Chapter III: The Vocation of Monna Lapa's Daughter

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Chapter III

This is the first instance of Lapa and Catherine's relationship proving absolutely fascinating.  The Order that Catherine longed to join was originally a married order.  I'm not entirely clear, but it seems to have been a mostly married couples order - with widows making up the Mantellata.  I wonder if it seemed to the Benincasas that an obvious compromise lay before them.

But Catherine had her vow and a determination and will that they had apparently never seen before.  And Jacopo understood at once, when she actually explained.  But Lapa did not.  Lapa fought her on the devotions, on the sleepless nights spent in prayer, on the denial of food, on the self-flagellation.  And what mother wouldn't?

I cannot make myself see it as a sin to shun the mortification of flesh.  I remember last Lent, I really wanted a physical, demanding devotion that would be good for me.  Thus the sitting up straight - exhausting but not harmful - in fact, quite the opposite.  But such things are rare, yes?  Exercise is the other one - a kind of torture for me but not harmful.  My mind recoils from the thought of harming yourself to prove love without another goal in clear sight.

But that's because I don't have Catherine's vision, again.  It truly is hard to look too long at such a person - to realize what she must have felt herself moving toward to see her flesh and health, the foundations of her life here on earth, as something to be destroyed if necessary on the path.

The heart of the chapter, however, is not Catherine's determination or even the final temptation and Mary's reward for passing the test.  The heart of Undset's chapter is Lapa's transformation.  I really want to dramatize this woman.  She fights her daughter on her extreme devotions because "she loved her daughters body more than her soul" as biographers put it.  Lapa could not understand what drove her child, how precious and wonderful a thing she flew to with her sacrifices.  So she threw obstacles in her way.

But then her daughter became ill, and Lapa stormed the Sisters of Penitence to demand they bend the rules to take her beloved daughter.  She played them, actually.  She cajoled and harangued them into listening, into coming to talk to Catherine.  She set up the objection that if Catherine were a beauty, she would believe there could be a problem then brought them to her sick daughter covered in a rash that swelled her face.  She brought the women to talk to Catherine and hear and see her devotion for themselves.

And Catherine was inducted into the order.  Her mother, for all that came before and would come after between them, Lapa Benincasa got her daughter into the Sisters of Penitence.  Because if, as Undset suggests, the devil used Lapa to try to stop Catherine's extreme forms of prayer, Lapa also chose to be an instrument of God.

Lapa's love of her daughter twisted both ways.  I suppose the lesson is that we have to watch the things that we do because of love.  I remember writing about Merchant of Venice in an email that it is necessary to look into our darkest impulses, our broken and twisty places.  Because otherwise, we won't see the damage they are doing and change.

We have to be able to step back from our actions and look at them - whether they come from love or from hate.  The ones we can identify as coming from hate are easy to spot.  The damage we do in love - we can only pray we are lucky enough to redeem ourselves by storming the Sisters of Penitence.