Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  Mary shivered and we fled.

  —All God’s creatures, she muttered and then hummed a few bars of “La Cucaracha.”

  —Yes, indeed, I said. Sometimes you have to wonder: What was he thinking?

  As we left the store, the elderly woman in the blue sweater was standing at the cash register with her wallet in one hand and the marmalade kitten in the other. They both seemed to be purring.

  Next we went into the drugstore, where Mary bought shampoo, vitamins, and a bar of oatmeal soap. I bought deodorant, mouthwash, mascara, a pair of yellow rubber gloves, and a Scratch-and-Win lottery ticket. Mary raised her eyebrows at that.

  —I hope you don’t think I can help you with that, she said.

  —No, of course not, I said quickly, although the thought had crossed my mind.

  —Many people pray to me about this sort of thing, she said, but, the truth is, lotteries are not my department. There are angels who take care of that.

  I have since done some reading about angels. I have read that, according to fourteenth-century Kabbalists, the number of angels abroad in the world was 301,655,722. That was over six hundred years ago. It seems safe to assume that the number has increased substantially since then.

  Having been crowned Queen of Heaven seven days after her Assumption, Mary has held dominion over all of them for the past two thousand years. I have looked at a dictionary of angels and I’m sure that some of them are delightful, if somewhat eccentric: Angel of Aspirations, Angel of April, Angel of Friday, Angel of Fruit, Angel of Fascination, Angel of Food, Angel of the Footstool, Angel of Small Birds, Angel of Summer, Angel of Sunday, Angel of Sweet-Smelling Herbs, Angel of Vegetables, and Angel of the Odd.

  I have also looked at a children’s alphabet book with charming, whimsical illustrations of twenty-six angels: Angel of Oranges, Angel of Books, Angel of Chimneys, Angel of Ink, Angel of Planets, Angel of Rooftops, Angel of Windows, Angel of Yonder, and Angel of Eggs.

  Some of the fallen angels, I imagine, are less than cooperative: Angel of Annihilation, Angel of Confusion, Angel of Corruption, Angel of the Abyss, Angel of Earthquakes, Angel of Dread, Angel of Fornication, Angel of the Fiery Furnace, Angel of Horror, Angel of Hurricanes, Angel of Lust, Angel of Perversion, Angel of the Plagues, Angel of Quaking, Angel of Scandal, Angel of Rage, Angel of Vengeance, Angel of Winter, Angel of Wrath.

  Nowhere have I found mention of the Angel of Lotteries. He or she must be a recent addition to the roster.

  —The funny thing about lottery tickets, Mary mused as we waited in line at the cash register, is that people keep buying them even if they never win. Week after week, month after month, year after year, still they never give up hope. But if they pray for something two or three times, they expect immediate results, and if it doesn’t happen, then they say that God is unfair, disinterested, or dead. Why is it easier to keep believing in the lottery than in God?

  I assumed this was a rhetorical question and made no attempt to answer. If Mary herself had not figured it out, then I was not prepared to even hazard a guess.

  —I only buy them once in a while, I said in my own defense. Once in a while, just for fun. I don’t expect to win.

  In fact, it is only when I have a lottery ticket in my hand that I truly understand the difference between hope and expectation. When I was younger, looking for love and all too often having my heart broken again, my friends were always advising me to be more careful. They said it was okay to hope (although not too much) but that I should not have so many expectations. I did not know the difference between hope and expectation or how much was too much of either. But when I buy a lottery ticket, it all makes sense.

  I carry the ticket hopefully home, happily dreaming of what I will do with my winnings: new wardrobe, new car, new house, maybe a yacht or a sailboat, maybe a cruise to Alaska, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, or maybe all three. (In my lottery fantasies, I know how to swim and I like traveling.)

  Then I scratch my ticket and win nothing. I am hardly even disappointed. I drop it into the kitchen garbage can on top of coffee grounds, used Kleenexes, and the remnants of last night’s dinner. Then I walk away and do not give it a second thought.

  When I buy a lottery ticket, I hope to win but I don’t expect to. Translating this lesson from the lottery to life, however, is more difficult than you might imagine.

