The girl who told me this story had been to Paris with her parents when she was a child. She had visited the chapel where Catherine Labouré’s body is displayed in a glass casket near the altar. She had seen Catherine’s brilliant blue eyes looking straight into her own and she had worn her medal ever since.
I learned about the rosary which had been a gift from Mary to Saint Dominic in 1208. She had appeared to him while he was praying to her in the chapel of Notre Dame in Prouille, France. She gave Dominic the rosary and asked him to go forth and teach people how to use it in prayer. I learned about the fifteen decades of the rosary, how each commemorates a miraculous event in the lives of Mary and Jesus: the Five Joyful Mysteries, the Five Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Five Glorious Mysteries.
The rosaries and the medals were most noticeably in evidence during pregnancy scares and final exams. During such times of extreme stress, I frequently came upon one or another of my Catholic friends crossing themselves, fingering their medals, or mumbling under their breath and fiddling with their rosary beads. Like many twenty-year-olds, I was working on the perfection of my own brand of cynicism and, in that frame of mind, these religious objects sometimes struck me as being akin to the lucky rabbit’s feet or four-leaf clovers the rest of us relied on.
Although the faith of my Catholic classmates was rather erratic, essentially they believed that Mary, in her role as mediatrix, would intervene on their behalf and relay their messages to her son who, hopefully, could not refuse his blessèd mother anything. Over and over again, they whispered their prayers of petition:
Hail Mary, full of grace: The Lord is with thee. Blessèd art thou among women, and blessèd 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.
Sometimes their prayers were answered.
In my third year of university I took a course in Medieval and Renaissance Art. Many of the painters we studied had taken biblical, especially New Testament, events and characters as their subjects. I still have the textbook. In it, Mary is everywhere. Few of these richly dramatic renderings bear much, if any, resemblance to those milky clichéd images of Mary as passive vessel that I had seen back in Sunday school. Each of these artists had conjured her and the narrative of her life according to his own personal vision. Most had outfitted her with the clothing and accessories of their own eras, translating her forward in time, filling the canvas around her with objects and symbolic details sometimes verging on the bizarre.
The Annunciation by Fra Angelico. A young blond Mary dressed in a soft pink dress and a deep blue robe sits inside an arched portico. The vaulted ceiling is blue dotted with gold and the floor is a swirling wave of color. Mary has been surprised at her reading by the arrival of the angel Gabriel. Her book is open upon her right knee, her hands are crossed against her breasts. Gabriel, resplendent in pink and gold and carefully balancing his large feathered wings, bows humbly before her and delivers the big news. A beam of golden light bearing a white dove shines down upon Mary, poured from a pair of hands inside the sun. To the left of the portico is a lush green forest out of which Adam and Eve are being firmly ushered by Michael the Archangel. Everyone in this painting is pale and blond and the haloes of Mary and Gabriel are as big as plates.
Virgin and Child by Jean Fouquet. An apparently bald Mary wears a large gold crown studded with rubies and pearls. Her white skin is tinged with green, so shiny and smooth she looks like an alien. Her tight-fitting, low-cut blue gown has burst open at the laces in the middle and her left breast has popped out. It is also greenish white, looking as round and hard as a billiard ball, with a tiny white nipple in the center. This bulbous breast hovers above the head of a plump baby Jesus resting naked on a pale gray sheet. He has red hair and colorless eyes, rolls of fat under his chin and around his elbows, wrists, ankles, and thighs. Both his left index finger and his fat little penis are pointing to the right at something beyond the frame. There are circles under his eyes and a single tear on his left cheek.
Glorification of the Virgin by Geertgen tot Sint Jans. Another Mary with long, thin red hair and a large forehead wears a bejeweled red and white crown. Her dress and cloak are both bright red. Beneath them she is wearing what appears to be a black leotard, the kind you would wear to aerobics class. She is apparently legless, poised on a golden half-circle with a nasty-looking lizard curled around it. The lizard has sharp claws and fangs and is spitting either its thin red tongue or a stream of blood up at Mary. She is holding the baby Jesus against her right shoulder. His arms and legs are gangly and thin. He is kicking his feet and holding in his hands two hollow silver globes that could be either Christmas tree ornaments or a pair of gaudy earrings. Mary and Jesus are contained in an oval of orange light which fades to black toward the frame. Both these light and dark areas are filled with hundreds of tiny naked angels so scrawny they look like skeletons.
Mater Dolorosa by El Greco. The sorrowful mother. This Mary wears a gray scarf over her dark brown hair, a black cloak against a black background. Her thin face is very small, her black eyes very large. Her hands are clasped in prayer at her breast and her head is tilted slightly to the left. Any minute now she is going to cry and cry and never stop.
Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy! Hail, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, your eyes of mercy toward us; and after this, our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary! Amen.
