A Return to Modesty – Chapter One

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Venetian, 1696 - 1770, Madonna of the Goldfinch
c. 1767/1770, oil on canvas

It was the morning.
In the suburbs, the flatness of a winter weekend stretched out. I looked over the dull trees and brick homes as I rode in the back of a taxi. My face burnt hot with shame—and a cracking hangover. I was sixteen.

The night before came back to me in a series of snapshots that I recoiled at. There was a backyard party that we – my girlfriends and I – were not invited to. I remember the hard looks on the parents' faces when they realised that this party was not what they had signed up for. They looked stricken at the mass of teens in dark clothes, the thumping music, the underage drinking (it's telling that I am sympathising with the parents now). In the haze of what I do and don't remember, I clearly see how cold it was. There was a kind of watery mist tangled between the limbs of my friends and the bare branches of trees. Maybe this was cigarette smoke.

We drank vodka out of pop-top juice bottles. Some of my friends started kissing each other for male attention. A private school boy showed interest in me. I didn't remember his name the next day, but it didn't stop me wandering into a field, quite a distance from any house or any help, with him.

In the taxi, I hung my head.

***
I grew up torn between wanting desperately to fit in (as the child of immigrants) and to reject everything around me (as somebody who did love God). I was smart, street smart, and my parents gave me an inordinate amount of freedom. Though I knew better, I got pretty close to burning my fingers when playing with fire. This was because the norm, at the tail end of the 90s and into the early 2000s, was the frightfully outdated-sounding 'hookup' culture. When I Googled the term 'hookup' just now, I received a list of the top 10 casual sex apps. This culture has progressed beyond teenage risk-taking and found a marketplace where we barter our bodies online. It kind of sounds like the old human chattel. To promote a body as sexually available is essentially to sell a body.  It's slavery. And yet we think we are free when we do our will when we post a suggestive picture on our Instagram.

***
And then I read Wendy Shalit's brilliant book, A Return to Modesty – Discovering the Lost Virtue.
First published in 1999 it rallied us women to reject  the poisonous fruits of this culture. Citing examples from philosophy and literature, Shalit looked to the past, not as a time with backward, prudish values that we had to dismantle, but where women were valued and respected.
Hail Mary, full of Grace... Blessed are Thou among women. Our biggest role models used to be the saints and chief among them, the Virgin Mary (or the Most Holy Theotokos as I know her). She was precisely valuable (#blessed) and revered because of her purity and asceticism. Who are the role models we have now? Dark, twisted industry pawns like Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish, Katie Perry? These deranged marionettes have nuthin' on our Original Queen!


It's never too late to discover the beauty, innocence and mystery that modesty brings.

Around my late teens, my father pulled me aside to tell me that without constraints, there is no freedom. There is, I saw out of the taxi that morning, just the great, flat waste of a life devoid of meaning.