Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  Think of those bald records as the facts. Think of the grammar text as an explanation of the medium by which they may be transformed. Think of the eloquent prayers of John Chrysostom as both the language and the narrative of history brought to life. Think of those thin places where the past shows through as the truth itself seeking to be transparent.

  Our Lady of Hope

  On January 17, 1871, in the village of Pontmain in the district of Mayenne in northwestern France, twelve-year-old Eugène Barbedette and his ten-year-old brother Joseph are in the barn helping their father prepare the horses’ evening feed. It has been an ordinary day for the Barbedette family, insofar as such a thing is possible during wartime.

  The family rose early on this Tuesday morning. They went to mass where Father Guérain, the parish priest, led the congregation in prayers for divine intervention to end the Franco-Prussian War which has been raging around them for almost a year. Paris is under siege and weakening daily, inching toward surrender to the Prussians. Having just won the battle for LeMans, the enemy is now intent upon overrunning the nearby town of Laval. The congregation prays every day for the safe return of the thirty-eight men from Pontmain who have been conscripted. One of them is the Barbedettes’ oldest son, Auguste.

  —It had been an exceptionally hard winter, Mary said, and it wasn’t only the Prussians that threatened Pontmain. Hungry wolves were slinking into farmyards in search of food, and deadly epidemics of smallpox and typhoid were breaking out in the area. Still the citizens of Pontmain refused to abandon hope. They prayed every day for God to take pity upon them. They prayed every day that his mercy would come to them through me.

  After mass, the two younger Barbedette boys went on to school. After school, they headed straight home to get started on their chores. Preparing the horses’ feed is a laborious and unpleasant process. Grain won’t grow around Pontmain, so branches of gorse bushes must be gathered and pounded in a mortar to make them edible. Young Eugène is tired and hungry. The branches are prickly and his hands are sore and scratched all over. He hates this job. Sometimes he hates these stupid horses too. He wanders to the open barn door when his father isn’t looking.

  It is almost six o’clock by now and the evening is clear and cold. Both the snow and the stars are sparkling. Looking up toward the gable of a neighboring house, Eugène sees a beautiful young lady in the indigo sky.

  —The night was so still, Mary said. I could hear cannon fire in the distance and two wolves howling at each other or the moon.

  The lady is wearing a dark blue dress dotted with golden stars and a pair of blue silk slippers decorated with golden ribbons. She is also wearing a black veil and a golden crown trimmed with a red ribbon. Around her head there are three bright stars. She spreads her hands in greeting. She smiles.

  —The slippers were a mistake, Mary said. My feet were very cold. And although I was smiling, the boy was frightened at first. He thought my black veil was a sign that his brother Auguste had been killed in the war.

  Eugène cries out and his father and brother rush to join him in the doorway. Joseph can see the lady but their father cannot. Eugène runs to the house and gets his mother. But even after she goes back inside to get her glasses, still she cannot see the lady in the sky. She is very angry and accuses her mischievous boys of lying. She will have none of this foolishness and makes them go inside for supper.

  —Supper, Mary said, was a pot of beans, some old carrots, and a heel of stale bread shared among the four of them. I could hear their stomachs growling. They drank pitchers of water until they felt full.

  After supper, the lady is still out there, waiting patiently in the evening sky. Word of her presence has already spread. Sister Vitaline, a nun from the village school, has come to the Barbedette barnyard with two young girls. Both the girls can see the lady but the nun cannot. The six-year-old grandson of a neighbor sees her too. A two-year-old held in his mother’s arms points and squeals the name of Jesus several times.

  —Soon the whole village was gathered in the barnyard, Mary said, almost eighty people staring up at the sky. None of the adults could see me, not even the priest and the nuns. They could see only the three bright stars around my head. Nevertheless, they were all weeping and praying the rosary, singing hymns while kneeling in the barn and the snow.

