Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  And Mary said,

  “My soul magnifies the Lord,

  and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

  for he has looked with favor on the

  lowliness of his servant.

  Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

  for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

  and holy is his name.

  His mercy is for those who fear him

  from generation to generation.

  He has shown strength with his arm;

  he has scattered the proud in the

  thoughts of their hearts.

  He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

  and lifted up the lowly;

  he has filled the hungry with good things,

  and sent the rich away empty. . . .”

  —The Gospel According to Luke

  The Magnificat is Mary’s longest speech in the Bible, and it is pure Mary. Her words are a paean to the unexpected, the world turned upside down, a hymn of encouragement to the disenfranchised, a reason to take heart. Mary was a Jew in Roman-occupied lands; she would marry a man who could not own land, which placed them at the very bottom of the social heap. But Mary knew that the poor and the lowly were blessed to the Lord.

  This was a belief her son would share. Jesus would be schooled in Judaism, but he would also receive an earful from his mother. Jesus had a mission and Mary wanted to steer him straight.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When we debark our plane in Bosnia, the night is eerily dark, and spitting spurts of chilly wind. I feel a little foolish as I pull on my shiny black, three-quarter-length patent-leather jacket made in Italy and bought in New York City, instead of the waterproof parka we’d been advised to bring. And as I pass my reflection in a window heading for the bus, I’m afraid I resemble an SS officer. Namik, a Bosnian war refugee I’d become friends with when I moved to Los Angeles a year ago, had told me that the area of the country Medjugorje occupied spawned the worst Nazi war criminals. Could that be why Mary chose this place—did she know when she began to appear that six years later a bloody civil war would break out?

  I’d lost the sisters in the scurry to stash our luggage and board the bus. As I mount the bus steps alone, I wonder whether I should take notes. But then I think, my fellow pilgrims have come for a religious experience and don’t need to feel spied on by a woman in a shiny black leather SS coat. I’ve come for a religious encounter, too, and documenting every moment would get in the way of experiencing it fully emotionally.

  I spot our priest, Father Freed, sitting alone toward the front of the bus. I’d seen him before at the airport—a small man in a nylon ski jacket and priest’s collar; a shock of white hair and a youthful face. He’s at least a couple of inches shorter than I, and his feet are so tiny they might be smaller than my hands—one of which I offer to him, then pull away, remembering my rash. “My hands,” I apologize as I sit next to him. “Don’t worry, it’s not contagious. It’s from nerves,” I blurt. “I’m not even Catholic. I’m not even sure I really believe.”

  Luckily, I’m interrupted by Annalena, who has stood next to the driver, brushing her platinum-blond bangs from her face. “Listen up. This is the last leg. I know it’s been a long haul. Just two more hours and we’ll be in Medjugorje. Offer it up.” What does that mean? She sounds like a gym teacher.

  “So, how is it you’re going to Medjugorje?” Father Freed asks me.

  As I run through my story, I begin to feel more comfortable, like I’m talking to a regular guy and even flirting a little. When I get to the part about all the Marys in my house, I tell him how I’ve read that the early Eastern Church had forbidden the use of images to inspire devotion, but couldn’t control it and finally approved their use. The images inspired uneducated people who could not read. For me it had been the opposite. I’d been too educated, had an overly analytic mind, and needed an image to help me feel what I felt, to let myself know what I knew unintellectually—that there is something going on out there, something beyond my senses that I want to know and even long for. I tell Father Freed how when I took a trip to Ireland my last summer in Orient I’d rented my house to a couple with a two-year-old daughter. They’d tried to put her to sleep in my shrine room and the little girl had freaked out until her mother took all the Mary pictures down.

  Father Freed laughs.

  Which encourages me. I tell him how after I left Orient, a year ago, I’d made a radio documentary in which I’d gone to Mary apparition sites around the country. People had told me to pray the rosary, and I did, for the radio story, as I tell Father Freed, “to see what would happen. I think something did happen. I say Hail Marys all the time, and it’s a comfort. But I’m still a skeptic. I guess that’s why I’m here: to see if I can believe.”

