Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  The worst thing that has ever happened to me does not even register on the same seismic scale of tragedy as the things these people have lived through. When all is said and done, I have to admit that I hardly know the meaning of the word suffering. I am well aware of (and whole-heartedly thankful for) the fact that I have only an arm’s-length acquaintance with evil, that all of what I know (or think I know) about it has come to me from secondary sources, from television, books, history, and the news. I know full well that I have only ever looked at evil through the safe filter of stories told with images on a screen or words on a page.

  So what right do I have to feel sad, even a little bit? What right do I have to indulge my own sadness and press it close to my heart?

  When the list of deadly sins was first drawn up in the late fourth century by Evagrios of Pontus, it included eight sins, not seven, and one of them was sadness. In the late sixth century, the list was reduced to seven by Pope Gregory the Great and still sadness remained. It was not until the seventeenth century that the intangible sin of sadness was replaced by the more specific sin of sloth.

  In addition to sloth, the list now includes pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, and envy. Who among us has not been guilty of practicing each and every one of these sins at some point in our lives?

  Contrast the seven deadly sins with the seven virtues: faith, hope, love, prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. Who among us has not also practiced each and every one of these at some point, however fleeting, in our lives?

  For hours on that Thursday night I tossed and turned in my bed in my white room. Obviously I was nowhere near falling asleep. Neither the potpourri nor my interior decorating strategies were working. These thoughts about evil, faith, doubt, and sin went round and round and round in my head just as they had on many other nights before. I was thinking and thinking and getting nowhere, as has so often happened in the never-ending conversation I’ve been having with myself for all these years.

  That night my thoughts continued to spin like the two neighborhood tomcats that sometimes fight in my yard in the middle of the night and when I go outside in my nightgown to chase them away, they are rolling up and down my driveway in a ferocious ball of teeth and claws, oblivious and screaming. I have to turn the hose on them to break it up, and in the morning I find chunks of fur all over the asphalt: black, white, orange, some with the skin still attached.

  Sometimes I feel fed up with all the irony and injustice in the world, utterly exhausted by the Sisyphean effort of trying to make sense of things: of myself, of my life, of the world (which both is and is not mine), of other people (who both are and are not like me). On October 12, 1999, the population of the world reached 6 billion: another large number of which I cannot truly conceive. Of the 370,000 babies born that day, the designated six billionth baby was a boy born at two minutes after midnight to twenty-nine-year-old Fatima Nevic in a Sarajevo hospital. With so many people in the world, how can I possibly know anything for sure about any one of them?

  Sometimes I feel completely defeated by the daily struggle of trying to understand, of trying to be mature, responsible, happy, and good. Sometimes I long to throw off the yoke of reason, to crawl out from under what Cervantes called “the melancholy burden of sanity.” Sometimes I want to get out of the way, stop trying so hard, and just let things happen.

  Sometimes all I want is for someone to tell me that everything is going to be all right. I want someone to tell me this over and over again in a sweet but firm voice, the way you would tell it to a child sobbing in the dark after a nightmare about a hairy green monster under the bed. I want someone to tell me this often enough to banish my doubts and make me believe it.

  For all these years, I had thought of doubt and faith as mutually exclusive opposites. Also faith and reason, faith and despair, faith and fear. I had thought that as long as I still had doubt, I could not have faith. For all these years, I had assumed that God did not want to hear from me until I had resolved my doubts and vanquished my uncertainty.

  But that Thursday night in April with the Virgin Mary sleeping in the room next door, it suddenly occurred to me that I was wrong. Maybe this endless internal monologue need not be a monologue at all. Maybe it was meant to be a dialogue. Perhaps, for all these years, I had not needed to be talking to myself. Perhaps, for all these years, I could have been talking to God. Perhaps that night, when I thought I was thinking, really I was praying. Maybe I had been praying all along.

  Perhaps it was more important to ask these questions than to have all the answers. Perhaps God was just as interested in hearing about my doubts as anything else. I finally understood that just as, according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, a system is changed by the observer, so I, too, was being changed forever by asking the questions in the first place. I finally understood that my uncertainty and my doubt were gifts that made me the perfect candidate for faith.

  More than anything, I wanted to master the state of being that John Keats called “Negative Capability.” I, too, wanted to be “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I wanted to have my doubts and my faith, too, both of them at once, without having to lose one for the sake of finding the other. When faced with all these mysteries and questions, I wanted to be able to admit that I did not know how to make sense of it all and that, in the end, my not knowing did not matter.

  —I don’t know, I wanted to say in answer to these questions, and I wanted to say it with utter confidence, without discomfort, regret, or apology. I wanted to surrender.

  —I don’t know, I whispered then, trying it out in my white room in the middle of the night.

  At that moment, just for a moment, I had the distinct sense of a small window opening, of all my spinning thoughts lining themselves up and slipping single-file through the crack. And then they were gone.

  I was not naive enough to believe that they were gone forever. Maybe they weren’t even gone for long, but for the moment, they were indeed gone and that, in itself, was a great relief. That, for the time being, was enough.

