Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  Paintings depicting the Assumption are among the most beautiful paintings and frescoes in the world. In churches Mary is often floating in the dome above the altar, her eyes longingly or joyfully focused on her destination—heaven. Sometimes she looks compassionately and a little sadly down at us, her children, whom she is leaving.

  Once Mary reaches heaven she is crowned Holy Queen, in the Coronation. I have one painting of the Coronation, in which she is depicted standing on top of the world and spreading her heavenly cape, which serves as a backdrop for a chorus of cherubim. At a little distance the painting looks remarkably like a woman’s private parts. The world is the clitoris and Mary the top of the vulva, which her cape, the labia, completes. Often her cape is painted hot red, sheltering men and women and children inside it.

  But Mary doesn’t stay in heaven looking passively down; she is all over the world in her portraits, the first of which were said to have been painted by Saint Luke and were highly prized (as were her veil, hair, milk, nail clippings).

  I can almost picture the scene when Luke went to visit the future Queen of Heaven. She told him her stories—which he then included in his infancy narrative—and then patiently sat so he could paint her. She knew she would still have work to do after she died. To put it crassly, she knew she’d have to publicize herself. Pain had stabbed her heart and she’d turned it into compassion for the world.

  She had too much compassion to watch her children suffer from above. She would come back down and try to help. She would bring them to the knowledge that love is the only way; she would bring them to her son and his teachings.

  And so she appears to us, in dreams and in apparitions, like the concerned mother she is, tirelessly stumping the globe for her son, spreading his message, bringing us back to God.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next day we are due to move to a large residential center in the afternoon to begin our five-day silent fast. Word has spread that Vicka, one of the visionary children, now in her late twenties, will be giving a talk that morning in her front yard. We all arise at seven-thirty in order to reach her house by eight-thirty. But I am still drained from my crying orgy the night before, and the coffee is weak. I need another cup, so I hang behind, as does Franny, the ex-nun. “I got to let nature take its course. Sharing a bathroom’s for the birds. You want a wake-up pill?” she says in a Brooklyn accent, then takes a pill herself.

  “Wake-up pill?”

  “Yeah. Awake. One of those caffeine pills. You never tried it? You’re not going to Vicka’s either?”

  “I should, but I’m too tired.”

  “There’ll be other chances.”

  “You sure?”

  “No.” She laughs.

  “You sure don’t act like a nun.”

  “I’ve been known to fire off my mouth, like you. Gets me in trouble, too.”

  “Is that why you left the convent?”

  “It was 1971. I’m in Chicago. The blues, the pill, and I’m gonna stay in a convent? I was twenty-seven. Been nowhere. Done nothing.” She’s only fifty-two? I would have bet she was sixty. “I wanted my own apartment and the order gave it to me. Big mistake.”

  “I get stuck on ‘obedient’ when I think about being a nun,” I say.

  “Tell me about it. You Italian?”

  “Yeah. You’re Irish?” She has sky-blue eyes and a rascal’s face.

  “Half Irish, half Italian. My father was Italian. Italians ain’t good at rules.”

  I am on my third coffee now and getting antsy. “I’m feeling guilty. I’m going to Vicka’s.”

  “Ah, guilt. The good Lord’s ally.”

  I have no idea where Vicka lives, but I spot three Koreans walking purposefully past our door, so I follow them.

  We wind through some lanes, then a vineyard, and end up in front of a large stucco house with a tile roof and brown shutters. There are three baby trees planted in the yard, pink geraniums in pots on the porch. Koreans are lined up at the picket fence while a large group of Irish people completely block the lane behind them.

  I stand on a stone wall to get a better view. Not one of my pilgrimage partners is there, so I ask the Irish woman standing next to me if this is Vicka’s house, and she says no, it’s Mirjana’s. I’ve read that although Mirjana has received all the secrets, Our Lady still appears to her once a month. Mirjana stands on the other side of the picket fence in the middle of her front lawn, wearing a knee-length skirt, a white blouse, and pumps. Her forehead is wide beneath bushy strawberry-blond hair, and her brown eyes seem very dark against her fair complexion. She holds her arms behind her back and smiles pleasantly as she speaks via the translator by her side.

