Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  When I was in my twenties, I gave so much of myself away that eventually there was nothing left for me or anybody else.

  As soon as I started liking a man, I started disliking myself. Whenever I became interested in a new man, I began to rewrite myself. I can see this only now, in retrospect, thanks to the miracle of twenty-twenty hindsight. At the time I looked with scorn at women I knew who changed themselves to try and catch or keep a man: women who suddenly found an interest in hockey, fishing, or fast cars; women who suddenly lost twenty pounds, quit smoking, or bought a whole new wardrobe because the man had once mentioned that he thought skirts were much sexier than jeans. At the time, I could see the deception and the danger of this in other women’s lives, but I could never see it in my own.

  Looking back at the machinations I went through then, now I think of the whole process as a further demonstration of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle at work. Granted, falling in love might not at first glance seem to have much to do with quantum physics or subatomic particles, but it does necessarily have a lot to do with momentum, position, chemistry, history, and uncertainty. Not to mention exhilaration, expectation, and doubt.

  Consider the case of two people who have recently become romantically involved. Call them Lovers A and B. At this early stage of their relationship, Lovers A and B are just getting to know one another, each trying to take the accurate measure of the other. Following the uncertainty principle, this is technically impossible. Both will change and be changed by the advent of the other in their lives.

  Observe:

  Lover A gets her hair cut, begins wearing leg makeup to cover up those unsightly spider veins, buys new underwear and perfume, starts reading self-help books, and stops schlepping around the house in her sweats in case Lover B decides to drop by.

  Lover B has his teeth cleaned, buys season’s tickets to the symphony, gives up greasy burgers for Lent, starts renting romantic comedies instead of sci-fi thrillers, stops making (and laughing at) politically incorrect jokes about women, and cleans up his filthy apartment in case Lover A decides to drop by.

  Both Lovers A and B soon become kinder, cleaner, friendlier people. They are more talkative, more attractive, and more patient in their dealings with the rest of the world. They take to smiling at strangers in the street. Both Lovers A and B are, for the time being, better people all around.

  Consider the possibility that, according to the uncertainty principle, by the time Lovers A and B actually do believe they have fallen in love, they will bear little or no resemblance to the people they were before they met. When I was in my twenties, I did not understand why this could be a dangerous thing. I did not understand how you are changed, a little or a lot, for better or worse, by each new person you choose to let into your life.

  I also did not understand that although you cannot do anything to make somebody fall in love with you, there are any number of things you can do to make sure they don’t.

  I am neither the victim nor the villain of this story.

  I wish I could look back over my own history and put my finger on one single event and say, unequivocally:

  —There! That was when everything changed.

  This is how it happens in books. The conventional plot structure of a novel is often diagrammed as an inverted checkmark. The long side represents the rising action of the conflict and its complications. The point of the checkmark is the crisis or the climax, the central event of the story. It is followed by the shorter side of the checkmark, the falling action, which then ends in the resolution or dénouement.

  It was the crisis, the climax, the turning point for which I yearned, the moment from which I would go forward forever changed. I wish I could tell you the story of some great conflagration, a climactic cataclysm, an eyebrow-singeing lightning bolt, a pivotal precipice off which I leapt, defying death, waving my arms and shrieking:

  —Eureka!

  But that is not how it happened in real life.

  In real life, it was more a matter of accretion or erosion or both. All around me, my friends and family were getting on with their lives: getting married, having babies, buying houses, moving forward. But there I was: stuck.

  I was a slow learner. It took me a long time to understand that any relationship could end at any time for any number of reasons, some obvious, others obscure. Coming to know this was not especially comforting, but it was, at times, in a certain reckless frame of mind, strengthening—in the manner of Nietzsche’s aphorism: What does not kill me makes me stronger.

  It took me even longer to understand that, once you have reached a certain age, you can no longer suffer one loss at a time, that loss is cumulative and, with each new experience of it, all your old losses will join forces and come back en masse to haunt you again.

