Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  After the apparition, Estella had seemed a different person. Her face was wet with sweat when she wrapped me in a hug, her voice hot and breathless in my ear. “Our Lady loves you very much. She wants you to believe that with all your heart. And that she has you doing a great work that will bring many people back to God’s love. And she thanks you. She thanks you. I thank you.”

  I’d been so unable to accept the message that it instantly flew from my mind until a few months later, when David played Estella’s breathless voice on a tape.

  Walking through the countryside in Medjugorje, I consider how Mary did sneak into my heart back in Orient and that maybe she’d been trying to sneak into my heart for decades. And how in a way I had done her work. The documentary had been heard on National Public Radio by millions of people. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I think, as I notice how the shadows of the dappled leaves on the ground have run into one another, if Mary really did say I was beautiful? If I really was beautiful, and not a lump of charcoal, inside?

  Suddenly I notice that those shadows I’ve been staring at have not only run into one another but are awfully long, and I fairly run back to town, afraid of missing mass again.

  As I approach Saint James, I see that there’s a crowd in the courtyard, and realize it’s spilled over from inside the church. I kick myself for not thinking to come an hour early to get a seat as I weave my way through a group of Latin Americans, but get only as far as the vestibule, which I decide is a perfect reflection of my religious commitment: I’m here, but not all the way. I’m still on the outside looking in.

  People pray all around me in different languages, which makes a mellifluous babble. After ten minutes, I’m finally able to make out the words (from the Spanish I’d learned when I’d lived in Mexico)—“Santa Maria, madre de Dios,” Holy Mary, Mother of God—and realize (duh) they’re praying the rosary. So I pull mine from around my neck and add English to the chorus, remembering, as I do, a visual image I have from Mexico. I lived in a little village with Kip, and had been doing dishes at the kitchen window when I noticed that the pink neon cross on top of the village church was in flames. I’d called Kip to come look and we’d watched, amazed, as a small man climbed the steep, slanted roof, then balanced himself as he beat at the flames with his coat. Kip and I had laughed that it was “so Mexico.” But I must have experienced the burning cross as a call, because after that I kept thinking, every day when I finished writing, that I should go to that church and check it out. I’d been living in the village three months and never been inside. I hardly ever left our garden walls. I was the only gringa in town, a tall stranger, and everywhere I went, people stared. I knew I should get over this, that I was depriving myself of experiences I might never have again in my life. So one day I finally gathered my courage and walked by the snarling dogs and the staring people to the church.

  A service was in progress, and I felt too shy, too much of a trespasser, to take a seat. The priest was kneeling at the altar with his back to the rest of the church, chanting. When he stopped, the women chanted back. The sound echoed and vibrated through me. It was so beautiful I really wanted to sit and stay awhile, but I didn’t want to interrupt their service, didn’t want to be a foreign distraction. But as they continued chanting back and forth, the pull became too strong, and I sat in the second pew from the back. A moment after I took my seat, the women broke into song, and the woman directly behind me sent shivers down my spine. Her voice was like an angel’s, unearthly, as though a choir of birdsong had flown from her throat.

  I’d never thought that amazing voice had been a reward for taking a seat in the church, but I do think that now. I also think that if I can force myself to stay in the vestibule with my legs killing me like they are, I may receive some sort of subtle reward—if only from the relief of sitting down. But I can’t make myself do it. I leave before the service is over and get a little lost—yet another perfect metaphor to describe my spiritual state.

  Dinner consists of veal cutlets along with homemade mashed potatoes, an oily green salad, and carafes of homemade white wine. I sit next to the sisters and show them my new rosary beads, then drink quite a bit. So, it seems, does everyone else. After dinner a woman at the far end of the table raises her glass to “Our Lady,” and then we stand one by one and tell how we came to be here. Mrs. Benedetti, the seventy-two-year-old woman with the metal cane whom my roommate, Beatrice, shepherded around, tells how she had a stroke and was flat on her back, praying to the Blessed Mother to give her strength. She promised the Blessed Mother that if she recovered she’d come directly to Medjugorje and climb Mount Krizevac. She pats the half-dollar-sized medal with a relief of Mary that’s on her chest and says, “It’s two months later and here I am.” We all applaud.