  As the people praise her, the lady begins to grow larger and larger until she has doubled in size. An oval frame forms around her and a sentence is spelled out letter by letter in French in the white space below her feet: Mais priez mes enfants. But pray my children. Eugène Barbedette and the other young seers relay the message to the eager adults. This sentence is followed by a second: Dieu vous exaucera en peu de temps. God will hear you in a little while. And then by a third: Mon fils se laisse toucher. My son permits himself to be moved.

  A red crucifix and a banner bearing the name of Jesus appears, also two small white crosses on her shoulders and four candles lit by the stars. She offers the crucifix to the children. The crowd continues to pray fervently. After three hours, a large white veil begins to swirl like a cloud around the lady’s feet. Slowly she is lifted and enshrouded and then she disappears.

  —I had done everything I could, Mary said.

  Later that night the Prussian army stops its advance through the French countryside. Nine days later, on January 26, more than five hundred pilgrims fill the Barbedette barnyard, offering their prayers all day long to Our Lady of Hope. The following day a full armistice is signed and the war is ended. All of the Pontmain men who had gone to fight the Prussians return to the village unharmed. Among them is Auguste Barbedette, handsome, hungry, and proud, without a single scratch on him.

  Now I understand that the past is not necessarily any more knowable than the future, that facts are not necessarily any more true than fiction. Fact and fiction. What is the difference, how can you tell, and who decides?

  I used to think that much as fact and fiction might originally arise from the same source (from some metaphysical desire to understand the world, the soul, or the meaning of life), from there they must run in opposite directions like rivers on either side of a watershed.

  Now I see that the dividing line between fact and fiction becomes increasingly unclear the harder you search for it. The same, I must note, has been said of searching for faith, searching for God.

  Now I see that fact and fiction are the inseparable Siamese twins of reality and everything we think we know for sure.

  Although the Marian apparition narratives have all of the ingredients of factual accounts, all the scholarly research and necessary documentation, still many people dismiss them as pure fiction. Some have gone to great lengths to disprove the apparitions and their accompanying phenomena, declaring them to be nothing more than elaborate hoaxes designed to exploit the gullibility, ignorance, and desperation of the faithful. According to these skeptics, the inexplicable light effects and the images of Mary appearing on windows, billboards, and the like are really just natural reflections or shadows, optical illusions, tricks of the light. They say the phenomenon of silver rosaries turning to gold that is frequently observed during apparitions is really the result of oxidation or erosion. As for the reports of the sun spinning, dancing, and radiating colors, the skeptics say all this is the product of a combination of local meteorological and atmospheric conditions, mass hysteria, and retinal damage.

  And yet the apparitions continue to occur, the stories of them continue to be passed on, and the faith of all those who believe continues to grow: undaunted, shining, and true.

  It was John Berger who said that poems are “nearer to prayers than to stories.” It seems to me now that the stories of the Marian apparitions are in fact prayers, precious gifts, innocent truths that are, as Werner Heisenberg said of the probability wave, “standing in the middle between possibility and reality.” It is in that still point, that point vierge, between fact and fiction that faith not only survives but thrives.

  Our Lady of the Cape


  In the middle of the seventeenth century, the settlement of Cap-de-la-Madeleine consists of a fort and a handful of houses on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River in Lower Canada, which will become the province of Quebec.

  —The river was named, Mary said, in honor of the third-century martyr who, while being roasted on a large iron grill over a slow fire, said, with a cheerful smile: Turn me over now, I’m done on this side. Lawrence became, among other things, the patron saint of cooks and a jar of his melted fat is preserved in the Escorial palace in Spain.

  The village lies between Montreal and Quebec City near the fur trading post of Trois Rivières. In 1662, a chapel dedicated to Mary is built by the Jesuits in Cap-de-la-Madeleine and in 1694, Canada’s first Confraternity of the Holy Rosary is established there. A generous parishioner donates a large statue of Mary to the church. As in the image on the Miraculous Medal, Mary stands atop a star-studded globe. Her bare feet crush the serpent beneath them. She is wearing a white veil and a golden crown. On her chest there is a large gold heart circled with roses and bursting with flames.