  So here’s the trouble with love: perhaps it is only in retrospect that you can know for sure it was love, only after twenty or thirty years that you can look back and say, with surprise and satisfaction and absolute certainty:

  —Yes, I loved him. And yes, he loved me too.

  And here’s the trouble with truth: it is disorganized, plotless, unsatisfying, often unbelievable, apparently pointless, sometimes boring, and it frequently amounts to much ado about nothing.

  Thinking about truth too long and too hard leads me into a metaphysical labyrinth where I experience a kind of panicky paralysis, where I realize that every single thought I have ever had or pushed away, every single word I have ever whispered or shouted, every single sentence I have ever written or deleted, could just as well be false and that, if the truth were known, I might be, after all, the consummate unreliable narrator.

  History (8)

  History is a story chafing against the bonds of documentary fact.

  —Janet Malcolm, The Crime of Sheila McGough

  There are many ways to divide up the world. One of those divisions is between those who make lists and those who do not. To my way of thinking, this distinction has been sadly neglected in favor of the more usual demographic categories such as male and female, young and old, black and white, have and have-not. I am sure that a detailed investigation of the propensity to list or not to list would yield remarkable new insights into the deepest psychological crevices (or crevasses) of human nature.

  I am a veteran and inveterate member of the list-making faction and can hardly imagine how a person without a list ever gets anything done. But those who don’t make lists are frequently amused by those of us who do. Back in university I had a boyfriend who liked to annotate my lists when I wasn’t looking. To my to-do list he would add items like Eat, Breathe, Have sex, Sleep. On my shopping list he would draw funny pictures: a little cow beside hamburger, a chicken beside eggs, or a penis (his, presumably) beside condoms.

  Checking off the items on my lists one by one as the day goes by gives me a sense of accomplishment and makes me feel that I’m in control of my life. Of course I know this is an illusion, and yet the lists satisfy my need to make order out of the potential chaos of any given day. In a larger sense, I realize that my writing itself is born out of the same desire.

  For a list-maker looking into history, chronology, the listing of events in order of their occurrence, would seem, at first glance, to present the past in its simplest, most reductive and seductive form. A chronology is so orderly, so clean, so self-contained. For a list-maker like myself, with decidedly architectonic leanings, it is extremely appealing to imagine that the unruly tumult of the past can be thus distilled and neatly poured into the jar of time, that all those events have apparently followed one after another naturally enough, the way Monday follows Sunday, May follows April, one year follows another, requiring absolutely no intervention on the part of humanity.

  I suspect that Mr. Skinner, my Grade Ten History teacher, with his insistence on the facts and nothing but the facts, must have loved chronologies as much as I do. But Dr. Sloan of Ancient History 101 would no doubt have dismissed them as nothing more than an elaborate exercise
in reductio ad absurdum.

  I own several fat chronologies of world history and consult them often when doing research for my books. I invariably find them reassuring and comforting. They make history look so manageable. Imagine the chronologist training the long lens of a telescope upon the past. Imagine the facts piling up like stars. Or imagine the chronologist taking aim at the past with the serpentine hose of a vacuum cleaner, sucking all the facts into its gigantic bag. Imagine all the chronologists making their lists and checking them twice. Imagine every single thing that has ever happened falling into place and staying there.

  When I began to read about Mary after she left, I turned naturally enough to these chronologies. I already knew that she was reported to have made more than twenty thousand appearances in the past two thousand years. But I found that in these books she made few or no appearances at all. In a chronology of women’s history, she was listed only five times, as having given birth to Jesus in 1 A.D., as having given rise to a cult-following by 1100, as having appeared to Juan Diego in Mexico in 1531, to Catherine Labouré in Paris in 1830, and to Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes in 1858. She was not mentioned at all in any of the other books.

  How can this omission be explained in light of the fact that Marian veneration has flourished around the world ever since her death in the first century? How is it that the most influential, inspirational, and significant woman in the history of the world is not accorded a single mention in most standard history books?