  Back home after our shopping trip, I scratched my ticket and won three dollars. It was better than nothing, of course, but not enough to do much else with besides buy another ticket.

  Our last stop at the mall was the jewelry store. Mary needed a new battery for her watch which, she said, had stopped that morning at precisely ten o’clock. I wondered briefly if there might be some significance to this.

  Mary removed the watch and asked the woman behind the counter if she would please put in a new battery for her as she always had trouble removing the back herself. While we waited, I looked at dozens of other watches displayed in a revolving rack on the counter. They were all stopped at different times. Again I wondered if this was significant.

  Does time pass if the clock is not ticking? Does time pass if there is no one there to measure it? I have no doubt that it does. I have also never doubted that a tree falling in the forest does indeed make a sound even if there is no one there to hear it. I cannot explain why I believe these things. I do not know if they are significant.

  I reminded myself that not everything is a sign, that some things simply are what they appear to be and should not be analyzed, deconstructed, or forced to bear the burden of metaphor, symbol, omen, or portent.

  Beside the watches was a rack of silver charms, just like the ones on my bracelet, just like some of the milagros we had unpinned from Mary’s dress. I wondered if it was still young women who bought charms or if it was now mostly middle-aged women, women like me trying to buy back their own innocent and aspiring selves, trying to find those parts of themselves they had lost on the journey from then to now.

  From behind the counter, the salesclerk said she couldn’t get the back off Mary’s watch either. She took it into the back room where, apparently, there was someone who was better at these things.

  Still waiting, Mary and I looked down into a large locked glass case which held the more expensive jewelry: diamond necklaces, bracelets, and rings, pure gold earrings and tiepins, a selection of heart-shaped lockets in both silver and gold with spaces on the front where you could have your initials engraved.

  The salesclerk returned triumphant and, while Mary retrieved her resurrected watch, I leaned in to take a closer look at the lockets. I caught a glimpse of my own face reflected in the glass, superimposed upon all those little hearts, and I remembered what Mary had said about Saint Teresa’s heart displayed in a glass case at the convent in Ávila and on it, you could see the gash where the angel had plunged in his spear.

  I have since read about other hearts under glass, most notably that of Saint Chiara, an Italian abbess who experienced the stigmata and visitations from both heaven and hell, and who, shortly before her death in 1308, proclaimed that the crucified Christ was present in her heart. When her body was later exhumed, her heart was found to be much larger than a regular heart and, when it was sliced open, images were revealed on the still juicy tissue. There was a thumb-sized crucifix with a red spot marking the wound in Jesus’ side. There were images of a lance, nails, a crown of thorns, and the marble column against which Jesus was scourged. Chiara was canonized in 1881 and her miraculous heart is still on display in a glass case at the Augustinian monastery in the tiny walled village of Montefalco.

  I have often been accused of wearing my heart on my sleeve. And if it, too, were sliced open and spread apart for all to see, I wonder what images might be found there, what pictures might have been inscribed by a fine steady hand into its succulent, glistening meat?

  History (5)

  I am the dreamer and the dream. I am the everything that is nothing, the spark of the soul, fire of the heart
, ember of love. I am up and down, top and bottom, strange and charmed. I am the woman clothed with the sun and the child swaddled in darkness. I am the tissue of contradiction, the eye in the needle, the needle in the eye. I am the insubstantial and absolute idea and the hammer that shatters your skull. I am the color you have not named, the light which makes all visible except itself. I am the wave of reason, the particle of faith. I am the star in the cosmos and the atom with the universe inside. I don’t seek, I find. I am the writing on the wall, the unutterable speech of the stone.

  —John Dufresne, Louisiana Power & Light

  To the enormous accumulation of written literature about Mary must now be added her ubiquitous presence in cyberspace. Soon after her visit, I discovered that Marian Web sites, like the books, number in the tens of thousands and they, too, come in an assortment of styles and approaches. They are, by turns, documentary, devotional, academic, personal. Some aspire to be comprehensive while others are of a more specialized nature.

