Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  I do not, however, love Annalena and Bruce’s responses to the complaints of three quarters of our group who are suffering from fever and chills and have broken the silence to complain. When Little Sista says to Annalena after a “meal,” “It’s a little hard to sleep; there’s no heat, and my sister has a fever,” a woman standing by says, “Jesus lived in poverty and suffered, and that’s the way it is. We should offer up our suffering.” When someone else says, “The sewer is backing up into my shower,” Annalena says, “Offer it up.”

  Is this the same as “Shake it off”? I once heard a Little League coach say that to a kid who’d just struck out: “Shake it off.” Now that made sense. Don’t dwell on the disappointment. Get over it. Move on. You still have a game to play, and worrying about your mistake will jam you up.

  But offer it up? Do they believe that your own suffering can be offered up to relieve suffering in the world, as though there’s a cosmic accounting of the finite amount of suffering that goes around? Or do they simply mean, be content with whatever you are given? Don’t fix something that’s broken, like the plumbing in the retreat house?

  Before we came into the house, Beatrice presented me with a cotton ball in a Baggie. “You know the girl in Massachusetts, the suffering soul?” The girl had experienced a loss of oxygen to the brain when she was three and had been in a coma for over a decade. Her mother brought her to Medjugorje, and since they returned, several communion wafers had turned to flesh during communion in her bedroom, cures of terminal diseases had been claimed by visitors, and oil bleeding from every statue in her room had been absorbed into cotton balls and given away. The girl would sometimes suffer the same symptoms as the people who came to her for a cure, and was considered a suffering soul, who took on not only the pains of the people who came but the pain of the whole world. “The oil’s very powerful,” Beatrice had said. “It smells like roses.” Which it did.

  I take the cotton ball out of the Baggie and hold it to my nose as I try to make sense of it all, shivering in my bed, hungry. When I lived in Mexico, I’d heard drumming coming from the back of a church known as a pilgrimage site for penitentes. The church had lurid chipped murals of devils biting flesh and frightfully bloody depictions of Christ. A statue of Jesus leaning on a rod was in the main chapel. I’d been told the rod was the axis mundi, the conduit between this world and the unseen world. That was where Mary probably lived; where all the angels and saints and devils lived. Sometimes they broke through to the other side, especially at hot spots like Medjugorje. And sometimes you broke through to them. In the ancient world the division hardly existed.

  In the church in Mexico, Christ’s face bled tears, his back was a gruesome mat of blood; but his expression wasn’t pained so much as worried and hurt for us. I had walked toward the drumming, past a sign that said No Trespassing, and peeked through the crack between the two ancient wooden doors. Men with no shirts wore crowns of thorns and beat their own backs over their shoulders with whips. Now why would they do that? To exhibit their love to God, I guessed. To show him they loved him so much they were willing to make themselves bleed. But does the God Father Slavko talks about believe that his children, whom he loves, should suffer for him like that, to prove their love?

  Some suffering is of our own making, and so is our punishment. What you do unto others is done unto you. God doesn’t do this; you do it to yourself. Less easy to explain is the suffering you have no control over: natural disasters, accidents, evil done unto you.

  The summer after I was hit by the car in New York, I was writing at the dining table overlooking Avenue A and saw something yellow streaming down from the sky. A little girl around two years old in a yellow dress lay on the sidewalk. Women screamed; men made a circle and reached their arms out, but it was as though the girl was a fire and they couldn’t touch her. A cop car screeched up and one of the officers wrapped the girl in his jacket and carried her off. A few minutes later the mother appeared on the street, pulling her hair and screaming up at the window her daughter had fallen from.

  Back then, when I was thirty-one, I wrote a bad poem blaming Mary and her powerlessness for the girl’s death; Mary was a mother, how could she let this happen?

  People are maimed and tortured every day. Holocausts happen. I understood now what Father Slavko would say to this: it is people performing atrocities, not God. But how would Slavko explain a baby falling out a window? That death is part of life, that sorrow and pain are what bring you to a need for the comfort of God, and only when you acknowledge your need is there room for God to enter? I already knew from experience that once you feel that God-love inside of you, nothing hurts quite so much anymore.

  Still, I cannot begin to explain or to understand how to reconcile the presence of such pain in the midst of the love I’m beginning to feel is at the core of everything, including ourselves.

  But it is the martyr element in Catholicism that most troubles me. Historically, for the religion to survive it was necessary to promote the belief that it’s better to die than renounce your God. Christ died because he was a political activist, a revolutionary truth teller, and society killed the messenger. Christ was a hero, but I did not for the life of me get the connection between Christ’s suffering on the cross and our suffering to find grace.

  Mary suffered, and we remember her for that, but it’s not what she is most celebrated for. Mary suffers the way all mothers, all people in the world, suffer, and she survived the suffering unembittered by it; she survived it with love. She is not a martyr, and she invites us to find refuge in her heart, that famous heart she wears on her chest, flames bursting out, a dagger piercing it and roses dancing round.

