Eatontown to try to restore my birth name on my records, they did not make me circle the building on my hands and knees nine times or lock me in a closet. They called me to a cubicle, insisted I didn’t have the right documents, and sent me away. The decor was a lot less impressive. The SSA doesn’t bother to invoke awe in order to get us to follow their rules. They realize financial penalties and jail time are enough of a threat without bothering to mention eternal damnation.
Perhaps this is because the Social Security office in Eatontown is not run by a powerful local family who gets income from each person who comes to this office instead of driving a little further to New Brunswick or Toms River (where perhaps they know that of course an Ontario divorce certificate is valid in New Jersey). The SSA office is an insignificant part of the local economy.
The SSA still has a moral bent to its communication. It tells us that we are responsible for our own fates. We are responsible for preparing for our future. We are responsible for protecting ourselves from scams. We are responsible for figuring out what forms we need to fill out and what documents to supply to prove that we have done All The Right Things. However, if something goes wrong and it’s really, truly not our fault, they will not let us literally starve. It’s only fair that people who did not work for ten years do not get more than the absolute bare minimum.
The messaging is more coherent than stories about saints, but it’s pretty boring, eh?
My friends kids are watching the Disney version of Cinderella. The moral of the story has shifted to tell us that if we’re true to ourselves and kind to everyone, our dreams will come true. The Dymphna story does not offer such rewards. The Dymphna story tells us that if we’re faithful to God, we’ll be rewarded with death. Martyrdom sounds less fun than marrying a handsome prince, at least to my modern ears.
In between these two stories is that of Donkey Skin, which promises that if we maintain our devotion to God at any cost, there will be some magical intervention that will reward us for our moral courage.
It’s too bad that when Dymphna’s gold coin reveals her true identity it gets her beheaded. She should have gotten advice from a fairy godmother rather than her priest.
While I generally shy away from predicting the future, I feel confident predicting that no one will become enamored with figures from the Social Security office hundreds of years from now in the ways people are enamored with Dympha. People will not be filling out SSDI applications as a spiritual exercise, like even non-believers now pray the noventa.7 If the responsibilities of the SSA are transferred to another agency, no one will drive to the bland office building in Eatontown to marvel at what once happened there. Imagine that I went all the way to Geel.
Dymphna’s story seemed nonsensical when I first encountered it. It still seemed nonsensical until earlier today, after so many months of it bouncing around in my head. Now I see that it is a heroine’s journey.
The impossible demand her father makes pushes her to confront her inner self, overcome her fear, and stand up in defense of her personal ethics. She faces obstacles in her flight before building a new life of her choosing in a far away land. Rather than returning to her home, her home finds her in the form of her father tracking her down. She has become courageous and does not flee this time, paying the price to stand up and accept the consequences for a woman living as her true self.
Not only did she have a strong Italian accent, it sounded like she’d learned English in Jamaica. I think my struggle to understand her helped me see things with a fresh light.
I picked up Carlos Eire’s They Flew: A history of the impossible because it discusses Saint Joseph of Cupertino, patron saint of the intellectually disabled. Alas, this well researched account of his life suggests he was a bit of a klutz and a poor student, not necessarily someone with an intellectual disability. Most people telling stories about the lives of saints are less concerned about sticking with information from historic accounts. While programs like the St. Joseph of Cupertino Program for Autism sound great, there’s little to suggest he would meet diagnostic criteria for autism.
In two weeks I have an immigration interview, the point of which is to prove that my marriage is real. How does one do that? With the artifacts of true love: a marriage certificate, health insurance policies, ID cards, tax filings, and phone records. What better way is there to do it? In order to be systematized, things must be quantifiable.
There is a medieval painting of a saint on the side of my in-laws house. You can see it from the window in my wife’s childhood bedroom. Does she know what saint it is? She does not.
Technically, it’s the altar that needs a relic. I think it’s clear that I don’t really understand how Catholicism or the internet work.
Reading Andrew Scull’s Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness makes me understand why some people choose to swear off modern medicine entirely.
As far as I know, no one is paying to be locked in a closet, starved, and crawling around the church three times a day for nine days. They just meditate for a few minutes a day and try to channel Dymphna’s resilience.