  I don’t tell Father Freed that I think belief can be like yoga. I’d started taking yoga classes when I’d moved to LA, and at the beginning of class the teacher would say, “Stand in Mountain and spread your toes.” My toes wouldn’t spread. I didn’t even know what it would feel like to spread my toes. But I stood there, every class, looked at my toes, and said, “Spread.” Then one day they did. I thought if I kept praying, belief in God might happen like that.

  Father Freed, who’s been leaning toward me, with his head bent, nodding, says, “You know, it’s said that if you’re looking for God you’ve already found him. Just try to be open. Keep an open heart and mind. You may be surprised what happens.”

  “I hated the way the Church made me feel about myself.”

  “A lot of people had that reaction.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “I always loved church. I was the youngest of four boys. Always liked to help my mother, was the peacemaker. Never rebelled against going to mass, never rebelled against anything. I’ve always loved God and felt that he loved me.”

  “Did you always want to be a priest?”

  “Oh, no. I didn’t become a priest till I was forty-five.”

  “No kidding?”

  “I was a high-school science teacher. Had my own house, built it myself. I loved to travel. Used to lead tours to Europe summers. Had girlfriends, but never longer than two years. I could never commit. I was one of those. I would always come to a point that as much as I liked the woman’s company it wasn’t fair to keep her. I was active in the church, and I was in my forties and never married, so our pastor suggested I might like to be a priest. I thought about it, but my mother was getting on in years and I wanted to be near her. Then she got MS and her physical requirements were too much for me to take care of, so she went into a home and I said to myself, I’m going to take a philosophy of religion course and if I do well in it, I’ll become a priest. I got an A. I was seeing a woman at the time and had to tell her I was going into the seminary. It had to be better than telling her I was seeing another woman. But maybe I’m wrong.

  “When I was ordained, my mother came from the nursing home in a wheelchair. The bishop said, ‘Now go get a blessing from your mother.’ It broke me up. She died last year.”

  I liked this guy. “I heard you were given the gift of healing?”

  “Yes. Father Jozo came to the States, and I went to a service.” Jozo was one of the priests in Medjugorje sixteen years ago when the visions began. He now has a church several towns away. “Father Jozo laid on hands, and I was slain in the spirit.”

  “What?”

  “You never heard of ‘slain in the spirit’? The priest puts his palm on your forehead and prays, and you feel the Holy Spirit enter you. I felt a sensation that was almost electrical running through me and I fell to the floor. It was very pleasant. I’d never experienced anything like that before. I’d suffered from chronic pain in my lower back for years. That just disappeared. After that, I came to Medjugorje the first time and visited Father Jozo’s church. He has all the priests join him at the altar for mass; then afterwards people come up, and you lay on hands. I found I have a gift, and no
t just for physical healing. There was a woman who came to church after being away for many years and asked to speak to me. She was a very unhappy, bitter person, so disappointed in her life, blaming everyone, full of hate. But she let God in and everything changed. . . . She even got married.”

  We both laugh.

  “Are you going to lay on hands on this trip?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should.” It crosses my mind to ask Father Freed to bless my hands right then, but I can’t do it; I’m too embarrassed. It actually flits across my mind that I could be receiving the stigmata, the wounds of Christ that manifest themselves in hysterics and saints. Then Bruce interrupts, calling out, “Father Freed, would you lead us in a rosary?”

  Those who already don’t have rosary beads twined in their fingers (maybe only me) take them out. Mine are the blue plastic beads that Mrs. Sabatini, a woman at one of the apparition sites I’d visited for the radio piece, had given me in Queens. I close my eyes and try to concentrate on every word, then fall asleep during the second decade. When I awake some time later, the bus is silent, and Father Freed is asleep, too. I’d been leaning toward his warmth and my knee is pressing into his. I move it away and remember the soccer player on the plane. Might he really have been sleeping and naturally, innocently, leaned in toward human warmth?