  One of my favorites is Hail Mary! Six Thousand Titles and Praises of Our Lady, the Web site of a doctor in Missouri named Florent E. Franke, who began collecting names of Mary while recuperating from a gallbladder operation in 1945. Many of the names included on Dr. Franke’s exhaustive list are just what you would expect: Our Lady of Grace, Our Lady of Peace, Our Lady of Mercy, Our Lady of Consolation, Our Lady of Providence, Our Lady of Pity, Our Lady of Charity, Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady of the Cross, Our Lady of the Crown, Our Lady of the Little Ones.

  But some names of Mary that appear on Dr. Franke’s list and in other sources are more surprising, more intriguing, even whimsical: Our Lady of the Girdle, Our Lady of the Milk, Our Lady of the Precious Blood, Our Lady of the Bowed Head, Our Lady of the Swoon, Our Lady of the Smile, Our Lady of Pottery, Our Lady of Power, Our Lady of Hal, Our Lady of the Eraser, Our Lady of the Cradle, Our Lady of the Crib, Our Lady of the Thorns, Our Lady of Dull Students, Our Lady of Fertile Rocks, Our Lady of Anguish, Our Lady of Infibulation, Our Lady of Ransom, Our Lady of the Underground, Our Lady of the Willow Tree, Our Lady of the Window Pane, Our Lady of a Happy Death.

  I would add to these now Our Lady of the Internet, Our Lady of Cyberspace, Our Lady of the World Wide Web.

  There are hundreds of Web sites listing the major Marian apparitions. Some offer descriptive details and full-color images, while others simply state location, date, and names of the visionaries. On some lists, each apparition is classified according its standing with the Roman Catholic Church. The approval code consists of five little colored balls reminiscent of rosary beads. A yellow bead indicates that an apparition has received full church approval while a blue bead signifies a bishop’s approval only. Green means the apparition is still under investigation, pink means belief in an apparition is discouraged by the bishop, and red means total disapproval by the church.

  For those modern-day apparitions which are ongoing, these lists provide direct links to the Web sites of the visionaries themselves. They post in several languages the regular messages they receive from Mary. Some of these are every bit as apocalyptic and terrifying as those in the books. Others are more therapeutic and remedial in nature, relaying Mary’s suggestions on how to live an exemplary life. Here she offers kindly advice on the importance of patience, prayer, forgiveness, and solitude. She gives gentle warnings about the dangers of gossip, materialism, seeking revenge, being too hard on yourself, and frittering away your time on pursuits that do not glorify God.

  There are also thousands of Web sites devoted to individual Marian shrines around the world. Some of these are quite plain and simple, showing a photograph of the shrine and briefly describing its history. Others are more complex and sophisticated, using the latest computer technology to show off their particular Mary to her best advantage.

  At the Web site called Our Lady of Guadalupe: Patroness of the Americas, for example, you can listen to a stirring rendition of “Ave Maria” while reading, in English, Spanish, French, or Portuguese, a lengthy timeline of events related to the miracle, from Juan Diego’s birth in Cuautitlan in 1474 to his beatification by Pope John Paul II in 1990. You can also read in translation the complete text of The Nican Mopohua, the first written record of the Guadalupe apparitions ascribed to the sixteenth-century Aztec scholar Antonio Valeriano.

  Our Lady of Guadalupe

  On the morning of Saturday, December 9, 1531, a Mexican peasant named Juan Diego is on his way to mass. It is still dark when Juan leaves his humble home in Tolpetlac to make the nine-mile trek through the rocky barren hills to the nearest church in Tlatilolco. Orphaned as a young boy, Juan is now fifty-seven years old, a lonely childless widower, his beloved wife, María Lucía, having died suddenly two years before. He and his wife, along with the uncle who raised him, Juan Bernardino, were among the earliest converts to Christianity, which was brought to Mexico with the 1521 conquest by Cortés.

  —Before that, Mary said, the Aztecs worshipped a pantheon of pagan gods and goddesses, chief among them being the feathered serpent god, Quetzalcoatl. The main feature of the Aztec religion was the practice of human sacrifice, which they performed daily. Black-robed chanting priests ripped the hearts out of their living victims, offering some twenty thousand men, women, and children a year to nourish, appease, and flatter their bloodthirsty and demanding deities. It is said that, in 1487, eighty thousand Aztecs were sacrificed in a single four-day ceremony. But Juan Diego, always a devout and mystical man, had renounced all that and dedicated his life to Christ. He walked to the church in Tlatilolco several times a week to partake of the sacraments and receive further Christian instruction.