  History (7)

  …the philosophical artist, at his or her best, possesses the ability to link the foreground action of particular characters and settings to the deep currents flowing beneath the surface of a culture…Transformation is what faith and imagination have in common: they take the stuff of ordinary life and place it in the light of the ultimate questions of sin and redemption.

  —Gregory Wolfe, “The Christian Writer in a Fragmented Culture,” in The New Religious Humanists: A Reader

  In the act of looking back, the past is inevitably colored by everything that has happened between then and now. The further back you travel in time, the more the coloring builds up. It is a kind of camouflage, like thin layers of paint applied to a canvas, one color on top of another. Blue plus yellow equals green. Or does it?

  If I were a visual artist, I might call it “pentimento.” Named from the word repentance, this is when the painter, having “repented,” has covered over the original image with a new one. This could happen several times on one canvas, the original being buried ever deeper and deeper. But with the passage of time, parts of the top layers wear off or grow transparent with age. What is revealed are portions of the earlier paintings showing through like vague ghosts, misplaced memories, half-remembered dream images: two crows perched on top of the gallows with two dead men dangling beneath them; a profusion of Castilian roses blooming and bathed with summery dew in the desert in December; a battered statue standing in flood waters up to her chest and still the rain continues to fall.

  The observer is thus granted fleeting glimpses of the past like seeing out of the corner of your eye a person sliding by an open doorway. If only all those lost pieces could be found and put together again, then you might be able to see the true picture, what was there in the first place before time ran on ahead and changed everything.

  Our Lady of La Sal
ette

  On September 19, 1846, in the French Alps, a boy and a girl are tending a small herd of cattle on the slopes of Mont Planteau some distance above the remote hamlet of La Salette. The children are from the town of Corps near Grenoble. The girl, Mélanie Calvat (also known as Mélanie Mathieu), is almost fifteen, and the boy, Maximin Giraud, is eleven. They have been sent out to work as herders to help support their large poor families. Mélanie has been working since she was seven years old. She is the fourth of ten children and, since early childhood, has been rejected and mistreated by her mother, who is known to have locked her out of the house for days at a time. Maximin also comes from a troubled family. His father is a wheelwright who drinks most of his wages away. Maximin’s mother died when he was only eighteen months old, and his father was remarried four months later to a woman who turned out to be a stereotypical wicked stepmother. Neither Mélanie nor Maximin know how to read and they have never been to school.

  —Mélanie, Mary said, was described by her family and her employer as lazy, disobedient, irresponsible, unreliable, sullen, moody, and morose. At the time, these characteristics were considered personality problems and earned her relentless criticism and condemnation. Today, she would likely be seen as just another teenage girl overwhelmed by a deluge of hormones and a large dose of adolescent angst. Maximin, like most eleven-year-old boys, both then and now, was high-spirited and reckless, innocent and impulsive, lacking in both malice and foresight. Back then, his family was always trying to knock the spirit out of him. Now they would just shake their heads and murmur, Boys will be boys, while waiting more or less stoically for him to grow out of it. Now both their families would be called dysfunctional and they would all end up in therapy. Times change, Mary said. Or should I say: Time changes how we look at things.

  After the noon Angelus has sounded, the children take the cattle to drink from a spring in a small ravine on the southern slope of the mountain. Then they have a drink themselves, eat their meager lunches of bread and cheese, and stretch out on the grass for a nap.

  —The Angelus, Mary explained, is a devotion that originally came from that moment when the angel Gabriel appeared to me back in Nazareth and told me I would give birth to the Son of God. Churches toll their bells three times a day, morning, noon, and evening, to signal that it is time to pray. In Mélanie and Maximin’s time, the people in that part of France, having survived the Revolution, more or less, had not returned to their former faith. Few attended mass, and the other Catholic observances were seldom practiced. The Angelus had become more of a time clock or a meal bell than a call to prayer.

  When Mélanie and Maximin awake an hour later, they find that the cattle have wandered away. The children climb to the top of a nearby knoll from where they can see their cows a little ways off, quietly grazing, safe and sound, happily chewing their cuds. Relieved, the children go back to the ravine to retrieve their knapsacks.

  In the ravine, they see a blazing ball of light hovering just above the ground. As they shrink back in fear, the light whirls and turns in upon itself, growing to the size of a person. Mélanie begins to make out the shapes of a face and hands. Terrified, she drops her herder’s stick. Maximin clutches his ever more tightly, assuring Mélanie that if the thing tries to hurt them, he’ll give it a good whack.

  Inside the globe of light, the figure of a woman gradually becomes clear. She is seated on a rock with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. She is weeping.

  When the woman stands up, Mélanie and Maximin can see that she is tall and very beautiful, dressed in a peasant woman’s typical garb. She is wearing a long white dress and a yellow apron, a small shawl around her shoulders, and a close-fitting white bonnet on her head. At first, the children think she must be just another poor local woman who has been abused by her family.