  “Do not preach,” she says. “Live your life and show by example. Our Lady asks us to fast on Wednesdays and Fridays. Pray the rosary in your home. Make confession every month. There is no man who doesn’t need to confess every month. She didn’t say anything about women.” Mirjana smiles at her own joke.

  Then Mirjana explains that each visionary prays for a specific group, and it’s up to her to pray for nonbelievers and priests.

  I am convinced it was no coincidence that I stepped out the door at the very moment I would see those Koreans, so I’d follow them to the visionary whose mission it is to pray for me. I believe Our Lady has arranged the whole thing, and experience what a child feels who senses her mother’s presence, then glances up to indeed find her there, watching her fondly.

  “Love the nonbelievers as brothers and sisters,” Mirjana says. “They were not so fortunate as you. Pray for them. Don’t judge them ever. To Our Lady we are all the same. She chose us six so through us she could say what she wants. She chose all of you, because she invited you. You received a call. You left home and country. Our Lady put this call in her heart for you to come here. While here you must ask Our Lady why she brought you here. If you listen with your heart, you will know.”

  People want to know about the secrets, and Mirjana says, “Why ask about secrets? Who knows whether we’ll be alive tomorrow.”

  A man asks Mirjana to describe Our Lady, and she says, “Our Lady is a little taller than I and always wears a gray dress with a white veil. On Christmas and Easter she wears a golden dress. She has long black hair. Blue eyes. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. There is no way to describe the beauty and love that radiate from her. When we were children we asked childish things: ‘How can you be so beautiful?’ Our Lady answered, ‘Because I love. If you want to be beautiful, you must love.’

  “I would like to conclude on the rosary. Pray the rosary with your heart. Feel it in your heart. When your mind wanders, leave the rosary and talk to Our Lady. Ask Our Lady to take this distraction away, then pray again.”

  “Is it Our Lady on that building in Tampa?” a man asks.

  “How could I know this? I must go now. Remember, every prayer you say for a nonbeliever wipes the tears from Our Lady’s face.”

  As I gather my luggage to transport it to the retreat house to begin our silent fast, I put my aurora borealis beads into a side pocket of my suitcase. I’ve decided that since the rosary beads are the most beautiful I’ve found, I’ll give them to my mother. I will pray on them the whole time I am in Medjugorje, which will charge them with good juju, and then the next time I see my mother I’ll present them to her. Even though she virtually has never gone to mass, or taken her children, my mother’s blue crystal rosary beads hung on her bedpost and she’d prayed a rosary every night when I was a kid. I haven’t seen the rosary in many years, and have no idea if she still prays. I decide I’ll ask her when I present her with her gift. I’ll feel so much better about her dying if I know she feels close to Mary.

  My mother’s Mary miracle was the first Mary story I ever heard. When my mother was twelve, her mother died of TB. Her father, an Italian immigrant who dug ditches for a living, could not afford to keep the family together. So my mother and her seven brothers and sisters became wards of the state—and were basicall
y farmed out as child labor. Eventually, my mother was taken in by an aunt and treated like Cinderella.

  Six months later, she went swimming in a lake and started to drown. She went under once; she went under twice. Flailing and struggling and calling to her cousins, who thought she was kidding, she went under for a third time, breathed in water, and saw the Blessed Virgin Mary aglow in the sky. Mary smiled and held her arms out to my mother, and my mother wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. A few minutes later she awoke on the beach, choking and coughing, saved.

  Her Mary sighting sixty-two years ago, powerful as it was, had probably planted the seed for my search for Mary, and so David and I decided to interview my mother for the radio documentary. When I called to tell her we were coming, she said of him, “What a nice boy.” We’d interviewed my mother before for a radio piece.