  Despite having been thus rendered virtually invisible by most secular historians, Mary has not become a quaint and feeble anachronism. She has remained an important and ongoing part of history. Like most people, she has continued to exist as both a part of and apart from history.

  In the twentieth century, an age generally considered the most secular and least religious age ever, the number of recorded Marian apparitions has escalated well beyond those documented in any previous age. How is it that none of these modern apparitions which have affected the lives of millions and millions of people are included in the standard histories?

  1917 On May 13, Mary appears to three children tending sheep in a valley called Cova da Iria at Fatima, Portugal. Lucia dos Santos and Jacinta and Francisco Marto see Mary on the thirteenth of each month for six months. On October 13, the day of the last apparition, the miracle of the sun is witnessed by seventy thousand people gathered at the site. It has been raining all day, but suddenly the clouds part and the sun begins to dance and spin, scattering red flames through the sky. It then plunges in a zigzag toward the terrified crowd before returning to its usual place overhead. Within three years, Jacinta and Francisco die of pneumonia. Lucia becomes a cloistered nun in 1929. She eventually reveals two of the secrets Mary told them in 1917. These involve a terrifying vision of hell, and predictions of the end of World War I, the horrors of World War II, and the rise and fall of Soviet Communism. She writes down the third secret and puts it in a sealed envelope, which is kept in a locked vault in the Vatican. It is widely believed that the third secret is an apocalyptic doomsday prophecy too frightening to be publicly revealed. When Pope John XXIII reads it in 1960, he faints dead away.

  1932 On November 29, five children see Mary near the Sisters of Christian Doctrine Academy in Beauraing, Belgium. By January 3, 1933, Mary has appeared thirty-three times to Gilberte, Fernande, and Albert Voison, and Andrée and Gilberte Degeimbre. In the final apparition, Mary reveals to the children her heart, made entirely of gold and sending off shimmering rays of light. On January 15, 1933, Mary appears to eleven-year-old Mariette Beco in the garden of her home in another Belgian village, Banneux. Mariette sees Mary another seven times, the last apparition occurring on March 2. Although these events at Banneux are first dismissed as copycat visions patterned after those at Beauraing, in 1949 they are accepted and approved by the church.

  1953 On August 29, in Syracuse, Sicily, a plaster-of-Paris image of Mary hung above the bed of Antonina and Angelo Iannuso begins to weep. Antonina, in the middle of a difficult pregnancy, suffers from toxemia, which causes convulsions that leave her temporarily blinded. As the tears fall from the plaque, Antonina’s sight is restored. The image continues to weep for four days.

  1953 On a September evening, five young girls watching a football game see Mary in a privet hedge in Fairmont Park, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The next night Mary appears again to the girls and two more friends in the same spot. On October 25, fifty thousand people gather in the park because it is rumored that another vision will occur, three miracles will be performed, and one of the girls will be taken up to heaven. Mary does not show up.

  1961 On June 2, Mary appears to four young girls in San Sebastián de Garabandal, Spain. Her first appearance to Conchita González, María Dolores, and Jacinta and María Cruz is preceded by several apparitions of Saint Michael the Archangel. Between 1961 and 1965, Mary appears to the four girls more than two thousand times in and around the village. During these visions, the girls are frequently transported into states of ecstasy in which they feel no pain, even when stuck with needles, and their bodies become so heavy they cannot be lifted. In July 1962, many people observe the miraculous appearance of a Communion wafer on Conchita’s tongue. Mary warns that eventually the girls will deny the reality of their visions and by 1966 they have all, in three separate periods of doubt, retracted their miraculous claims. This does little to discourage people’s belief in the apparition.

  1968 On April 2, two Muslim mechanics see Mary atop the dome of the Coptic Church of the Holy Virgin in Zeitoun, Egypt, fifteen miles north of Cairo. Between 1968 and 1973, hundreds of thousands of people, Egyptians and foreigners, Christians and Muslims, see Mary in an ongoing series of apparitions in Zeitoun.

