Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  But if you were lucky—had been to mass before you died, say, and had not committed any other mortal sins, such as murder, or remarriage after divorce—you went to purgatory, where you still burned and screamed in agony, but only for a couple hundred or thousand years, depending on the nun telling you.

  I was a black-and-white kind of dramatic kid, who went through periods of heated prayer and punitive self-scrutiny: “You are bad. You make Mom scream and swear and hate you. You must say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys and walk on the floor barefoot, even though it’s the middle of winter and freezing cold.” But then I also went through periods of stealing cookies and telling lies to get myself off the hook. If I stubbed my toe, my mother would say smugly, “See? God punished you.”

  During my saintly periods I’d play holy communion with my brother in the basement, using saltines, and beg my mother to take me to church.

  “It’s not my fault I don’t have a nice coat,” she’d say. “You think I can afford a hat? Your father works the swing shift; I’m not going to ask him to drive us to church too. And I don’t see God sending me a driver’s license.” She shivered with disgust. “Damn those money-grubbing Irish priests. They’re the ones who should burn in hell. Your poor great-grandmother, God rest her soul, went blind crocheting doilies for their altars, and look at the thanks she got. Too ashamed to go to mass because she didn’t have a quarter to drop in the box. You think God approves of that? I say my rosary every night. The Blessed Mother knows.”

  Sometimes I would sit on the front stoop with my best friend, Linda Cholefsky, and pray rosaries. We never said prayers together; we raced because we were taught that each prayer we said for a dead soul reduced his time in purgatory for a set number of years. And if you released a dead soul from purgatory, when your time came, he’d be positioned in heaven to petition for you.

  Although mass was insufferably long and boring, it was always a relief to go. My grandmother and I liked to sit near the Mary statue, and I busied myself before we all stood for the priest’s entrance by staring at her. Mary was beautiful, of course, very young and also demure. But that innocent demeanor disguised her bravery and her will. I saw how her foot stomped on that green, tongue-lashing snake. Jesus, on the other hand, was skinny and wearing a diaper, with his head lolling on his chest, making you feel guilty because he died for your sins. But when I stood in line for communion behind my grandmother, my hands clasped at my chest, I’d kneel in front of the priest who’d say “Corpus Christi,” then picture that same tortured body of Christ flowing to my soul as the host melted against my palate, dissolving the big black smudges of sin with a twinkle, like in a Mr. Clean commercial. My soul would be left brand-new, pure and white like the holy host itself. I pictured myself a nun lying facedown before an altar, my head shaved and my arms spread like a cross. I was a girl thrown to the lions for the love of God. I would gladly pluck my eyes out like Saint Lucy or be tied to a stake and burned alive like Saint Joan. From now on, I would help without being asked, never answer my mother back, never lie, filch cookies, tease my sister, hate my brother, or wish my father would die so I could watch what I wanted on TV instead of endless droning ball games that nobody cared about but him.

  My poor family, at home that moment and not in church with me. I at least would be saved till the next Sunday, but if a tidal wave hit tomorrow, or an atomic bomb, my parents and brother and sisters would burn in flames forever, while I reclined on a fluffy white cloud, an orphan.

  This made me feel terribly lonely, and because I never knew you could ask Mary for things, I used to pray every night to Jesus: “Please, dear Jesus, come sit on my bed.” But he never did sit on my bed or whisper in my ear, or make the television stop flipping when I prayed an Our Father hard, my eyes squinched shut, a finger pointing to the telephone wires.

  I never received one crumb of comfort from Jesus; instead, I received dark sweaty nights of condemnation for never measuring up.

  I do not want to adore him. But I’m trying for once in my life to be open, and obedient, so I sign up for adoration at ten o’clock Thursday evening, hoping I may be ready to sit there by then.

