Our Lady of the Lost and Found Page 9

  The box was filling up. There were radios, watches, padlocks, books, crosses, medals, crowns, keys, slippers, pillows, and liquor bottles. There was a purse, a guitar, a sewing machine, a pair of scissors, and a pair of eyeglasses.

  —Some of these are from people praying for the return of lost or stolen objects, Mary said. Others are given in thanks for their recovery.

  —Our Lady of the Lost and Found, I said.

  —I like that, she said, and sang a few bars of “Amazing Grace.”

  I remembered the large wooden box that had sat in the main hallway of my elementary school. It was always overflowing with lost articles: scarves, hats, single winter boots, jackets, teeshirts, lunch boxes, and gym shorts. Several times a day the box was vigorously pawed through until it became an impenetrable tangle of sleeves and legs, zippers and buckles and twisted cloth. Once a pair of long johns, torn and yellowed at the crotch, worked its way to the top of the pile and everybody giggled every time they walked past. Once a year the box was emptied, its contents spread across the floor of the gymnasium for all to see. Parents were invited to the viewing. Each class would then file down to have a look, students often finding things they didn’t even know they’d lost, parents discovering pieces of their children’s clothing now two sizes too small because they’d been in the box so long. Whatever was not claimed was then bundled up and given to the poor people, as if they, by some heroic measure of resourcefulness spawned by desperation, would be able to make good use of all those single socks and mittens and shoes.

  I thought about other things lost, other milagros that people might pin to Mary’s dress. I pictured hundreds of single earrings and gloves. I imagined tiny scaled fish for all the ones that got away; locks of hair from balding men; brains or marbles from those in danger of losing their minds; and words, many little silver words from writers who were blocked or from others who had lost their voices, words like love, sorry, please, promise, stop, go, come back to me. I wondered what you would pin to her dress to represent those lost things bigger but harder to put your finger on, things like innocence, trust, hopes, dreams, courage, faith.

  Each milagro contained a story. Going through them was like going through an old photo album and telling the story behind each picture—the way I might point out a black-and-white photograph of two little girls and a boy beside a lake and say:

  —Here we are at the beach in 1963, my bathing suit was pink, my sister’s was orange, my brother cut his foot, and we had to go home.

  Or many pages later, I might put my finger on a colored picture of a tall, handsome, dark-haired man in a green shirt standing beside a red car with a bouquet of yellow flowers in his hands. And I might say:

  —This is someone I used to love.

  Finally the box was full and the dress was just a dress again, having given over into our hands all those miracles and moments of despair. Although this word is bandied about as a generic term for all manner of misery and unhappiness, now I could see that, in fact, despair is an utterly personal and private place.

  Mary washed the dress by hand in the bathroom sink and hung it over the shower curtain rod to dry. I took the box into her room and left it on the bed, not sure what she wanted to do with it now.

  We went back into the living room and sat down. Having told me all those strangers’ stories, Mary started then to tell me the stories of her own life.

  History (1)

  Every child, and the child in every one of us, is ready to plead: Tell me a story. For the role of stories is to explain life, and the good stories, in their very substance and in the structure of their language, become revelation.

  —Andrew M. Greeley

  Since all of what I first learned about Mary came from the Bible stories I heard in the basement of Saint Matthew’s United Church, I realize now that it was no wonder my early knowledge of her was so meager. In the New Testament, Mary is mentioned less than two dozen times, often not even by name. But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law.

  In its skeletal outline of Mary’s life, the Bible does not even say when she was born, who her parents were, what she looked like, or how and when she died. Mary herself speaks only seven times.

  All the history and myth which now trail her, all the legend and lore which now ravel around her, came later: an apocryphal and eventually enormous body of details and interpretations that grew and changed through the centuries, fueled as much by faith and imagination as by documented factual information. Much of the official doctrine that now concerns her grew out of the unofficial stories of her birth, life, and death: articles of dogma forged from controversial narratives not contained in the Bible itself.

  Even in what they do tell us about her, the authors of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, do not always agree on the details. By the time their books were written, Mary had been dead for many years and was already making the earliest of her earthly visits.

  Our Lady of the Pillar

  In the year 40 A.D., some ten years after the death of Jesus, the apostle James has been dispatched to preach the gospel in Saragossa, a town on the banks of the Ebro River in northwestern Spain. It is a primitive and isolated region ringed with rugged mountains. Its natives are fierce and unholy, prone to excessive violence and immoderate bloodshed.

  —This was just four years before James became the first of the apostles to be martyred for his faith, Mary told me. He was beheaded in Jerusalem by King Herod Agrippa I. This was seven and a half centuries before he became known as Saint James the Greater. This was back when he was still just plain James, son of Zebedee, and the word Christianity would not even be invented for another sixty years.

  James is discouraged and depressed because he isn’t having much luck converting the bloodthirsty pagans of Saragossa. They just won’t listen to him, despite the fact that back in Jerusalem he was already well known for performing miracles, including once having brought back to life a boy who had been dead for five weeks after having been unjustly hanged.