  As we pass through Mostar, out the window I can see large barrooms filled with black-clad, good-looking young people with cool hair, sitting at round tables drinking beers and smoking. I’m in a bus filled with plain and overweight Americans with rosaries in their laps. I’d been praying to the Virgin Mary when I fell asleep, and before that I’d been talking to a priest. And at this moment, my rosary in my peeling palm, Father Freed asleep beside me, I suddenly think, I wouldn’t change places with those gorgeous young people for anything in the world.

  The bus groans to a stop on a narrow road next to a stone wall. There are no streetlights and no moonlight, but soon we see a flashlight bouncing down the lane. It’s Josef, the owner of House 2, where I’ve been assigned to stay with a roommate named Beatrice Day. I have lost sight of the sisters and wish I could see the cows I smell nearby, but it’s too dark. My fat green suitcase keeps falling on its side in the rock-studded dirt road, and the women dragging their luggage all around me make supportive asides, “Ooopsy Daisy, hope nothing broke.”

  Our host, Josef, is joined by his wife, Mariana, at the door to their house. They’re a tall young couple, surprisingly cheerful considering we’ve arrived past midnight. Josef points us down halls, saying, “Come, eat when you are ready. Soup. Below.” Josef and Mariana had added onto their house and turned it into a guest house, which they fill with crowds of pilgrims like us.

  It was in 1981 that the Virgin Mary began appearing to six kids, four girls and two boys in Medjugorje, which is in the former Yugoslavia, a country where East meets West, on what is now called Apparition Hill. The local clergy disapproved, the Communists tried to squash the apparitions; but the kids persisted—and so, presumably, did Mary, who talked to them like clockwork every afternoon. As always happens where Mary visits, word spread like holy fire, and the masses came. They somehow busted through the Eastern Bloc, and millions dodged bullets to come see her. I have read that not one bomb fell on Medjugorje, not one villager was injured, and a fighter jet was spun out of the sky when it dared fly above the town.

  By the time I arrived, in late October 1997, sixteen million had come before me. Countless people, including clergy, claimed physical, emotional, spiritual healings; but it seemed a miracle in itself that the place had remained a peasant village and was not filled with high-rise hotels. The villagers had simply made their homes bigger and welcomed pilgrims, at a reasonable price, as their guests.

  There’s a tradition of Mary’s conveying “secrets” to seers, who are most often children. Children still believe in magic and readily believe they’re seeing Our Lady. They are also more likely to repeat her messages without staining them with their own interpretations. Perhaps the most famous visitation was in Fatima, Portugal, of which Medjugorje has been accused of being a copycat apparition. Remember, it was a little picture of Our Lady of Fatima that had been my first yard-sale find. In my picture—and, of course, in Fatima—Mary appeared to three little peasant kids, carrying her own string of rosary beads draped over her arm, imploring them and the world to pray the rosary to bring peace. It was 1917, at the peak of the First World War and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. Mary conveyed three secrets to the kids. One foretold the end of the First World War; another predicted the spread of communism. The third remained secret until the year 2000, when the Vatican finally revealed that the secret was a vision of the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. In 1946, a tenth of the population of Portugal gathered in Fatima to thank Our Lady of Peace for the end of the Second World War.

  There are ten secrets in Medjugorje that will be revealed at some future time. As soon as the visionaries, all of whom were now adults, received ten secrets, Mary stopped appearing to them every day and appeared only on their birthdays and on special occasions. When I visit Medjugorje, two still have daily visions of Mary, and another, Mirjana, has a vision each month. The bishop of the region is in denial, but the local priests have become enthusiastic believers.