  Within twenty-four hours a violent windstorm rips through the village, leaving us without electricity, heat, or hot water for three days. Luckily the stove is gas, so there’s no shortage of tea and bread, which the fifty of us eat, three times a day, at two long tables. We try not to stare at one another as we chew, and listen to tapes supplied by Annalena and Bruce, who turn out to be purveyors of some fairly hard-core, scare-tactic Catholic dogma. A deep booming male voice: “RIGHT IS RIGHT. WRONG IS WRONG. TRUTH IS TRUTH. LIES ARE LIES. YOU KNOW WHAT IS RIGHT AND YOU KNOW WHAT IS WRONG. IT IS WRONG TO WORSHIP FALSE GODS. MONNNNEEEEY . . . AAAMMMMBIIITTTIOOON . . . YOOOUUURRR OOWWWNNN BODDDIIIEEESSS. GOD SPEAKS THE TRUTH AND SO MUST YOU. IT IS WRONG TO SIT IDLY BY AS MILLIONS OF BABIES ARE MURDERED IN THEIR MOTHERS’ WOMBS. THEIR MOTH-ERS’ WOMBS. . . . IF YOU DO NOTHING, GOD SEES THIS AND IS NOT HAPPY. YOU HAVE AN IMPERATIVE BY VIRTUE OF YOUR BAPTISM TO SPEAK UP, LOUD. . . .”

  The speaker’s fire-and-brimstone tone is enough to make me experience this as water torture. But gradually, as the week passes, during which I’m continually awakened in the night by the wind screaming like a banshee at my window, I enter a numb zone, where I chew like a cow on cud, adding more and more honey to my tea, as though sweetness will provide an antidote to this limbo state.

  Beatrice and I have been assigned a room on the second floor, but Beatrice sleeps there only one night. The rest she spends with a blanket and pillow in adoration in the chapel. I shiver under the covers in my tights and down pants, which I wear under my velvet skirt, my SS jacket over it all, a beret on my head and gloves on my hands, which are still peeling and have begun to reveal raw, quilted flesh dotted with blood, but still, thank God, do not itch.

  Day and night I read the Bible with my flashlight: “Ask and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. . . .” And when I can read no more, I pray the rosary and meditate, picturing Mary patting my heart, or pulling me up by my hands so she can hug me and stroke my head. I pray Memorare after Memorare, begging Mary to teach me how to love, to know what it is, to feel it in my heart, to teach me how to show it. I implore her to enter my son’s heart to give him the mother he never had, to heal him. And I pray to the Holy Spirit to enter me so I can make a good confession. I have signed up on another sheet for my first confession in thirty-five years, with Father Freed; I’m determined to have the full experience, to give it a try, see what it feels like. Confession will take place at four-thirty on Thursday afternoon. In rehearsal, lying in my bed to keep warm, I run through a dirty laundry list of my gravest faults: bad mother, selfish, cruel, hard-hearted, hurtful, liar. I can’t tell if my stomach hurts because I’m constipated from my diet of bread and tea or because I’m making myself sick with the fear of coming clean.

  Will I tell Father Freed about Paul, the sweet young man at Wesleyan who lived above me? He took me to my first Chinese restaurant and then afterwards to see Shakespeare in New Haven. He introduced me to tofu and made vegetarian dishes he carried down the stairs to me. I was repulsed by all his attention and let him discover we were over when I opened my door to his knock and he saw another man warming tortillas on my stove. I heard Paul crying through my ceiling and never climbed the stairs to comfort him or apologize; I barely said hello when we passed on the porch.

  I’d heard how Mary had appeared to an ex-convict in Ohio and replayed for him the scenes of his life as though it were a movie. Mary showed him what compassion was when he saw everyone he’d hurt—not through his own eyes, but through theirs. He experienced the physical and emotional pain he’d inflicted on them, feeling in his own heart the same hurt he’d caused in others.

  I wonder if I’m producing my own movies in bed in my room, or if
Mary’s projecting them to me. Reading the Bible is becoming a relief and a distraction. I look forward to mass in the chapel with our little group, and mass at Saint James even more, where I jam in with the whole town, pray and sing with all my heart. But mostly I look forward to being lectured to by Father Slavko, with whom I’ve fallen in love.