  In Saragossa, nobody cares that he, along with Peter and John, was present at the Transfiguration when Jesus took the three of them up to a high mountaintop and the prophets, Moses and Elijah, appeared before them.

  He was there in the Garden of Gethsemane, too, where Jesus took him after the Last Supper. James was one of the three apostles who slept while Jesus spoke to God. Then cometh he to his disciples, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.

  Stranded alone now in Saragossa, James feels like a failure. He wanders around listlessly, barefoot, with his robes muddied, his favorite hat all bent out of shape, and his staff dragging in the dirt behind him. Even the scallop shell which he wears like a badge has grown dull and chipped. He looks pathetic and he knows it. He looks like a lost soul, which, for the moment, he is.

  —That shell was something of an affectation, Mary said, like a tattoo or an earring. But it was harmless enough and he loved it, his special symbol of the sea. Besides, even a future saint should be allowed a bit of vanity now and again, don’t you think?

  Bedraggled and beset by despair, one sunny morning James trudges down to his favorite spot along the Ebro and dangles his fishing line into the river.

  —He was thinking, Mary said, that he might as well just give up on this mission and go home to Jerusalem. He was an excellent fisherman back in Galilee before Jesus called him and now, effortlessly, he caught one fish after another and tossed them carelessly onto the bank behind him. If only being a fisher of men were as easy as being a fisher of fish. He was losing his faith not in God but in himself, in his own power to spread the word, do good works, change history.

  James stands on the riverbank in the sun, fishing and doubting, doubting and fishing, and then there are sounds in the bushes behind him. Rustling, sighing, a little genteel throat-clearing.

  It is Mary. She has
been transported from Jerusalem to Saragossa on a large gilded throne borne by a band of angels. They set her down softly and then stretch out on the riverbank to doze in the sun. Mary steps down from the throne and stands with her hands raised toward heaven.

  —Some people have wondered if maybe I was still alive when this happened, Mary said. But I was not. I was dead, quite dead at the time. I never performed miracles in my earthly lifetime. Only later, only after I was dead.

  Terrified and ecstatic, James flings himself to the ground at her feet and then clings briefly to her ankles. She is indeed a sight for sore eyes. As in: eyes sore and bloodshot from so many sleepless nights, so many wretched days. As in: eyes strained and gritty from so much fruitless soul searching. As in: the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

  Mary pulls him gently to his feet and brushes him off.

  —We prayed together then, Mary said, for patience, perseverance, peace of mind. I woke the napping angels and we went back to his small dwelling for lunch. It was Friday. We cleaned the fish and fried them up. I reminded him that not only was the fish a mystical symbol of fertility and the life-giving force of all motherhood, but it was our secret sign, too, the sign by which the followers of Jesus could recognize each other even in the midst of the heathen hordes. We licked our plates and picked our teeth with the bones.

  Then Mary gives James a six-foot pillar made of a green-colored quartz called jasper and a fifteen-inch wooden statue of herself cradling the baby Jesus in her left arm. A little bird sits in the baby’s hand. Mary asks James to build a chapel in her name and there to place the statue on the pillar in her honor.

  —We prayed some more, Mary said, James cried a little, and then the angels carried me back to Jerusalem. That very night, James cleaned up his act, washed his dirty robes, polished his precious scallop shell, and began to make plans for the chapel he would build, the chapel which was the first ever dedicated to me.

  Many more miraculous and interesting things happen to James in the following years, both before and after his death. He is first buried in Jerusalem but his body is moved several times after that, finally ending up in Compostela, Spain, eight centuries later. The shrine of Santiago de Compostela soon becomes one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in the world. The bones of Saint James are still there today, housed in a silver reliquary beneath an imposing statue of the saint seated on a throne, wearing garments of silver and gold. Embossed upon his voluminous cape are scallop shells, which the pilgrims fervently kiss and caress.

  James becomes the patron saint of Spain, also of Nicaragua and Guatemala, and of soldiers, laborers, horsemen, furriers, and veterinarians.

  Over the bloody centuries of Spanish history, Saragossa is invaded by various conquerors including the Romans, the Goths, the Moors, the Muslims, and the Vandals. The original chapel and several churches built to replace it are destroyed. But always the jasper pillar and the statue survive. They stand now before a green marble wall studded with 148 gold stars, eighty of which are set with precious jewels. Both Mary and Jesus now wear jeweled crowns and behind their heads is a large bejeweled halo and a golden aureole. The pillar is encased in intricately carved silver and bronze. The small patch of jasper left exposed and framed by a golden oval has been worn smooth by the kisses of millions of pilgrims including Saint John of the Cross, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Teresa of Ávila, all the kings of Spain, and Pope John Paul II.