  This morning, as he reaches the base of Tepeyac Hill, Juan is startled to hear music like a delicate chorus of songbirds. He peers up at the mist-shrouded summit a hundred and thirty feet above him, once the site of a stone temple dedicated to the great mother-goddess, Tontanzin. There he sees a glowing white cloud shot through with streaming rays of light and a dazzling rainbow. Then he hears a woman’s sweet voice calling him. He clambers up the rocky hillside and there she is: a beautiful Mexican girl, so radiant that even the surrounding rocks and cacti are splashed with her multicolored light. She looks nothing like Tontanzin, whose head was made of snakes’ heads and her skirt of their writhing tangled bodies.

  The young woman speaks to him in his native Nahuatl dialect. She is kind and concerned. She calls him the smallest and dearest of her children. She wants to know where he is going. She tells him who she is: I am the perfect and perpetual Virgin Mary, Mother of the True God, through whom everything lives. She says she wants a teocali, a church, built in her honor on this spot. She says he must go to the bishop and make her request.

  —Juan, without question, fear, or doubt, agreed immediately, Mary said. He headed for Tenochtitlán, the large settlement that would one day become Mexico City. When he reached the house of Bishop Zumarraga, he was greeted by servants who, suspicious of this coarse, scruffy native, reluctantly ushered him into a small room where he waited alone for hours. Finally the bishop appeared and, with the help of the official church interpreter, Juan Diego told his story.

  The bishop listens patiently enough but, in the end, he is condescending and skeptical. He says he will have to think about it and sends Juan away. Disappointed, Juan leaves the city and heads for home. Mary is waiting for him at Tepeyac Hill. Juan tells her what happened. Discouraged, he says maybe she should find a better messenger since he, obviously, sadly, has failed. Mary assures him that he is her chosen one. He will have to go back to the bishop tomorrow and repeat her request.

  The next day, Sunday, the bishop is not so patient with this foolish old peasant who keeps pestering him with his outlandish story. Again he sends Juan away, this time saying he must have a sign from this mysterious woman claiming to be the Mother of God. When Juan again finds Mary waiting at Tepeyac, she tells him to come back the next morning and she will indeed provide the requested sign. If Juan is feeling frustrated, not to mention exhau
sted by all this trekking back and forth, he does not let on.

  —When he got back to Tolpetlac, Mary said, he found that his uncle, Juan Bernardino, had fallen ill with the dreaded fatal fever, cocolixtle. Juan Diego remained by his uncle’s bedside all that night, all the next day and the next night. He tried not to think about me waiting for him at Tepeyac. By Tuesday, December 12, it seemed that the end of his uncle was near. Juan set out for Tlatilolco to fetch a priest to perform the last rites. When he reached Tepeyac Hill, afraid that I was annoyed with him, Juan sneaked around the other side, hoping to avoid me.

  But there she is again. Juan apologizes profusely and explains about his dying uncle. Much to his relief, Mary is not mad at him. In fact, she assures him that his uncle is already fully recovered and now he can quit worrying and get on with the task at hand. But first there is the matter of that sign.

  Following her instructions, Juan climbs once more to the top of the hill. There, in the midst of thistles, cacti, mesquite, and prickly pear, he finds a profusion of Castilian roses in full fragrant bloom, bathed with a delicate summery dew. Having no container, Juan makes an apron with his tilma, a cape made of ayate fiber, a coarse fabric woven from the threads of the maguey cactus. He fills it with the moist blossoms and goes back down to Mary. She rearranges them carefully, ties up the tilma, and sends him again to the bishop. Bearing this miraculous treasure before him, Juan makes the journey with joy, certain that this time the bishop will believe him and honor Mary’s request.

  —Not surprisingly, Mary said, Juan was again abused by the servants, who cursed him and made him wait for hours outside the gates. Finally, he was allowed inside and this time he found the bishop accompanied by an entourage of important-looking men. Juan told his story and then loosened his knotted tilma. The roses, still fragrant and dewy, fell to the floor. So did the bishop and the other men.