  At our Monday-afternoon lecture, he blew into the room and peeled off his brown jacket, pulled back his medieval hood, clasped his hands together at his chest, and looked us over mischievously. He was thin and wiry, in the brown robes of a Franciscan with the rope around the waist. We were all seated at the two long dining tables, waiting. He ran a hand through his short gray hair and grinned, revealing small square teeth with a space between each one. “So, we are fasting.” He nodded, smiling around. “It is good to chew many times. Thirty-three. Put some sweetness in the tea if you like.

  “Do not fast or pray to be better than others, hey? We have no right to judge. You do it to be closer to God. It is good to do. That’s why Our Lady asks it. Wednesdays and Fridays. Fasting helps you appreciate what you have. God gave everything to man and woman. Only one thing he said “Do not touch.” A big success for Satan when he focused Eve’s eyes from all that she had onto what she was missing. It is the human condition. All conflict begins at the same moment, when I become blind to what I have and see what I don’t. We are conditioned to believe we need more to be happy. It’s not bad to have more. It’s bad when you do not see what you have. A man who lost his leg didn’t feel joy when he had it.

  “Life has to be more simple. We have so many gifts. If you want peace, open your eyes to what you have around you and say thank you.”

  Father Slavko prepares a newsletter every week, has written a dozen books, runs an orphanage and an old people’s home (“for old orphans”), supervises Sister Vera’s home for male junkies and the retreat house, and is the priest in charge of all programs for pilgrims. He sleeps only four hours a night and climbs Mount Krizevac at sunrise every morning. And he prays.

  “Prayer changes the man,” he says, “man changes the world. Pray three rosaries a day. If you say one Hail Mary, Our Lady would say like a mother, ‘That’s good. There are 149 more.’”

  When asked if Mary speaks of the chastisements in her messages in Medjugorje—the punishments that will be let loose on the world if we don’t change—Father Slavko responds, “Our Lady does not preach punishment and destruction if we don’t convert. She just urges us to pray. Everyone. Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew. In June 1991 Yugoslavia split. It was exactly ten years to the day after Our Lady’s first apparition that the first bomb fell. Our Lady appeared that day crying with the cross, saying, ‘Peace, peace, peace.’

  “We are carriers of God’s peace and joy for the world. ‘You are important,’ she says. ‘Without you I cannot do anything. I need you.’ Mary asks us to love with God’s love, not with human love. Human: I accept you if you are a good boy. But he cannot be a good boy if he is not accepted. Always a lack of acceptance is the beginning of trouble. Love is the beginning of the healing. God loves everybody. God invests his love within us. He loves, not because we are good: he creates the condition that we can be good.

  “There are three surprises in heaven: you find people you sent to hell, you do not find angels, you are there.

  “Our Lady sees you’re good even if it is small, and she appreciates it. The sin begins where thanksgiving is missing.”

  It makes perfect sense. It sounds so Eastern. If you are focused on what you don’t have, you are in a constant state of craving. It’s the same as seeing the glass as half-empty. You see what you don’t have instead of what you have.

  When I was in Orient I’d gone for a weekend meditation retreat in the Hudson River Valley. The retreat was led by a lovely Hindu monk in a bright orange sari, who looked twenty but could have been sixty. Bhante sat still as water as he smilingly instructed us on different meditation techniques, which we practiced in a large circular room with windows all around. We chanted. We did walking meditation, sitting meditation, yoga. And we discussed things. The monk asked what we mean when we say we want to be more spiritual. “What does ‘spiritual’ mean?”

  “It’s a feeling. Of well-being,” a bald man with an earring said.

  “It’s what you can’t know with your senses,” a woman with brilliant red hair said.

  “A sense of being in touch with a higher power,” a woman in a turquoise jogging suit said.

  The teacher suggested that that evening we think about what love is, and added that we might like to have the experience of remaining silent for the rest of the weekend. I decided to try it. I had two hours before dinner and sunset and decided to take a walk up a marked mountain trail. The trail was steep, in deep wooded shade, and it was getting chilly, but I could see a slant of sun over to the left, where I hoped the trail would eventually wind. After I’d walked a steep mile in the dark, I grew frustrated and broke away from the path to get to the sun but was blocked by a gigantic rock.