  Religiously speaking, things start off well enough. Because the tiny settlement is very vulnerable to attack by hostile Iroquois natives, its residents turn to Mary for protection. They erect shrines in their homes and attend mass daily. But as the years pass, the settlement grows larger and the danger recedes. Human nature being what it is, the parishioners become complacent. As their fear wanes, so does their devotion, and church attendance falls off steadily.

  In 1867, the four provinces of Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia are united by the British North America Act to become one sovereign nation, the new Confederation of Canada. That same year, Father Luc Désilets is dispatched by the bishop to Cap-de-la-Madeleine. His mission is to revitalize the religious devotion of the parish. Other priests before him have tried and failed. At first Father Désilets does not do very well either.

  —It was on the eve of the feast of the Ascension, Mary said, that Father Désilets finally understood how far the parish had fallen. He waited and waited in the confessional that evening but nobody came. When he ventured out and surveyed the nave, he saw that not one person had shown up. Instead there was a large pink pig wandering down the aisle, snuffling and grunting, poking its hairy snout under the empty pews. By the time it reached the altar, the pig had a rosary in its mouth and was munching happily. Finally the pig swallowed it, beads, cross, and all, with a slobbering, satisfied gulp.

  The next day Father Désilets’s sermon is called “The Pig and the Rosary.” The negligent parishioners hang their heads in shame. Set back on track now, they resume their former religious enthusiasm, and the size of the congregation grows well beyond its former numbers. A new church is needed to hold them.

  In 1877, work begins. Stone is cut in the quarry across the river from Cap-de-la-Madeleine. The cutting takes two years. The plan is then to haul the rock across the mile-wide river when it freezes over.

  —Although winters there are notoriously long and cold, Mary said, the winter of 1879 proved to be unusually mild. On the river there was still open water. The thin crust of ice that had formed on some stretches was not solid enough to hold a child, let alone a block of stone weighing several tons. So Father Désilets prayed. He promised that if I would make him an ice bridge, then he would leave the original 1662 chapel alone instead of dismantling it as he had planned.

  Father Désilets prays for a bridge on March 14, 1879. The next day gale-force winds begin to blow over the Saint Lawrence. Ice floes begin to accumulate. By the following morning, Sunday, March 16, the ice that spans the river is strong enough to bear the weight of forty men. By the next day the river is solid ice between the quarry and Cap-de-la-Madeleine. The formation of this miraculous bridge is front-page news in newspapers throughout the province. It takes one week for more than 150 horse-drawn sledges to haul the stone across. Then a thaw sets in and the ice bridge melts completely away.

  The new church is opened a year and a half later on October 3, 1880. Then the original chapel is restored and reopened. It is consecrated to Mary on June 22, 1888.

  —A promise is a promise, Mary said. I kept mine and Father Désilets kept his. I took a few moments that evening to show him my thanks after the official ceremony was over.

  Around seven o’clock that evening, Father Désilets enters the newly consecrated chapel with Father Frédéric, a new priest who has recently joined the parish. With them is a sick man from Trois Rivières, Pierre Lacroix, who needs their support to make it to the altar. Father Désilets is an old man, and he groans as he kneels at the altar rail. Getting down there is a struggle these days, and he always wonders if he will be able to get up again. Father Frédéric, who is young, kneels effortlessly. Pierre Lacroix, who cannot kneel at all because of his affliction, sits on a chair between them.

  All three men gaze up at the statue of Mary as they pray, thanking her for their various blessings, asking for her continued guidance and protection. The usually downcast eyes of the statue open and lift so that she is looking over the heads of the men into the far distance, maybe all the way to Trois Rivières. All three men blink hard and go pale. Each is hugely relieved to discover that the other two have seen it too. This makes it easier to believe, easier to spread the news.

  Eight weeks later Father Désilets dies peacefully in his sleep.

  The miracle is thoroughly investigated and documented. Father Frédéric and Pierre Lacroix do not waver in their faith. They both sign written declarations as to the details of the event. The news spreads quickly and the shrine becomes the most popular Marian pilgrimage destination in Canada.

