The Dish

The Belgian town Geel has been known as a refuge for the mentally ill for over 700 years. Mike Jay describes how the town’s “family care” treatment tradition developed:

Among the people of Geel, the term ‘mentally ill’ is never heard: even words such as ‘psychiatric’ and ‘patient’ are carefully hedged with finger-waggling and scare quotes. The family care system, as it’s known, is resolutely non-medical. … [T]he most common collective term is simply ‘boarders’, which defines them at the most pragmatic level by their social, not mental, condition. These are people who, whatever their diagnosis, have come here because they’re unable to cope on their own, and because they have no family or friends who can look after them. …

During the Renaissance, Geel became famous as a place of sanctuary for the mad, who arrived and stayed for reasons both spiritual and opportunistic. Some pilgrims came in hope of a cure. In other cases, it seems that families from local villages took the chance to abandon troublesome relatives whom they couldn’t afford to keep. The people of Geel absorbed them all as an act of charity and Christian piety, but also put them to work as free labour on their farms.

Today, the system continues along much the same lines. A boarder is treated as a member of the family:

involved in everything, and particularly encouraged to form a strong bond with the children, a relationship that is seen as beneficial to both parties. The boarder’s conduct is expected to meet the same basic standards as everybody else’s, though it’s also understood that he or she might not have the same coping resources as others. Odd behaviour is ignored where possible, and when necessary dealt with discreetly. Those who meet these standards are ‘good’; others can be described as ‘difficult’, but never ‘bad’, ‘dumb’ or ‘crazy’. Boarders who are unable to cope on this basis will be readmitted to the hospital: this is inevitably seen as a punishment, and everyone hopes the stay ‘inside’ will be as brief as possible.

The people of Geel don’t regard any of this as therapy: it’s simply ‘family care’. But throughout the town’s long history, many both inside and outside the psychiatric profession have wondered whether this is not only a form of therapy in itself, but perhaps the best form there is.

Nick Ripatrazone urges a renewed appreciation for the great Catholic short story writer Andre Dubus, whose earthy characters he describes as “trapped in worlds timed by their immediate needs” – smoking, drinking, sex. He especially dwells on Dubus’ powerful tale, “A Father’s Story,” centered on the moral dilemma confronting its main character, Tom Ripley:

Ripley is divorced, owns and boards horses, and tells the reader about his daily Catholic rituals for the first half of the story. This telling would lumber forward in the hands of lesser writers, but Dubus makes the prose confessional, and we later learn the reason Ripley needs forgiveness. His grown daughter, Jennifer, spent a night drinking with friends. She struck a man while driving home, and weeps to her father in the early morning. He drives his pickup to the scene and voices simultaneous prayers: that the man was alive, and, “if he were dead, they would not get Jennifer.” The man is dead, and Ripley chooses his daughter over morality, over even God. He disposes of the body, and this is what he tells God: “I would do it again. For when she knocked on my door, then called me, she woke what had flowed dormant in my blood since her birth, so that what rose from the bed was not a stable owner or a Catholic or any other Luke Ripley I had lived with for a long time, but the father of a girl.”

Thomas Kennedy notes that the spiritual evolution of Dubus’s characters “might be seen as a growth to this ‘weakness’ [of love], to the openness of heart that, in weighing love against principle, chooses the former, although without releasing the latter.” This is the “moral paradox of the contemporary Catholic portrayed by Dubus, the encompassment into a single tension of the heart of the law of the Old Testament and the love of the New.” “A Father’s Story” is often misread. As the father of twin daughters, I fully understand Luke Ripley’s decision. Dubus recognizes that sometimes we must act poorly, immorally, in order to love. I cannot think of another writer who forces me to question God.

The Dish has given Dubus plenty of love – check out QFTDs from him here, here, and here. Previous Dish on “A Father’s Story” here.

Last year around this time, Richard Blanco, a gay Cuban-American, was named the Inaugural poet, the occasion for his writing the poem “One Today.” In an interview for his new memoir, For All of Us, One Today, Blanco discusses how growing up gay in a homophobic environment – his grandmother would tell him, “I’d rather have a granddaughter who’s a whore than a grandson who is a faggot like you” – impacted his writing:

When you’re a kid, you love her unconditionally, and you want to be loved, and at the time, you are just trying to please your grandmother. You act like she tells you not to act. What essentially made sense to me was that my grandmother ultimately made me a writer. She made this prancing little kid with his coloring books and his Play-Doh, she squashed the hell out of him, but she made him an observer of the world versus a participant. She made the little boy with an incredible will to survive — to learn how to read people, and most of all, how to read her emotionally, to know how to act, how to respond, and not be called faggot.

That made me a great observer of human nature, an introvert, and after all, what do writers do but look at the world and write about it. In some ways that was the forgiving moment. I was able to make sense of why my grandmother was in my life. I never had a forgiving moment with her face to face, as the poem describes. It was a great irony that she died without being able to speak. And the silence made me make peace with myself. That’s the only way I can make sense out of her. I don’t think I forgave her more than I just moved on.

Previous Dish on Blanco here, here, and here.

Alison Smale reports (NYT) on Islam classes offered to German primary school students “using state-trained teachers and specially written textbooks” in an effort “to better integrate the nation’s large Muslim minority and counter the growing influence of radical religious thinking”:

The Hesse curriculum effectively places Islamic instruction on equal footing with similarly state-approved ethics training in the Protestant and Catholic faiths. By offering young Muslims a basic introduction to Islam as early as first grade, emphasizing its teachings on tolerance and acceptance, the authorities hope to inoculate young people against more extreme religious views while also signaling state acceptance of their faith.

Leah Libresco argues that the classes “might be a cautionary tale for religious conservatives who want to see their faith more closely woven into state education”:

When running classes in Islam, generally, the German schools run into the same conflicts that must come up when they give students classes in generic Protestantism. Already, in one community, a group of Sunni parents are trying to keep members of the Ahmadiyya reformist sect from influencing the curriculum. When schools teach religion as a matter of ethics, not history, school administrators must either run ecumenical councils or, more likely, just set a curriculum more in line with the school’s goals than the faith’s …

The separation between church and state is there for the protection of both institutions. The state has enormous power to shape culture, and it’s natural for religious communities to want that power deployed molding the culture in their own image.

But the state’s power will serve the state’s ends. So state-sponsored religious education will still, ultimately, be designed to raise good citizens, not good Christians.