  Beatrice tells her manager-of-a-bank story. “Our Lady has been calling, but I wasn’t ready to hear. Finally, she made it happen, so I had no choice.”

  The woman across from me felt a calling and became a paramedic. She and her husband drive in a van around rural Virginia, bringing medicine to the indigent. “We live in a shack with a wood stove and plant our own food. When I signed up for this trip I was seventeenth on the waiting list and didn’t have any money. I prayed to Our Lady. If she wanted me to come, I’d get here. And here I am.” The woman has a huge scapular on her chest, and when I ask what it signifies, she tells me she’s a lay Carmelite, which I found out is an order of mendicant nuns dating back to the twelfth century.

  The lovely birdlike woman with the melodious praying voice from the night before stands. “I’m Leslie Berman. I’m a psychotherapist in New York. I’ve led a few groups to Medjugorje. This is my fifth time, and each time I come home richer than when I left. Our Lady is very good. She loves each and every one of us, and there’s a reason why she brought us here. Some of us may already know why, and some of us won’t know till we get home, or not for years to come. Our Lady is so good, and we’re in her heart, so we’re good too.”

  Amens chorus around the table.

  Annie, the hectic, angry woman who came down the hill with me the night before, looks a lot less hectic and angry. She’s smiling. “I don’t have a career. I’m a mother. I have two girls and a wonderful husband, twenty years older than me. He knew I wanted to come, and it’s a hardship, but we scraped the money together. I used to be independent, never wanted to get married, but then I changed. My husband wants me to stay home with the girls, and I’m happy. . . . I just want to say that when we got to the airport in Rome, from the beginning really, I was nervous. Calling home, worrying. Mad because it wasn’t the way I thought it should be. Then, being here . . . everybody praying the rosary out on the street, and tonight going to the service with all those people, old people on their knees out of love for Our Lady . . . feeling her so near . . . We’re all her children, and we all came because we love her. It felt so good. I felt so happy. I just want to apologize for the way I was.”

  I don’t know whether it’s the wine or the talk or the air in Medjugorje, but I know I’ve been feeling some of the euphoria she’s talking about. I stand. “Well, I’m forty-seven years old, and the last time I went to church before this last year, I was thirteen.” Then I launched into my by-now-rote story of collecting Marys, going to apparitions, wanting more, coming here. Followed by my confession that I may write about this pilgrimage.

  “I’m too boring,” “We’d better watch out,” “Change my name” chime around the table, then trail off into “Our Lady is calling you. She wants you for something. That’s the way she is—she’s sneaky. She wants you to write a book. Oh, you wait—she’ll use you. Talk shows—you’ll be on talk shows.”

  None of us want to leave, so we stay in our seats drinking, and then after one sip of wine too many I cannot restrain myself a moment longer. “What do you think about women priests?” I ask my table neighbors. “Do you think women should be ordained?”

  Everyone smiles indulgently. Little Sista Alma thinks they should. “There is no reason w
hy there shouldn’t be women priests.”

  “There never has been. I suppose there’s a reason,” says Annie.

  Diane, the blond daughter of the big-haired mother-daughter fashion-design team from Nashville, pipes up. “It’s not feminine to want to lead. We do it our own way.”

  Not feminine to want to lead? That enrages every feminist bone in my body. “And what way is feminine? Subterfuge? Manipulation? Great, give all the power to men. Let them make all the decisions. Why the hell do you think the world’s so screwed up?”

  The women said:

  “It’s not about power.”

  “You’ll find out.”

  “It’s about love.”

  “And nurturing.”

  “Women have more important skills.”

  “Look at Our Lady. Imitate her.”