  “We’re doing a piece about the Virgin Mary, and we want to come interview you about the time she saved you from drowning.”

  “Mary?” she said. “It wasn’t Mary. It was my mother.”

  “Mom, you said it was Mary.”

  “No. You think it was Mary because of the bright light.”

  My memory is not beyond distorting things, especially for dramatic effect, but I clearly remember sitting on the porch swing, listening to my mother tell her miracle story. I remembered wearing my first two-piece at Lake Compounce, where my mother almost drowned, and scanning the sky for the Virgin Mary.

  It was interesting that Mary and my mother’s mother had merged into the same person in my mother’s mind. My mother’s mother had just died, and what my mother had needed most in the world was to have her mother back. It was no surprise really that Mary and mother would be interchangeable; they answered the same needs: for comfort, warmth, unconditional acceptance, love.

  It was more than a little disturbing, though, to consider that I might have been the one exchanging Mary for mother, forming my personal mythology from a family “miracle” that had never happened.

  I wanted to know the real story. David, too, agreed we should continue.

  We arrived in Connecticut at four in the afternoon and sat in the living room. The blinds were drawn against the sun, as they always were, which had never ceased to depress me when I lived there. My mother, who ordinarily would be bustling around offering food, asking our plans, urging us to stay to dinner, sat still as a turtle on the couch, looking tired and pale. She suffered from the beginning symptoms of emphysema and had tried to quit but still smoked. She had good days and bad days, and this day was obviously not good. My father was there, too, sitting in his easy chair. He’s a shy man, uneasy around strangers and like a cat with his routines, but he seemed genuinely happy to see us and stood to kiss me on the cheek and to offer David his hand.

  The television gets turned on at around noon at my parents’ house and is never shut off until they both go to bed. It’s their tranquilizer; but when company arrives, the volume is lowered to a murmur out of politeness. This afternoon, however, a Carmen Miranda movie was on, and the TV stayed cranked at full volume. “I love her,” my mother said, shuffling the deck of cards she’d been playing solitaire with.

  “Me, too.”

  “I’ve been thinking.” She jumped right in with the old energy now. “It was Mary. You were right.”

  “Wait,” I said. David had to set up the recording equipment, which would take a few minutes, but I couldn’t resist. “So why’d you say it was your mother?”

  “I don’t know. I was confused. I’m old.”

  David positioned the microphone between us and I asked my mother to tell us her story. “I was swimming with my cousins, splashing and fooling around. When I started to go under, they thought I was kidding. I went down once. I went down twice. I remember I saw the buoy; then I went down for the third time and didn’t come back up. And I saw her.”

  She was seeing her again in the living room; I could tell by her face, which looked twenty years younger. “So beautiful. The light. There’s no way to describe it. It’s like nothing on this earth. You felt so . . . I don’t know . . . good, peaceful. You can’t know unless you see it. It was the Virgin Mary. Then I woke up. On the beach. Saved.”

  “You can’t know unless you see it”: a little defensiveness in her tone when she said that, an anticipation of a cynical reaction, but strident too, sure now of what she’d seen. The defensiveness would not have been there when I was a child and believed everything my mother said and even subscribed to her exact point of view. My mother had thought I’d go through adolescence and come out the other end of it her best friend. She’d expected that I’d marry and live next door, that my children would run in and out of her house, that she and I would cook the same recipes. When I announced I was going to college, she didn’t like it, because she was afraid she’d lose me, and in a way she had. But even though we live in different worlds, I know my mother’s heart. And I can imagine hearing this story when I was little and knowing then, too, exactly how my mother felt going under that cold water at Lake Compounce, her cousins, the favored children of the aunt my mother lived with, splashing near, thinking my mother was joking, and the more my mother can’t communicate that her terror is real, the more terrified she becomes. She cannot stay afloat although she is a good swimmer. She has lost her nerve. Then she is under for good, and it is dark there, a relief to let herself sink, a comfort to surrender. And that’s when she sees the light and in it her Mother Mary, and feels the same as if she’s seen her own mother returned from the dead, holding out her arms to lift her.