  Wednesday we make a side trip to Father Jozo’s church, an hour away along winding mountainous roads. I’ve eaten nothing but a slice of bread and a cup of tea three times a day for three days now. Father Jozo was the priest here when Mary first started appearing in Medjugorje. His translator comes on the bus ride with us and leads us in two rosaries. Between each ten Hail Marys we sing a song that goes, “Come, Holy Spirit. . . .”

  As soon as I enter the church, I smell roses. I don’t believe it at first, but the scent is strong and does not go away. “You smell roses?” I break silence to ask the sisters. They shake their heads, look significantly at each other, and smile kindly at me.

  I want to believe that the roses are Mary’s way of letting me know she’s here, of giving me support, telling me she appreciates the painful self-examinations I’ve been putting myself through while shivering in bed, unbathed and starving.

  Then, when Father Jozo begins to speak, I think Our Lady has sent me a gift of roses because she does not want me to bolt from his lectern-hammering sermonizing. Father Jozo is a burly, unsmiling man with a balding head and intense dark eyes. “During all time there has never been such a time of grace,” says Father Jozo through his translator. “Every day for sixteen years. It is not a miracle that Our Lady comes. It is a miracle that you have come to see her. She is our mother, she must come. But she is not here to make your life smooth. She’s here to hold your hand. She was not at Calvary to take away the cross.

  “She says, ‘Pray, pray, pray. Prepare the soil of your heart.’

  “In 1945, Communists walked through the door of this church and the priests were given the choice of dying, or living by renouncing their God. They refused to renounce God and were shot and burned.”

  “Now,” says the translator, “the father will lead us in the Joyful Mysteries.”

  Another rosary!!! We already said two on the bus ride over.

  After we finish, Jozo continues. “You are creating a world without God. Show me a woman who has found contentment or peace from killing her unborn child. A wound remains.”

  Back on the bus, Beatrice leads yet another rosary—the Sorrowful Mysteries, basically a recounting of the stages of Jesus’ “Passion,” his persecution and death. I’ve had enough. Especially when she gets to the Scourging at the Pillar: “Every
part of his body was torn and beaten. Imagine how the salt of his tears burned when they entered his open wounds, stinging him like the memory of his betrayal. . . .” I block my ears like a five-year-old.

  Back in bed in the middle of the afternoon at the retreat house, I feel sick thinking of my confession to Father Freed the next day. By participating in the rite of confession I will be implying a belief in a priest’s authority to act in God’s name, on God’s behalf. I will be a practicing Catholic, which will place me in obeisance to Father Jozo, to all priests, and to the Pope. I will have to confess my abortion.

  I smell roses again, and remember the first time I mourned my unborn baby. I was in Mexico, and in love for the last time. Kip was a veterinarian, nine years younger than me. I’d moved to Mexico with him when he’d taken a job to oversee an aid project. There were roses blooming in our garden that lovely summer evening in 1989 after the rains had come just as the campesinos said they would, on June 24, John the Baptist’s day. God was part of everyday life in Mexico. Statues of Mary and Jesus in churches were dressed in real clothes and wigs and paraded around. People set up little altars to the Virgin of Guadalupe in their houses. They set food and candles and flowers before her and asked her for things. Yet the first thing I did when Kip and I moved into our little house in the dairy village was to take Guadalupe’s picture down.

  I did not know at the time that Guadalupe was the Virgin Mary. I thought she was a Mexican saint, and in the crude images I’d seen of her, she looked like a beetle with spikes. I had, however, found a cloth embroidered with her image, which I draped over my computer when I was done writing for the day. After I’d stashed the printer in the china cabinet, I’d balanced deep-blue candles in the backs of the lime-green lizard candleholders on my desk, which was also our dinner table. Kip would be home any minute, and I wanted the place to be lovely and ordered. I carried some scissors out to the garden and waved to the three women staring over our wall waiting for a glimpse of La Gringa Alta. A rumor had circulated through the village that La Gringa sat sola in her kitchen and stared at a television screen with words on it—my computer, which I’d had to smuggle in. The fact that I might enjoy my solitude was hard for most Mexicans to imagine. They had huge extended families of cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents, all crowded into a couple of houses. A woman my age without her children near was someone to be pitied. Children were your wealth and motherhood a virtue in a country that revered Mary more than any other saint, even—or so it seemed—more than her son. Women in Mexico were not “liberated,” in the popular sense, but they were the strength of the family. Mi hijo was the endearment used to address their husbands: “my son.” In Mexico, in the middle of a nation watched over by Mother Mary, I thought I might like to be a mother again myself. In Mexico, for the first time in my life, I thought I might like to be a wife.

  I decided on yellow roses and cut eight blossoms, which I pressed to my face as I walked back inside. I arranged them in an earthenware vase in the middle of the dinner table, then lit the candles. The tamales I’d bought from a woman at the picnic table set outside her door were beginning to give off their sugary fragrance in the oven when I heard a horse on the porch.

  Kip was astride him bareback, holding his baseball hat over his heart. “Come on, Bevy, we’re going for a ride,” he said, his grin so bright it shone through the screen door.