I do not mean to imply that I have carried these images of Mary in the front of my mind for all these years since. The truth is, I seldom gave her more than a passing thought, even when she did occasionally pop into view. There were those two old Beatles songs, “Lady Madonna” and “Let It Be,” and there were several houses around town with small shrines set up in their front yards like lawn ornaments.
These featured blue and white plaster or concrete statues of Mary in various sizes. Some were installed in plastic grottoes, others in bathtubs. Many were decorated seasonally, with real or plastic lilies and strings of Christmas lights. I never witnessed anyone actually worshipping at or tending to one of these shrines. It was as if the decorations appeared and disappeared miraculously, by way of divine, rather than human, intervention. I did not give these installations any more serious thought than I gave to the pink flamingos or plastic dwarves that graced the adjoining front yards.
Day after day, week after week, year after year, I went on with my life in the usual secular way: making meals, making beds, making books, making promises, decisions, and mistakes, making my own dogged way in the world, with all of these divine images stowed away somewhere in the intricate folds of my brain. They were like dream images, those ones that are so vivid when you first wake in the morning, and then within minutes they begin to fade until, by the time you get the coffee made, they have disappeared completely and you are left with nothing more than an uneasy sense of having lost something but you cannot say what.
Maybe Mary is one of those archetypes that swim in the pool of the collective unconscious that Carl Jung wrote about, a part of that common symbolic inheritance of all humanity. Maybe everyone has some image of Mary in the back of their minds, an image that, like matter, can be neither created nor destroyed.
I thought about Mary only when she made the news. This happened more often than you might expect of a woman who had been dead for almost two thousand years.
As the new millennium closed in upon us all, reports of sightings of Mary seemed to increase. News of these phenomena were usually relegated to the back pages of the daily paper. Mary had a habit of popping up in unexpected and unlikely places. At various times, she was said to have appeared in a yucca tree, a privet hedge, and a muddy field of cabbages and onions. In various locations around the world, icons of Mary were changing color, moving arou
nd, and weeping blood, tears, oil, or milk. She frequently spoke to the visionaries, delivering messages, warnings, and instructions. She asked them to pray, to fast, to spread the word, to have churches or shrines built in her honor on the sites where she had revealed herself to them. Her image was photographed in the large tinted windows of a finance company in Clearwater, Florida, and on the concrete floor of an auto parts store in Progreso, Texas. And then there was the Holy Camaro—Mary’s likeness spotted by a sharp-eyed mechanic in the dents and rust spots on the bumper of a late-model Camaro in Elsa, Texas.
There were numerous sightings of Jesus too. His face was seen in the X ray of the spine of a man whose neck was broken in a car accident, in the wound on a maple tree where a limb had been lopped off, on the side of a soybean oil storage tank, in the scorch marks on a burnt tortilla, on the brick wall of a Tim Hortons donut shop in Bras D’Or, Nova Scotia, and in a plate of spaghetti on a Pizza Hut billboard in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
I read these reports with an ironic postmodern eye. But I tried to be open-minded too. If, for the sake of argument, I managed to overcome my own skepticism and could convince myself that those who claimed to have seen Jesus and Mary were not simply the spiritually inclined equivalent of those who claimed to have seen Elvis or aliens or both, if I could actually accept these divine apparitions as plausible fact, then I had to wonder why Jesus and Mary were choosing to reveal themselves in such ludicrous ways. Why were they so foolishly leaving themselves and the visionaries wide open to ridicule? Was it a test, a test of faith? Were they saying to the faithful: If you can believe this, then you can believe anything?
Or were they simply trying to show the world that even the Almighty has a sense of humor?
How else was I to interpret the newspaper story of several evangelical Christians who claimed that God had implanted gold fillings in their mouths after they prayed for dental healing? (Having had a lifelong aversion to dentists myself, I have to admit that the idea of divine dentistry appeals to me. I assume it would be painless and silent and would not involve being held helpless in a chair for an hour or two while a large man and his assistant stick their hands and an assortment of ghoulish instruments into your mouth.)
God as dentist? Jesus’ face in a plate of spaghetti? The Virgin Mary on the bumper of a Camaro? These manifestations struck me as akin to subliminal advertising, the way they used to embed pictures of popcorn between movie frames or images of naked copulating couples in the ice cubes of liquor ads. Buy popcorn. Get drunk, get lucky. Believe in me.
But even while these reservations were going through my rational mind, I found myself deeply moved by the unflinching faith of those who truly believed.
Whenever I was asked (or asked myself) if I believed in God, I always said yes. I guess I was what you might call “a small c Christian.” Although I had stopped going to Sunday school as soon as my parents would let me and had seldom set foot in a church since, I, like most people, whether they go to church or not, did pray sometimes, mostly out of sheer desperation, mostly for an easy way out. I prayed in the regular way, begging God, not Mary, for favors, forgiveness, money, or peace of mind. I, too, at certain junctures of anger and despair, had thrown up my arms, glared at the heavens, and wailed:
—Why me, God? Why me?
