“Listen to you,” I say, trying to appear lighthearted. “You speak Greek.”
“Just Greek food,” she says.
I remember at thirteen she went through the refrigerator and pantry, calling out the contents in Spanish. I remember her then—the perm that didn’t work, the braces on her teeth, giggling as she recited la leche, el pastel. It shocks me how I wish for all of that again, for what is lost and cannot come back.
We eat roast chicken and Greek salad in silence. Idly, I begin to feed the last of the kotopoulo to the cats and instantly a dozen or so other cats materialize out of nowhere. They swarm around our table, mewing, jockeying, possibly multiplying. Waiters rush over, waving trays, snapping crisp, white napkins, and shouting in Greek. Cats hiss and scatter. It’s a dazzling eruption that hushes the taverna. Everyone turns. And there we are, Ann and I—stupid, cat-loving, American women—smiling sheepishly, bits of roast chicken sprinkled about our table.
“Check, please,” I say.
We slink out, head straight to the nearest bench, and collapse in laughter. We laugh until it’s not about the cats anymore. Our laughing takes on a life of its own, making us cry. Every time we think we’ve composed ourselves, one of us looks at the other, her mouth twitches, and we’re gone again.
Gradually, though, we get hold of ourselves, and gazing around the square, I see a large church the color of oatmeal. It has two bell towers, three arched entrances, and one shining, cinnamon-tinted dome. We resort to our guidebooks and discover we’re staring at the Mitrópoli, the “Annunciation cathedral.”
“It’s Athens’ largest Greek Orthodox church,” Ann says, reading from the book. “‘ Dedicated to the Annunciation of the Mother of God in 1862 by King Otto and Queen Amalia.’ Hey, listen to this—the bones of St. Philothei are in there. She was martyred in 1589 for rescuing women enslaved in Turkish harems.”
“Well, the least we can do is go in and pay our respects to somebody who did that,” I tell her.
Entering the narthex of the cathedral, I consider the extreme laughing Ann and I have just done, how buoyant I feel, and I see how laughing can become a “narthex” in its own right—a space of divesting. The laughter has cracked the heaviness that formed around us like tight, brittle skin, and even now delivers me peeled and fresh to this moment, to Ann, to myself.
Standing near the entrance, I watch a young woman bend over and kiss an icon of Jesus, leaving a firm, heart-shaped blotch of lipstick on the glass. She licks the back of her thumb and rubs the cherry smudge as if scrubbing ink off a child’s face. When it’s spit-cleaned to perfection, she drops a coin into a wooden box, lights a candle and drones her prayer, half-whispered, into the bronze light. I have left so much of traditional religion behind, but the scene tugs at me, the whole lovely encounter.
Inside the sanctuary, the air is dusky. A sweet, acrid scent drifts like vapor. I notice the altar screen at the end of the aisle holds a series of icons. From this distance I cannot tell whose images they portray; I can only see the shining swatches of jeweled colors. I’m drawn to them almost magnetically. Ann slips into a pew near the back while I head down the aisle toward the icons.
In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I’d come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how do you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?
Maybe in the end, the big thing we call God can only be experienced in concrete particulars, not unlike William Blake’s vision of the whole world in a grain of sand.
Was there an image—a mere grain of sand—that could be a symbol for me of this ineffable, divine presence? What amazes me, what makes me almost break down and cry in the aisle of the cathedral, is how much I hunger for this.
I think suddenly about a crude little icon of Mary that a stranger gave to me several months before. I was sitting in a bookstore in Atlanta signing copies of Dissident Daughter when an Episcopal priest introduced himself with a shy, reluctant look, like a boy delivering a note to his mother about his behavior in school.
“I imagine this will sound peculiar,” he said, “but many years ago, a Greek woman gave me this icon from her home on the island of Tinos. She said she’d gotten the overwhelming sense she was supposed to give it to me, and one day I would meet someone and get the same feeling. When I saw you, that’s what happened. I actually drove back home to get it.”