  But as they watch, astonished, a crown appears on the woman’s head, edged with multicolored roses and emitting rays of light. Her dress, too, is sprinkled with bursts of light like stars and her apron glitters like pure gold. Her white slippers are decorated with pearls, gold buckles, and tiny roses. A large crucifix hangs from her neck on a golden chain. To the left of the body of Christ on the cross is a hammer and to the right, a pair of pliers. As the woman moves closer, the children are enveloped in her light. The woman speaks.

  —At first I spoke to them in French, Mary said. I warned them that unless the people of the region returned to the faith, they would soon suffer unbearable hardships. I told them that babies would be seized by convulsions and die in their parents’ arms, that another great famine was coming, even worse than the last one with the potatoes. When I said the French word for potatoes, pommes de terre, they frowned, and I realized they weren’t understanding me very well, so I switched to their local dialect. I warned them that this time the grapes and the walnuts would rot too.

  The mysterious woman continues to speak warnings, complaints, secrets, and stern admonitions to pray often and spread the word. Then, with her feet not touching the ground, she steps across a streambed, walks down the ravine and up the side of the mountain. With her face turned heavenward, she rises up and disappears.

  Although Mélanie has her suspicions that this woman they have seen might be a great saint or something, in fact it is the mother of her employer who first suggests that it is Mary.

  —Don’t forget, Mary said, that the events at La Salette took place twelve years before I appeared to Bernadette at Lourdes. People were less inclined then to jump to conclusions. It was Bernadette’s experience that really set the precedent in that part of the world. Unfortunately, what happened to Mélanie and Maximin afterward was also very much like what happened to poor Bernadette. They, too, were interrogated relentlessly even as word of my visit quickly spread and pilgrims began to make their way to La Salette. They expected miracles and they got them.

  In late October, a group of military recruits passes through the town of Corps. The two lieutenants with them have heard about the apparition. They are very curious and, upon encountering Maximin in a local café, ask him to get them a souvenir from the site. Maximin leaves the café and quickly returns with a rock half the size of a man’s hand. The lieutenants both want a piece of the rock so they split it in half with a hammer. On one surface of the broken rock there is an image of the face of Jesus.

  In the following weeks, many miraculous healings occur to those who partake of the water from the spring at La Salette. Among them is a woman from Corps named Marie Laurent who has been disabled by rheumatism for twenty-three years. For the last sixteen years she has been on crutches. This woman makes a big pot of soup from the spring water and eats it every day while praying. She begins this on November 17, a day on which seven hundred people have gathered at the site. By November 24, Marie Laurent is virtually cured. On November 28, the number of pilgrims has increased to one thousand.

  The healings continue, the pilgrims keep coming. On September 19, 1847, the first anniversary of Mary’s meeting with Mélanie and Maximin, fifty thousand people crowd together on the mountainside to worship. In 1851, on the fifth anniversary of the apparition, papal approval is given, and in 1879, a church is built on the site and consecrated by the cardinal archbishop of Paris to Our Lady of La Salette.

  —This story does not have a happy ending, Mary warned.

  Maximin does not live to see the church built. He dies in 1875 at the age of forty, having led an utterly aimless and occasionally scandalous life. Mélanie, too, leads a troubled life in various convents in France, England, and Italy. She writes a questionable book about her vision that is eventually banned by Pope Pius XI. She dies alone in 1904 at the age of seventy-two, a miserable, stubborn, obnoxious old woman at odds with the church and everyone who knew her.

  —Obviously Mélanie and Maximin were not saints, Mary said. They were all too human: flawed, foolish, and weak. By any worldly standards, they were disappointing failures. And yet, they did what I asked them to do: they spread the word and this dre
w thousands of people back to the faith. Being called to perform a special duty does not necessarily come with a guarantee of special sanctity. What Mélanie and Maximin did with their lives afterwards was up to them. Remember what I said to Bernadette: I cannot promise to make you happy in this world, but only in the next.

  It was George Orwell who said that all history is a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed as often as necessary. In the days before the invention of paper, writing materials were scarce and often reused. Vellum could be rubbed clean, papyrus could be washed, then written on again. But sometimes the earlier work was not completely erased and it would eventually begin to show through the later manuscript. As with pentimento, in a palimpsest, history can be found beneath the present work.

  The example I like best involves a Syriac text of the writings of Saint John Chrysostom. Once an anchorite in the mountains near Antioch, and eventually the archbishop of Constantinople at the end of the fourth century, Chrysostom was renowned for his eloquence and his name, given posthumously, means Golden Mouth. The discovered manuscript had apparently been written by someone else long after his death, probably in the tenth century. It was found to be superimposed on a Latin grammar text written in the sixth century. This, in turn, was found to be written over a set of fifth-century Latin records.

  I do not know the details of the various texts of this palimpsest, but I like to imagine the vaunting sweetness of John Chrysostom’s sermons, the top layer covering page after page of the conjugation of Latin verbs: veni, vidi, vici. These, in turn, cover table after table on the bottom layer, census records perhaps, lists of births, deaths, debts, and crimes.

  Each layer of the palimpsest is a piece of the past, true in its own way. Taken together, what they reveal is, like any good story, more than the sum of its parts.