And sometimes, sweating and sleepless in the middle of a long hot night, I, too, with the humid darkness pressing down upon my mouth like a hand, had whispered:
—Forgive me, God. Please forgive me.
I did not think of myself as a particularly religious or spiritual person. I guess I was what has been called a neoagnostic. My trust in intellectual reasoning as the most important avenue to knowledge and understanding left me feeling skeptical about traditional organized religion. And yet, I did believe in something, some higher metaphysical power in operation beyond the merely human, some omnipresent force administering rewards and punishments according to some incomprehensible plan. Perhaps it was simply for want of a better word that I called this power God. My confidence in this supreme being waxed and waned according to my own circumstances and to how hard done by I did or did not feel in any given situation.
Like most people, I was always hoping and praying for something, and I did not know for sure the difference between the two. I could always find something to feel guilty about and so I assumed that punishment could not be far behind. It never occurred to me that some of the things I perceived as punishment might just be coincidences. Like most people, I did not understand that not everything was about me.
I had not worked out the details of this whole arrangement. If anyone challenged my beliefs, I found myself quickly floundering out of my depth. I had always taken God more or less for granted, but I had no more proof of his existence than the next person, no more reasonable explanation as to why there was so much suffering and tragedy in the world if indeed there were actually someone in charge. I did not understand evil either.
For want of a better explanation, I often fell back on the notion of poetic justice. I clung to this idea in a split-brain kind of way: much as I could see little or no consistent evidence of good people being justly and richly rewarded, still I kept insisting that bad people would surely get what they deserved in the end. This was like believing my daily horoscope in the newspaper when it promised riches, romance, and good news from an unexpected source, while dismissing astrology as the trivial construct of simple-minded fools when my horoscope predicted failure, sickness, and betrayal.
As for the matter of poets and justice, I have since read the story of Saints Theodore and Theophanes, two Greek brothers who were tortured in the ninth century for their outspoken belief that images of Mary, Jesus, and the saints were suitable objects for worship and devotion. In an effort to silence them, the iconoclastic emperor, Theophilus, had them bound and tied to a bench. Then twelve lines of poetry were carved into their foreheads.
Although I was mostly of two minds about the whole issue of God, I had to admit that, in my heart of hearts, I wanted very much to believe. Not surprisingly, I was also of two minds on that Monday in April when I first met the Virgin Mary. On the one hand, I figured there was a reasonably good chance that I had lost my mind altogether. On the other hand, I felt as if I had known her all my life. And in many ways, I had.
Of all the images of Mary that had entered my life over the years, the one that came most clearly to mind that day was, not surprisingly, the most recent.
About six weeks earlier, I had happened to turn on the late-night news just as they were showing video footage of the disastrous floods taking place several hundred miles to the southwest. While we were enjoying a pleasant early spring here, it was proving to be a dangerous season in many other areas of the continent. This was the first of many such floods brought on by heavy rains and the run-off from unusually high snowfalls that winter. The camera panned whole towns submerged. The brown water reached to the tops of stop signs in some places, to the second floors of houses and stores in others. Floating in the water were pots and planks, mattresses and kitchen chairs, books, pictures, children’s toys, dead dogs and cats, an overturned canoe. More rain was predicted and still the level of the river had not peaked.
This story ended with a shot of a life-sized statue of Mary completely surrounded by water up to the middle of her chest. Her face was battered, her cheekbones chipped, her forehead gouged, and her nose was half broken off. While the water rose around her, she stood there alone in her blue dress, and still the rain continued to fall.
And God said unto Noah…behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die…and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.
They cut then from the statue of Mary to a commercial for a new cold remedy. A cherubic red-haired boy in a shiny yellow sli
cker couldn’t find his other boot. His mother, who had a terrible cold but you’d never know it because she’d taken this amazing new product, helped him look. In seconds, she was standing in the doorway with a smile on her face and a little yellow rain-boot in her hand. She helped her son on with his boot, kissed him on the top of the head, and sent him on his merry, puddle-jumping way. Then she enthusiastically explained that these new cold pills made her feel so good that she could once again happily assume her rightful motherly role as the finder of all lost things.
Secrets
Mary found the coffee filters, ground the beans, rinsed out the pot, filled it with cold fresh water, and then poured it slowly into the coffeemaker. I sat at the kitchen table. I watched her and I worried. What did she want from me? I thought about those brief newspaper reports I had read and the many requests she had made of those other people over the years. Did she want me to pray, to fast, to go to the bishop and tell him to build a church here on this very spot where my cozy kitchen now stood?
Our Lady of the Lost and Found Page 5