  1970 On April 7, Mary appears for the first time to Veronica Lueken, wife of a construction worker and mother of five, at her home in Bayside, Queens, a borough of New York City. On June 18, Mary appears again to Veronica at nearby Saint Robert Bellarmine Church and asks that a shrine be erected there. The shrine, dedicated to Our Lady of Roses, Mary, Help of Mothers, gives rise to a following known as the Bayside Movement. Until her death in 1995, Veronica continues to see Mary during vigils held at the shrine.

  1973 On June 28, a painful cross-shaped wound appears on the left palm of Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa, a forty-two-year-old deaf nun at the Institute of the Handmaids of the Holy Eucharist in Akita, Japan. A week later the wound begins to bleed. On July 6, a small wooden statue of Mary speaks to Sister Agnes and assures her that her deafness will be cured. The next day blood is found flowing from an identical cross-shaped wound on the statue’s left hand. On July 27, Sister Agnes’s wound disappears and on September 29, so does the wound on the statue. On October 13, the anniversary of the sun miracle at Fatima, Mary speaks to Sister Agnes for the last time. But on January 4, 1975, the statue weeps. Between that day and September 15, 1981, the statue cries 101 times. On May 30, 1982, Sister Agnes’s hearing is permanently restored.

  1981 On June 24, Mary begins appearing to six young Croatians on a mountainside near the village of Medjugorje, Herzegovina, in the former Yugoslavia. What follows is an unprecedented, complicated, and well-documented series of daily apparitions and messages from Mary to all six visionaries that continues to the present day. This has transformed Medjugorje into a major international center of Marian devotion filled with hotels, shops, and restaurants. Despite the bloody civil war that begins in the area in 1992, Medjugorje remains miraculously undamaged by the conflict, and millions of people continue to make the pilgrimage to the site every year.

  1981 On November 28, Mary, with dark skin and long dark hair, appears to sixteen-year-old Alphonsine Mumureka while she is serving dinner at the Benebikira Sisters’ School in Kibeho, Rwanda. During the following year, Mary also begins appearing to six other Rwandans, five girls and one boy. Five of the girls are Catholic, one is a Muslim, and the boy is illiterate. With no religious upbringing whatsoever, he has not ever even heard the name
s of Jesus Christ and Mary. In one of the apparitions, Mary shows the young people a river of blood in which Rwandans are killing each other, a prophecy of the coming war between the Hutus and the Tutsis in which millions will die.

  1982 On November 22, in Damascus, Syria, the palms of eighteen-year-old Maria Nazzour begin to ooze oil. Maria, known as Myrna, then places her hands upon Layla, her husband’s seriously ill sister, and Layla is instantly healed. On November 27, a three-inch statue of Mary and the baby Jesus in Myrna’s bedroom also begins to ooze oil, enough to fill four saucers in one hour. Mary tells Myrna not to be afraid. On December 15, while a large group of people is praying before the statue, Myrna sees Mary, shining as if she is covered with diamonds. For years, the oil continues to pour from Myrna’s hands and many miraculous healings occur. On Good Friday 1987, Myrna experiences the stigmata, including the bloodied outline of a crown of thorns across her forehead. Myrna continues to receive the stigmata regularly. She cries and writhes in pain while her wounds bleed for several hours.

  1988 In July, while attending a Greek Orthodox Church Camp in Mercer, Pennsylvania, fourteen-year-old Sam Boumis of Lorain, Ohio, buys a large laminated portrait of Mary and the baby Jesus at the camp gift shop. The painting has been blessed with holy water and tears from the weeping icon at Saint Nicholas Albanian Orthodox Church in Chicago. When Sam takes the painting back to his cabin, it begins to exude oily tears and the fragrance of myrrh. Eighteen other pictures of Mary at the camp, some on paperback book covers, are also found to be crying.