  “Who was at the cross when Christ died?” The women. The men fled. The men. Huh! One betrayed him, one denied him, and the rest ran away. Women were with the apostles the whole time. They were in the early Church. For all we know, Jesus thought of them as equals. But it was the men who learned to write, the men who wrote the Bible and chose what writings got in. Who was it who told Jesus to change that water into wine at that wedding so everybody would have a good time? His mother. Jesus didn’t even want to do it. I just know what happened after the Resurrection. Mary rounded all those apostles together and told them, ‘Stop hiding like sniveling little cowards and snap to it; we’ve got work to do.’ Look who’s on this pilgrimage: women. Oh—and the ‘infallible’ Pope: what does he think, the earth can sustain everyone’s having seventeen babies? The Church is so hypocritical. Divorce is a mortal sin, and if you’re poor you rot in hell for remarrying, but if you have enough money the Church grants you an annulment? They can change dogma when it’s convenient—or profitable.”

  “Some of the biggest converts were the biggest sinners,” someone interrupts; I think she’s talking about me and am flattered.

  “Our Lady will use you.”

  “Is your name-saint Theresa?” the lay Carmelite nun asks me. She’s been sitting there grinning and enjoying the debate. I’d had a feeling she might be simpatico but too politic or bemused to take on the crowd. “Who’s your name-saint?” she asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Therese,” she says. “Therese, the Little Flower. You remind me of her.”

  “I’d love to be named Therese.”

  “A Carmelite. Maybe you’ll be a Carmelite. Are you married?”

  “No. Divorced. But he’s dead now. I’m a widow.” Ray had died a few months before. Jason and I had gone to his funeral, and this was the first time it had occurred to me to refer to myself as a widow. Maybe Mary had paved the way for me to join the life of a “religious”: “That means I could be a nun, right?”

  “It depends on what you’re called to do. Carmelites hear a calling.”

  I wonder what that would sound like.

  “You guys all just follow whatever the Pope says?” I can’t let it go, even as I try not to judge them for their blind obedience.

  They nod.

  “You believe it’s a sin to use birth control?”

  They nod.

  “And you believe masturbation is a sin?”

  “Oooh, Beverly!”

  Back in our bedroom, Beatrice presents me with a gift: a foot-tall, white, pressed-marble statue of the Virgin as she’s depicted in Medjugorje, walking on a swirl of clouds, looking downward, one hand stretched out and her cape flying behind.

  “Oh, Beatrice,” I say, “it’s so beautiful! You’re so generous.” She’s brought an empty suitcase to fill with gifts for people, and plans to give away all her clothes so she can fill her other suitcase too. In one day, she’s already bought hundreds of Mary medals, plastic rosary beads, prayer cards to pass out to people back home. The nuns in her town will get one of everything she’s bought, and Beatrice will pass a medal to each woman at her bingo game—which she has volunteered to run every Friday evening for the past fifteen years.

  The statue is beautiful, heavy, and feels smooth and cool as I run my hand over it.

  “Look.” Beatrice takes it from me. “This one’s unusual. They’re hard to find. She’s crying.”

  There is a shiny track and a tear on her left cheek.

  I kiss it.

  Mary is mentioned more times in the Koran than she is in the Bible. In fact, the Koran paints a more vivid picture of Mary than of Jesus, who isn’t the Son of God, but he is the Chosen One, the Messiah.

  Mary is all alone, a single mother, when she gives birth to Jesus. On the ground, leaning against a date palm tree, she says, “Would that I had died before this and become a thing forgotten, unremembered.”

  Mary’s pain in childbirth isn’t mentioned in the Bible, but we see clearly the pain she felt as a mother.

  When Christ is eight days old, Mary and Joseph bring him to the temple to dedicate him to God, as all firstborn male children of the Jewish faith must be. There, the holy man Simeon prophesies to Mary, “A sword shall pierce through thy soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Mary will be wounded with the pain of mother love: her pain will help others reveal the secrets in their own hearts; then her love will flow and flow, pouring graces over us all.