  I did not want to go riding on any horse. I hated horses. Their nostrils flare, their eyes dart around, and they’re huge and unpredictable. There was no moon out there, it was dark, tamales were in the oven, the table was set. But then I recalled last Saturday night and how I’d wanted to stay home then, too, and what I’d potentially missed. We’d been invited to a Quinceaños celebration, which is a girl’s fifteenth birthday, her coming-out party, at which she is dressed in virginal white. I preferred to stay home and work and avoid the frustration of trying to make conversation in Spanish, of which I knew maybe two hundred words, all in the present tense. Kip complained that he was restless. He’d done no physical work that day; dancing would be fun. I compromised by playing checkers with him. When I creamed him in two games straight, he complained that I was too competitive, and said, “This is not relaxing.” Then we heard the band at the Quinceaños at the other end of the village strike up again, and Kip said, “Come on, let’s go.”

  “No,” I said unequivocally; he could go alone. So he did. A half an hour later Juan, the man who’d dug a patch of garden for me to plant herbs in, knocked at the door and handed me a napkin. On it Kip had written, “Turn off the computer and come NOW.” I told Juan to tell Kip I’d be there in a minute. I changed into a dress, feeling a little piqued, but I put on red lipstick and waded through the muddy village in the dark, stepping on rocks, avoiding snarling dogs. When I reached the fiesta, Kip was standing with ten men, all of them grinning and nodding at me, all of them aware of the note he’d sent, and all of them, just ten minutes before, trying to get him to dance with every sola woman in the backyard. The band was led by the principal of the school and played traditional Mexican-hat-dance music. Kip and I did our best at dancing and the people smiled and nodded and toasted us, the Americanos who had come to live with them. The host kept handing us rum-and-Cokes. When we were all good and drunk the band switched to rock and roll, and Kip and I danced so wildly, people made a circle around us to watch.

  I reminded myself that I would have missed a good time had I stayed home that night, that I should try to look at life as an adventure instead of as a problem to be solved.

  “Come on,” Kip called through the door. “Climb the rail and hop on.” I was afraid of that flare-eyed horse, but didn’t want to admit it. I stood on the porch rail as Kip patted my seat in front of him on the horse.

  So I did it. I climbed on and tangled my hands in the horse’s mane as Kip wrapped my waist with one arm and gave a giddyap with the other. We rode through the village, the horse’s hooves clomping on the stones, its back rocking rhythmically beneath us, until we reached an alfalfa field at the edge of town and the horse took off. Kip held me close as I laughed so hard from terror and the thrill of it that I almost fell off. Then Kip lifted me off in the alfalfa, and while the horse ate his heartful nearby, we made love on the soft grasses.

  That night I dreamed of Joseph, the man to whom I’d been engaged when I was twenty-five. Angry and bitter because I broke off the engagement for my “bigger” plans, he was holding a hat filled with three kittens and offering them to me. In the dream I wished he would forgive me—and then was awakened in real life by a bell at the gate. Kip pulled on his jeans to answer it, then came back to the bedroom. It was a farmer with a sick cow, and he was waiting for Kip outside. Kip changed into his jumpsuit, then kissed me goodbye, saying he’d try to bring home fresh milk, which the villagers sometimes presented him in payment.

  I made oatmeal and fed the leftovers to the three wild kittens—my little friends in the backyard. I made no association of these kittens with the kittens in the dream about Joseph. Their mother, a feral cat I’d named May, had delivered them in the stones of our back wall. Neither May nor her kittens would let me get near, so I’d watched their frolicking from the kitchen window. Now it seemed May had left her children to fend for themselves, and so I fed them. I watched the kittens eat for a while, then came back in and began to write. I put in a solid few hours before Kip returned, and we made plans for a drive into Morelia, the city a half hour away. Kip had a meeting with another veterinarian, and I would sightsee and shop. Later, Kip would meet me in the cathedral for an organ recital.

  Kip dropped me off in the square and I bought some sweet custardlike bars with coconut on top and figs embedded in them, then went into the cathedral. It was dark in there, cool and still. Christ looked pained on his cross while the Virgin looked compassionate and kind on top of her world. I sat in a pew, took a deep breath of air spiced with incense. In the silent stillness, all my feelings of loss and joy and fear ran up and down and through
me. It was as though kind ears were listening and waiting; the very air was quiet with compassion, and it felt safe to spill feelings that had been a secret even to me. I bent my head into my hands and felt, simply, lost—as I remembered another dream I’d had the night before. In that dream I had a pain, pushed once, and gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. I experienced such a feeling of contentment and well-being that I thought, So this is how an infant feels when she drinks from her mother’s breast. Then, still in the dream, with a jolt, I realized I wouldn’t be able to have a career, and that the father was Nigel. Suddenly, I felt like an orphan.

  Awake, it made no sense. I was confusing motherhood with being a baby. I’d felt contentment like a baby drinking from a breast, but I was the mother, the one drunk from. Or was it possible that being a mother could give you such contentment? I’d never experienced that. But in the dream, I’d ended up feeling like an orphan, who’d been wanted for a brief moment but wasn’t wanted anymore. Was I the rejecter or the rejected—or were they the same thing? Was this dream about a child homesick for her mother or about a mother rejecting her child?