“Me?” I looked at him, startled and wary.
He set the icon on the table in front of me. It was a rectangular piece of wood no more than two by three inches with a tin figure of Mary hammered onto it.
His story seemed bizarre, but I thanked him. I sensed he was a forward-thinking man who loved life’s mysteries and tried to follow his nudges even when it made him uncomfortable.
Later, while searching for information about icons on Tinos, I found a peculiar story about a nun named Pelagia who had dreams in which the Virgin Mary begged for her icon to be dug up from a certain uncultivated field on the island. When the excavation was carried out, an ancient icon of Our Lady of the Annunciation was discovered. Numerous stories like this exist in Greece, where Mary has a habit of coming up from the underworld like Persephone, pushing her way into consciousness. I had no idea what to make of the mystifying way my Tinos icon came to me. I wondered if it was a replica of the icon Pelagia dreamed about. Nevertheless, I slipped it into the bottom drawer of my bedside table and forgot about it.
Am I thinking about the icon now because I’m in Greece where it originated? Or perhaps it’s something deeper. Perhaps I feel compelled finally to try and understand the strange experience in the only way such things can be understood—as metaphor, as life speaking in parables. If so, what do I do with the idea that the Mary presented to me might be the same one who pleaded for her image to be dug up from an uncultivated field or at the very least that my icon came from the same island as the excavated Mary?
Was I being prodded to dig up Mary from a neglected place in myself?
I walk to the icon screen, straight to her image.
In Greece, she is known as the Panagia, the Virgin. Her skin is dark, the color of almonds, though considering how often she rises out of the depths, you have to wonder if it’s the darkness of the earth she wears on her skin. She gazes out from the icon with uncompromising authority, her eyes alert and undaunted. The look of her resurrects Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye that I read just before we left home. Atwood has her character, an artist, paint Mary with the head of a lioness while envisioning a gnawed bone at her feet. The peculiar vision, so different from the typical Mary with downturned eyes, dipped chin, and tentative demeanor, stuck in my head for days.
Is it just me, or are there traces of the fierce, untamed Mary in the Panagia in the cathedral icon? I stare at her so long I see motes of dust floating in the air—dark gold, pulsing crumbs. I sit down in the closest pew. I don’t know how I feel about this. Parts of me don’t want it to be Mary—the feminist part, the theologically correct part, the pragmatic, demythologized, leached-of-mystery part, the teeny part where the old Protestant tapes groan “Mary, just a woman, just a woman. . . .” I feel like I’m suddenly going in the wrong direction on a one-way street. Everybody knows you don’t go this way. Who makes Mary an icon of devotion these days? How could she possibly be suited to twenty-first-century feminine experience?
But I can’t let it go.
It has been easy to admit to myself recently that I need some new aspect within my spirituality, one that could take me into the next phase of my life. Uncovering this need has been like finding an empty room in the center of my house, one I didn’t know was there, one I couldn’t pass without feeling
its vacuity and wondering how it should be filled. I know I came to Greece in part to try and fill this vacancy in myself. I just didn’t think it would have anything to do with Mary.
Leading up to the appearance of the Tinos icon in my life, my history with Mary was relatively short, a series of unexamined stories. I have a sudden, overpowering need to remember, to rough them out on paper. Twisting around in the pew, I locate Ann still in the back, her nose buried in a guidebook. I pull out my red notebook and a pen.
Growing up Baptist in a small town in Georgia, I was virtually unaware of Mary except at Christmas, when she turned up life-sized in the outdoor nativity scene beside the church, wearing a sky-blue scarf and kneeling over the manger. When the nativity caught on fire one year, our minister dashed in to save baby Jesus and left his mother behind, a story that was retold at the dinner table for years. That sums up how expendable the Baptist Mary was. I, too, acquired the habit of slighting her. Of leaving her behind.