  As I neared the two-mile point I realized I still hadn’t walked in the sun or been given even one peek at a view. A great oak had fallen across the path, which I wanted to interpret as an omen, or a good excuse, to turn back, but I didn’t. I scrambled over it, then continued to climb up and up, never reaching the fading sun or a hint of a view.

  At the end of the trail there was a pile of rocks for a marker, but no view and no sun. I couldn’t believe there was no payoff to this hike. What could they have been thinking when they designed the trail? Suffer? The path marker had been a sadist, and I’d had enough.

  As I was about to turn and head back down, I heard a loud squawk and looked up. There in front of me beyond the pile of stones was a magnificent view of the valley, rolling down below: A red farmhouse, tiny black-and-white cows dotting a meadow, and the sun disappearing in a blaze of magenta behind a distant hill. I sat down on a rock and wept, aware that this was a moment when God was speaking to me.

  I had assumed the worst. I’d been suspicious and dissatisfied, ignoring the beauty of the forest around me, focused on the sun, which I could not get to. I’d been so angry I’d almost missed the view when I’d finally reached it. I’d done this even though I knew that the journey is everything. Even though I’d caught myself many times before this seeing the glass as half-empty—caught myself and promised not to do it again.

  I was the daughter of a mother who believed that the world was so untrustworthy that even the weather had it in for her, who could not, until the end of her life, believe it was really the Virgin Mary she’d seen. I had a grandmother who went to church every day of her life but was incapable of appreciating the good that surrounded her. But maybe I could be the one to do it—to see the sun through the clouds. Maybe when I woke up one morning and the sun was not shining and the wind was howling and I was prevented from doing something grand that I’d planned, I would watch the rain dribble down my window glass and think, “Wonderful; I can snuggle in and read a book.”

  I lie in bed, wrapped in my clothes like a mummy, shivering under the blankets, the wind not howling so much as screeching, as the days pass without my speaking, as I dream of fresh fruits and vegetables, of all the food I’ve thrown away, of the meals I could have cooked but never did, of the great conversations I have with my friends, of my family and how ungrateful I’ve been. I griped about how we never had family vacations growing up, or ate at restaurants, or tossed balls in the backyard. But my father did not have enough money, time, or energy to take us on vacations or to eat in restaurants. After he’d quit the soda truck, he became a cop and worked a swing shift. During the summers, whenever he was not scheduled to work days, he worked a second job, spreading molten tar on driveways. I remembered my mother draping hot towels on his shoulders in the evenings to ease the pain of his aching back.

  I remember with shame the meals, with desserts, my mother cooked for us four children, every single night; the baskets of laundry carried up and down the s
tairs; the five beds she made every single morning; and I think how lucky she must have felt that one Christmas to have found those two Barbies for the price of one, so I could have exactly what my best friend, Linda, had. And how hurt she must have felt when tears filled my eyes as I looked at those two cheap imitation Barbies, then locked myself in my bedroom for the rest of the day.

  I had only one child, and I moaned about no fun and too much work. But worst of all, I’ve been stingy with my love. I was closer to Jason than to anyone else in my life, and I never appreciated him. I was never grateful. A deep well of sadness opened up as I soaked my pillow, praying Hail Mary after Hail Mary, chanting Memorares: “To thee do I cry, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. . . .”

  I remember one Sunday when Jason was seven years old. He and I and Joseph—a schoolteacher whom I’d been with for four years and almost married—packed a picnic to go hiking up Sleeping Giant. It was late in the fall and getting colder and we took a steep, windy trail instead of the easier well-worn path. I’d been pleasantly surprised when Jason braved the long hike without a whine or a complaint. I knew it was because he was being brave and acting like a man for Joseph, who’d decided to take Jason on as a son. Joseph had kept a distance until we decided to marry; then he began picking Jason up after school once a week and driving down to the beach to empty his lobster pots. They’d even gone to a cabin in the Maine woods one weekend and shot cans off a stump. As we made our descent down the mountain, it started to pour. We slid in the mud, were soaked through to our skins and chilled. My mother, who was Jason’s second mother, would not have approved. But with Joe, I felt more like an adult, like we were a family, and the decision we’d made to climb the mountain under threatening skies had been okay. Jason would survive being chilled.