Volume > Issue > Adventures of a Middle-Class Catholic Bag-Lady

Adventures of a Middle-Class Catholic Bag-Lady

THE HUMOR OF SIMPLICITY

By Ronda Chervin | June 1990
Ronda Chervin is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. John's Seminary in Camarillo, California, and an international lecturer. Among her many books are Woman-to-Woman and Feminine, Free and Faith­ful.

So, what’s a middle-class Catholic bag-lady? A woman who by background and pro­fession belongs to the middle class, but by vir­tue of trying to follow gospel and papal dictums about a simple and austere way of life, manages to give the appearance of a real bag-lady, with humorous results.

Before going any further, I want to make absolutely sure the reader knows that this ar­ticle’s title is not meant to be in the least of­fensive to real bag-ladies, for whom I feel great empathy, especially since they provide me an image of my future in case my “sha­dow-self” someday overtakes my present efforts at maintaining the merest modicum of respectability necessary for my job as a seminary professor and for speaking engagements.

An example will explain what I mean about being taken for a bag-lady. Recently I drove my son from our lower-middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles to take his col­lege boards at a high school in Watts — a neighborhood now being rehabilitated, but famous for past riots and gang warfare.

Anticipating a wait of some four hours, I brought along a bag of knitting, and dressed casually in my Saturday best: scuffed boots, twisty leotard, long skirt, 10-year-old sweater, long scraggly hair, and of course no makeup, since even the $1 that could be spent on a cheap lipstick could better be given to the poor. You get the picture.

Enjoyed reading this?

READ MORE! REGISTER TODAY

SUBSCRIBE

You May Also Enjoy

Life in Consumer Catalogues (For Irina Ratushinskaya*)

Dreams are for sale.

Catalogues arrive unbidden, offering raw material. The contents, chaotic like dreams,…

The So-Called Underclass, Part I

Why don’t the “underclass” want to leave it? Is there, perhaps, some failure not of psychology or school experience but of the moral imagination?

The Motherhood of the Church

A good mother teaches her children but knows that her teaching will not be well received if she does not also love her children with a vigorous and gen­erous love.