I took no notice of her until my late thirties. It was not a cheerful meeting. I came upon a drawing in which Mary’s hands were amputated—a reference to the fairy tale “The Handless Maiden,” about a docile daughter whose father asks for her hands. This got my attention. It caused me to contemplate how Mary and sacred feminine images in general had become wounded, diminished, and sacrificed. Why was Mary so often portrayed as an obedient and submissive “handmaid of the Lord,” all her power sublimated to the male aspects of the deity? I was put off by the meek and mild look. I wanted to shake her.
My next brush with Mary went better. It came around age forty when I noticed a print of Leonardo da Vinci’s cartoon sketch, The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist hanging in Mercy Center in Burlingame, California. As I gazed at the Madonna and her child both sitting in her mother Anne’s lap, a tuning fork went off in my chest. Admittedly, I was struck mostly by Mary’s mother, Anne—by her great, extravagant lap and her burning, unapologetic gaze. She looked for all the world like the Great Mother who births, contains, and encompasses everything, even the male savior. That was probably the first time I grasped that the image of a female could be a symbol of the divine. And Mary was her mother’s daughter. I amended my opinion of her, coming to understand that she’d inherited the role of the ancient Goddesses, however sublimated their earthiness, grit, and authority had become in her. The human soul needs a divine mother, a feminine aspect to balance out the masculinity of God, and yes, Mary had carried it off the best she could.
A year or so later, I had a dream which would become strangely prophetic. I wrote it down but didn’t explore it at the time except for a chalk drawing I made on black paper, then rolled up and deposited in the back of my closet, where it remained like a lump of dark leavening. In the dream I’m riding on a train. It slows down as it passes through a quarantined slum area, and looking out the window, I see a rundown house where a black woman in a red African scarf weeps on the porch. She seems bereft. I turn to the other passengers: “Look! Do you see her?” No one does. As the train rumbles by, she fixes her eyes on me—a riveting, heart-stopping look—and in a flash I realize: this is Mary! I beat on the train window and shout over and over, “I will come back for you.”
The next time I met her was a year later in the Tate in London.
Coming upon Rossetti’s annunciation painting Ecce Ancilla Domini!, I stared at the angel, tall and oddly wingless, standing beside the Virgin Mary’s bed with tendrils of fire licking around his feet. He thrusts out a long white lily and announces to Mary that she will give birth to a divine child. Mary appears startled out of sleep, startled out of her wits, in fact. Wearing a white night shift, her auburn hair tumbling around her, she shrinks against her pillow in terror.
I gazed at the painting for twenty minutes, stirred by it, as if I, too, were being shaken awake to some mysterious knowledge I couldn’t take in. The painting triggered a longing in me that was maternal and aching. It struck a raw nerve inside that had to do with unfulfilled creative desires, conjuring up my dormant and unacknowledged wish to write fiction.
Many years before this, when I first set out to be a writer, I had entertained a dream of writing fiction, then quickly banished it—I thought forever. In the museum that day, I realized the aspiration had never really left, it had merely gone underground to wait its turn. The dream had been turning up recently dressed as whimsy, hope, impulse, and silly conceit. I’d refused to take it seriously. It felt beyond my power and courage, the sort of thing that made me shrink against my pillow late at night.
As I stood before the Rossetti painting, however, my desire to write fiction crystallized into a pursuit that I saw as authentic, necessary, and even sacred. I now understood that writing fiction was a seed implanted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.
What had happened, of course, was that Mary’s annunciation became a metaphor for my own creative potential. It became a means to confess the truth to myself, to understand and interpret this quiescent potential in a way that would begin to bring it to life.
I didn’t bump into Mary again until an October afternoon in 1993 during my first pilgrimage to Greece. After traveling for several days with a group of women on Crete, we stopped at Palianis Nunnery, a tiny, walled-away place so ancient its name comes from the word palaia, which means old. Supposedly it goes all the way back to the first Byzantine period.