  Then, when Jesus is twelve, he and Mary and Joseph go to Jerusalem with a group of friends and family to celebrate the Passover feast. On their way back home, the party travels a full day before they realize they’d left Jesus behind. When Joseph and Mary return to Jerusalem to look for him, it takes three days before they find him—in the temple, asking and listening and answering questions, like Plato.

  Mary says, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.”

  Jesus responds, “Why are you searching for me? Did you not know I would be in my Father’s house?”

  They return home, where Jesus is obedient to them, and “his mother treasured all these things in her heart.”

  Many years pass; Jesus is near thirty, and Joseph is no longer in the picture. Jesus has been baptized by John the Baptist and has begun to gather his disciples, but he has not yet preached or performed any miracles in public. He and his mother and the apostles attend a wedding in Cana, and when the party runs out of wine, Mary wants to help. She says to her son, “They have no wine.”

  Jesus says to his mother, “Woman, what concern of that is to you and to me? My time has not yet come.”

  Mary basically ignores him and says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

  Jesus obeys his mother and tells the servants to fill six jugs with water, then take to them to the governor, the ruler of the feast.

  When the governor tastes the water, he knows that it has been turned to wine. And the Bible says, “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana in Galilee, and revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.”

  The Bible doesn’t say “thanks to Mary.” But it’s implied by the story. Mary is a good Jewish mother, who knows that wine is spirit too; she also knows from living with her son the miracles he is capable of performing, and she knows that contrary to what her son believes, his time has indeed come. So Mary, like any mother who knows what’s best, tells her son what to do.

  Mary never minds her own business. Mary did in Cana what she has continued to do all along: interceded on behalf of the people to her son.

  Mary was such a strong woman, Jesus was probably tired of her telling him what to do; he had to break away from her to come into his own. Which he obviously did, because a while later, Mary showed up at a door behind which Jesus was speaking to a crowd. When someone yelled to him that his mother and brothers (perhaps Joseph’s sons) were at the door and wanted to speak to him, Jesus said, “Who is my mother and who are my brothers?” Then he pointed to his disciples and said, “Here are my mother and brothers! For whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and moth
er.”

  Jesus was making a sound point: that the spirit transcends your earthly family; his mission was more important than his mother’s feelings—a point Mary no doubt would have appreciated. But the rebuff probably smarted.

  In the Gospel According to John, we meet Mary one more time in Christ’s lifetime: at the foot of the cross. When Jesus looks down and sees Mary standing next to “the disciple whom he loved” (John, the writer of this passage), he says to his mother, “‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he says to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’” He drinks vinegar and hyssop and says, “‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up the spirit.”

  And so the last thing Christ did before he left this earth was to make sure his mother was taken care of and that the apostle he loved was taken care of, too. The apostle represented the future church and so Mary would be the mother of that church. Jesus had ensured that Mary would be around to keep his apostles straight.

  And so we see Mary, for the last time, praying with the apostles, who “were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers. . . . When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit. . . .”

  In Jesus’s lifetime his apostles were always walking around “amazed” at what he did, which annoyed Jesus, because if the apostles had stronger faith, nothing Jesus did could surprise them.

  But nothing Jesus did surprised his mother.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The next night I make sure I’m at the rosary mass an hour early, and find a seat next to an ancient peasant woman the size of a ten-year-old girl. Her knuckles are gnarled and swollen and her rosary is clutched in fingers that slant in one direction. Two skinny white braids fall down her back from under a black shawl draped over her head. As the crowd files in, we squeeze in closer, and the old woman turns and smiles up at me. I am one of thousands of strangers crowding her church, sometimes, I’m sure, leaving her without a seat, and yet here she is welcoming me. We’re all there for Mary. Some have brought little collapsible seats to set in the aisle, but most stand, sit, or kneel on the stone floor. The space between the first rows and the altar is jammed. People spill out the door and into the courtyard. No one chats; the air is electric; and when the rosary begins, the songs boom between each decade, a cacophony of voices praying and singing the same words in different languages to Mary, our mother.