  How can my mother have forgotten this? Instead of walking through her life, expecting every sunny day to turn cloudy, she could have remembered how the Blessed Mother had saved her once and was looking out for her always.

  I hope now that my mother remembered how Mary had intervened in her life, that she would see Mary again when she died, see Mary holding her arms out, bathing my mother with love, giving her golden peace.

  How alone will I feel when my parents leave this life?

  The thought terrified me. This fear, I’m sure, had something to do with my search for faith, begun in the middle of my life, and near the end of my parents’.

  David asked my mother to recite the Hail Mary, and in her crackly, wavery smoker’s voice she prayed:Hail Mary, full of grace,

  The Lord is with thee.

  Blessed art thou among women

  And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

  Holy Mary, Mother of God,

  Pray for us sinners

  Now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

  The sound was as familiar as a nursery rhyme, my mother as lovable as a baby. I took her hand and squeezed it. She squeezed my hand back.

  It’s believed that Satan was once the leader of the angels but had a falling-out with God over God’s decision to produce a son, born of a woman. Satan was furious that a mere human would be above him, the archangel Lucifer, in the heavenly pantheon, and led an insurrection. He lost and was expelled from heaven. Bitter and vindictive and determined to make humanity suffer for his fall from grace, Satan has been in competition with Jesus for souls ever since.

  Among Catholics it’s believed that because Mary was the human who bore Christ, Satan harbors an especially venomous hatred for the Blessed Virgin. And Mary, because she loves and wants to protect her children—and because she gave birth to goodness and redemption in this world—is at the point guard of the battle against Satan. In paintings, Mary is depicted in front of even the archangel Michael leading a charge of angels against the forces of darkness.

  According to legend, Pope Leo XIII, who was subject to visions and auditory messages from heaven, overheard God speaking with Satan at the turn of the twentieth century. Satan said that he was winning more and more souls and in a short time he would win the world. God discharged Mary, his strongest force, to win the decisive battle, and so she appears more and more frequently, ardently imploring her children to pray, because prayer is the absolute
weapon against evil, and the rosary will win the war.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  This is the schedule tacked to the wall as we enter the door of the newly constructed retreat house, an odd triangular-looking building with three floors of dormitory rooms near the edge of town.

  7-8 Group Adoration [not of one another, but of Jesus in the chapel]

  8-9 Breakfast [bread and tea, all you can eat]

  9-10 Father Slavko [lecture by priest with Ph.D. in psychology]

  11-12 Group Adoration

  12 Mass

  1-2 Lunch [same menu as breakfast]

  3-4 Father Slavko

  5-7:30 Evening rosary and mass at Saint James

  8-9 Dinner [leftovers from breakfast and lunch]

  Next to the schedule is a sign-up sheet for adoration, which means that the exposed heart of Jesus—the host in a gold reliquary—will be in the chapel every minute we’re in residence, and since Jesus can never be alone in the room, we’ve been asked to sign up for hour-long slots to keep him company. We are entering the retreat house on a Monday and will leave the next Saturday. People have signed up for repeat vigils, thinking nothing of committing to three, four, five in the morning, every day.

  I’m highly resistant to adoring Jesus and I don’t want to sign up at all. Why would I want to adore someone who tortured me in childhood?

  Though we never went to mass, I was treated to catechism every Saturday morning, where nuns in wicked-witch skirts told us if we didn’t go to visit their beloved Jesus every Sunday, we’d be sent straight to hell: do not pass go, burn for all eternity. God the Father; Jesus the Son; and the Holy Spirit, who- or whatever that was, were all the same person, and the Three-in-One sat in judgment and would point their finger, sending you far below, where your blood would boil, your veins turn to rivers of fire, and no matter how ardently you begged and screamed and prayed for forgiveness, it would be too late—mercy would not rain.