  In 1904, Pope Saint Pius X orders the official coronation of Our Lady of the Cape, and in 1954 she is crowned again by order of Pope Pius XII. She remains the only Madonna in Canada to be so honored.

  Now I see that the opposite of fact may not be fiction at all, but something else again, something hidden under layers of color or conscience or meaning. If I were a visual artist, I might call it pentimento. If I were a historian, I might call it a palimpsest. But I am a writer and I call it the place where literature comes from.

  It is a place akin to those known as “thin places” in Celtic mythology. Like the thin places in both palimpsest and pentimento, these are threshold bridges at the border between the real world and the other world, still points where the barrier between the human and the divine is stretched thin as a membrane that may finally be permeated and transcended.

  Now I see that the opposite of knowledge may not be ignorance but mystery; that the opposite of truth may not be lies but something else again: a revelation so deeply imbedded in the thin places of reality that we cannot see it for looking: a reverence so clear and quiet and perfect that we have not yet begun to fathom it.

  Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift.

  Our Lady of Knock

  On the evening of Thursday, August 21, 1879, in the hamlet of Cnoc Mhuire in County Mayo, Ireland, Mary McLoughlin, housekeeper to the local priest, Archdeacon Cavanagh, is on her way to visit her friend, Margaret Beirne. It is about seven o’clock, raining heavily, and the streets of Knock are deserted. As Mary McLoughlin passes the small village church, she sees three white figures standing near the south gable. She assumes they are new holy statues purchased by the archdeacon. She clucks her tongue: more dusting for her and more money to be squeezed out of the parishioners, no doubt. It is too wet to linger and she hurries on her way.

  —The two women passed a pleasant hour drinking tea and gossiping, Mary said. The tea was laced with whiskey, the gossip peppered with ribald laughter and bawdy innuendo. Knock was a very small village then, little more than fifteen or so houses clustered around the church. Everybody minded everybody else’s business and, when facts were in short supply, the two women felt free to fill in the gaps with their own lascivious speculations.

  The women enjoy themselves immensely and then Mary McLoughlin heads home. She i
s now accompanied by Margaret Beirne’s sixteen-year-old daughter, also named Mary.

  —There are too many Marys in this story, Mary said.

  When the two Marys reach the church, they see that the three statues are still there. Mary McLoughlin wonders why the archdeacon has been so careless and left them standing out in the rain. It is Mary Beirne who first realizes that they are not statues at all.

  The divine trio is floating two feet above the ground. Mary is in the middle with Saint Joseph on her right, looking up at her with his head slightly bowed. On her left is Saint John the Evangelist in the white robes of a bishop with a book in his left hand and his right raised in a gesture of benediction or admonition. Mary is wearing a flowing white cloak tightly fastened at her throat. Suspended from her large yellow crown is a single red rose dangling in the middle of her forehead. The three figures are silent. To their left is an altar with a cross on top and a small white lamb curled up at its base.

  —After staring at us for a few minutes, Mary said, Mary Beirne ran home to get her family. Mary McLoughlin ran to fetch Archdeacon Cavanagh but he was not impressed. He said it was probably just a reflection in the stained glass windows and he did not even come outside to have a look. Mary McLoughlin had a fanciful mind and was a little too fond, he thought, of those old Celtic stories about the wee folk, faeries, leprechauns and the like. Besides, she had a reputation for overindulging in alcohol, and he could smell it on her breath.

  But no matter what the archdeacon thinks, fourteen people have already gathered at the church. Everyone in the group can see Mary and the two saints, who move around a little but do not speak. When thirteen-year-old Patrick Hill boldly approaches them, the figures step back. When seventy-five-year-old Bridget French drops to her knees and tries to kiss Mary’s feet, she finds that she is kissing air even though the feet are visible right there at her lips. And the ground all around the figures is dry despite the day’s heavy rain. At his farm half a mile away, sixty-five-year-old Patrick Walsh fears the church is on fire when he sees a large glowing light in its vicinity.