  In her monthly messages, which can be read on the web-site out of Medjugorje on the Internet, Mary has made it known that she considers all people of all religions her children. She asks them to pray, but she also asks them to fast, and to attend daily mass and monthly confession—a lot to expect of a non-Catholic, but perhaps, like a mother, she thinks there’s no harm in asking. Annalena, our pilgrimage leader, had been a lapsed Catholic. She had been working as a detective and a horse trainer when she was stricken with multiple sclerosis, which rapidly deteriorated her nervous system, so that within a few years she was a paraplegic. One trip on a stretcher up Mount Krizevac—a local mountain at whose top a huge cement cross had been erected during a drought at the turn of the century to consecrate the village to Mary—and Annalena was on her feet, fully functioning, and utterly converted. She and her husband, Bruce, also a cop, left their lives as they knew them to dedicate their new lives to Mary.

  I stash my suitcase in my room, which has two single beds, a closet, and a bathroom. There’s no other luggage and no Beatrice Day. I wash my hands and go directly to the dining room, where three urns of soup and baskets of thickly sliced bread are waiting in the middle of a long table.

  I’m the first to sit down, feeling famished. Besides Father Freed, there are three single men on the pilgrimage and a half-dozen husbands and wives. That leaves thirty-two women, sixteen of whom file in around the table, including, to my relief, the southern sisters, Arlene and Alma. A group is forming to walk up Apparition Hill after dinner. Bruce will lead the way and will come by in an hour or so to see if anyone wants to join.

  I’d been on a plane, stuck in an airport, or cramped on a bus for the last sixteen hours. And even though I’ll be walking around the countryside after one in the morning, I decide the fresh air and exercise will do me good. Besides, I’d read that Apparition Hill offered a good view of the cross atop Mount Krizevac, and I’m hoping to see it glow like so many have before me.

  After downing the chicken soup, I find my flashlight and drop it into my pocket, then walk out into the dark and wait. I’d already taken a dislike to one woman, Jane, who’d been a travel agent and had given everything up to move to Conyers, Georgia, to be near Nancy Fowler, an apparitionist, and to care for the site grounds. I’d been to Conyers for the radio documentary and did not like Nancy Fowler’s doom-saying messages: do not watch TV, avoid homosexuals, end abortion, or armies of Chinese soldiers will tromp all over American soil. Fowler, like all the apparitionists, claimed to be channeling the words of the Virgin Mary, but this was not the Mary I wanted to know. While my producer and I were reporting in Conyers, we’d talked to a brain surgeon who’d done extensive tests on Fow
ler. He said that Fowler, like most apparitionists, went into a trance, which measured metabolically as a coma. But unlike a person in a coma, the seer is fully conscious and functioning. He’d placed Fowler on one side of a divided room and another apparitionist on the other side. Without being able to see or hear each other, both registered a coma at exactly the same time they claimed that Mary was in the room.

  At dinner I’d overheard Jane, the woman from Conyers, talking about a statue that was bleeding in upstate New York, of a painting that was crying in Chicago or somewhere, and how the United States government is secretly preparing for the Chinese invasion at a base in San Diego. I could not keep my mouth shut. I said, “I just don’t think Mary means to spread fear and terror.”

  “She’s not the one spreading fear and terror. It already exists. She’s just warning us. Nancy Fowler—”

  “I’m sure Nancy Fowler does get these messages. But people, these seers, are human. They’re fallible.” I wanted to say that for all we knew, some of them could be channeling the devil disguised as Mary, but was afraid my tongue would burst into flames.

  “We should wait and ask Father Slavko what he thinks,” suggested Little Majesty, Arlene, the peacemaker. Father Slavko, the Bosnian priest who would lecture us daily, has a Ph.D. in psychology, which would serve us well, I hoped.

  Jane and I had glared at each other down the long table. Now, as I stand outside waiting in the dark, she comes out the door with her flashlight. “Where are you from?” she asks.

  “Los Angeles.” I hate saying that without qualification, like “but for only a year.” But this time I let her draw whatever conclusions she wants.

  Another woman, very pretty and very heavy, joins us. I’d noticed her in the airport, helping an old woman with a metal cane. She has dark hair that seems to have been set with rollers, perfect skin, blue eyes. “I am so excited,” she says. “This is my first time.”