When I stepped through the gate, I had the sensation of time slowing. A whitewashed church sat in a courtyard filled with fuchsia oleander, red hibiscus, date palms, lime trees, and terra-cotta jars overflowing with feathery orange flowers. Several nuns sat outside their apartments making what appeared to be lace. The serenity was narcotic. “Greek Eden,” someone in the group said, and sure enough, behind the church, we found the Tree of Life. It was an immense myrtle sacred to the nuns, purportedly a thousand years old. It held itself in an elaborate yoga posture, its serpentine limbs bent into mind-boggling contortions. I noticed crutches piled near the trunk, with a back brace and other orthopedic apparatuses that looked like they, too, might go back to the first Byzantine period. Rosaries were tied to the branches next to hundreds of tin votive offerings or tamata, hanging like drooping garlands. Ribbons, cards, jewelry—even wedding rings—dangled from the limbs. No one spoke—all of us a little dumbstruck by the sight of a massive, old tree decorated with so many inventive prayers.
Catching the smell of beeswax candles, I wandered around the tree to find tapers burning in a metallic shrine box. That’s when I saw the huge, glass-plated icon perched in the branches. Panagia Myrtidiotisa, the Virgin of the Myrtle.
Her legend holds its own among the most lavish Greek stories of miraculous, walking, talking icons. It’s said that after the Turks destroyed the convent in 1821, the surviving nuns heard a voice calling from the tree and discovered the Virgin of the Myrtle. They carried the icon into the church, but that night she escaped back to the tree, where they found her the next morning wedged happily in the branches like a tomboy returned to her true element. This went on and on. Eventually the nuns gave up and left her out there.
A short, black-clad nun found us staring at the icon. She greeted us in labored English. “You ask her for the thing at the bottom of your heart, yes? The Virgin will give it. Then you give to her something.”
As I studied the dark-skinned Madonna, her face as brown as the tree bark, her headdress bright red, I had a flash of the Mary in my dream with her red scarf and dark skin. Even the thick glass covering the icon reminded me of the train window. In the spirit of pilgrimage, we all decided to ask the Virgin of the Myrtle for what lay discarded at the bottom of the heart, the thing half-known and half-allowed. When I stepped beneath the limbs into green, phosphorescent light and tingling tamata, I was unsure what I would pray for.
To my surprise I blurted: “I would like to become a novelist.”
Hunched over my journal in the wan light of the cathedral, I look over the experiences with
Mary that I’ve collected—the motif of leaving her behind; the recognition she could be larger than the human Mary, unconfined by religion and imbued with meanings that have long been associated with the ancient Goddess; how she showed up as a dark, feminine divinity, a Black Madonna; and finally, the way she was connected to my desire to write fiction.
I will come back for you.
Mary crying in my dream, living impoverished and quarantined in my soul, reminds me suddenly of Mary in the Tinos icon, begging to be dug up from the uncultivated field. I can’t deny the inner behest in all this. It seems more than possible that the piece I’m missing in my spiritual life is a single image of devotion. Is Mary my “grain of sand”?
If I penetrate to the center of Mary’s image, perhaps I will find a new center of myself. Isn’t that what iconic images are meant to do—bring us into encounters with our own deep selves? My heart and my gut tell me that the night-skinned, fierce-eyed, tree-loving Mary will help lead me to the inner sanctum of the Old Woman, that she has something to do with my rebirth as an older woman. I can’t explain this to myself. I only feel in intuitive, indeterminate ways that she will have a part in whatever renaissance might lie in my aging, perhaps opening me to the deeper, more primal layers of creativity I yearn for, and at the same time, taking me down to an irreducible essence, all the way to the severity of my own dying. Down to the gnawed bone.
Light sweeps across the slits of windows in the dome of the cathedral, sparking the air with bits of coppery brightness, and I look up for a moment and feel the spaciousness of wonder. And then a kind of guilt. How long have I been sitting here? An hour? Where is Ann? As I jump up, I see her walking toward me. “Did you see the bones?” she says.
Traveling With Pomegranates Page 5