  That was the beginning. In the nearly two thousand years since then, Mary, according to several reliable sources, has made more than twenty thousand appearances. A well-traveled gypsy, she has been seen on every continent except Antarctica. (And no one, in all honesty, can blame her for this omission from her itinerary. The interior of Antarctica is, after all, permanently covered by 8,000 feet of snow, enjoys August temperatures as low as – 130°F, and is populated only by penguins.) She has appeared to people of all ages, races, classes, and occupations, to the educated and the illiterate, to believers and nonbelievers alike.

  The chronicle of Mary’s miracles and apparitions tracks the entire timeline of human history, charts an annotated atlas of world geography, paints an illuminating picture of all mystery and magic, narrates an intimate story of all hope and despair.

  What I now know (or think I know) about Mary, I learned in two ways: from the stories she told me while she was here and from the reading I have done since. For those of us with a bookish bent, reading is a reflexive response to everything. This is how we deal with the world and anything new that comes our way. We have always known that there is a book for every occasion and every obsession. When in doubt, we are always looking things up.

  Not being especially fond of library books myself (mostly because you have to give them back when you’re done but also because their spines are often broken, their pages sticky and dogeared, marked up with other people’s jottings and grease spots), I would rather buy than borrow. Even a casual examination of my overcrowded shelves would quickly reveal the various areas of interest that have gripped me over the years. Add to these now a small shelf of books about Mary:

  Mary Through the Centuries. Mary, Queen of Heaven. A Litany of Mary. A Dictionary of Mary. Miracles of Mary. Visions of Mary. Meetings with Mary. Portrait of Mary. In Search of Mary. The Secret of Mary. Encountering Mary. Mary’s Message to the World. Mary’s Journal. Mary’s Way. Healing Words from Mary. Desperately Seeking Mary…

  My original intention was to write a fictionalized version of the story of Mary’s visit to me, keeping my promise, of course, to publish it under a pseudonym and call it a novel. I knew this would work to the book’s advantage because, ironically, calling it fiction would make it easier to believe. There are some truths that cannot be made credible in any other way. When I began to write this book, I thought it would be a simple story, one that would result in a slender pretty volume with gold lettering and a Renaissance painting of Mary and Jesus on the cover. But soon after I started reading about her, I realized that I could not write the story of Mary’s visit to me, fictionalized or not, while ignoring her whole history, the history of the last two thousand years.

  Each story of Mary that I have discovered could (and sometimes does) constitute a whole book in itself. For each one of the stories I’ve attempted to retell here, there are hundreds more that I haven’t got room for. As the story of Mary that I was trying to tell grew ever more complex, I could not decide whether trying to get it all straight was more like untangling a gigantic ball of wool or like being caught in a labyrinth. Some stories are too small to be novels but others, I soon found, might just be too big. I could only hope Italo Calvino was right when he said that, while overly ambitious projects may be objectionable in many other fields, in literature they are not.

  In my mind, the book began to resemble an octopus with its tentacles waving alarmingly off in all directions at once. Or sometimes it was like a giant squid squirting ink all over the place. When these deep-sea similes threatened to overwhelm me entirely, I kept reminding myself that many cephalopods, by way of a process called bioluminescence, are, like angels, saints, and fireflies, capable of producing light.

  What kept me going was a vision not of Mary but of a stack of white pages covered with double-spaced typescript, clean and tidy with no arrows, scrawls, or angry red slashes; a stack of white pages perfectly squared, with no yellow, purple, turquoise, orange, and pink Post-it notes affixed to the edges bearing exclamatory notes to myself like NEEDS WORK, CHECK THIS, MORE HERE, CUT! I kept reminding myself that there is only one way to write a book: one word at a time.

  As I tried to sift through and make some sense of all this material, it became more and more obvious to me that the whole story has not, cannot, will never be told. It also became clear to me that the whole story, the real story, and the true story are not always the same thing.

  Our Lady of Einsiedeln

  Born at the end of the eighth century to a noble Swiss family, the Hohenz
ollerns, young Meinrad is never especially interested in the advantages that nobility has to offer. Rather he is interested in holiness. At the age of twenty-five he becomes a priest and enters the Benedictine monastery at Reichenau. But even the monastic life does not completely satisfy Meinrad’s longing for solitude.

  Several years later, in 829, he moves to an isolated spot on Mount Etzel, taking with him only a small collection of religious books and a wooden statue of Mary and Jesus that was given to him by the Abbess Hildegarde of Zurich. It is a Black Madonna, and in the crook of her left arm sits the naked baby Jesus. His whole body is black too.

  —For years, Mary said, people have been coming up with theories to try and explain away this and the many other Black Madonnas around the world. They say my skin in these images is black by accident, because of the passage of time or fires in those churches or from the soot of so many candles lit before them for hundreds of years. But if that were the case, then wouldn’t the whole image be blackened, not just my face and hands, not just Jesus’ body? These artists made me black because sometimes I am. Even way back then they knew that someday I would be all things to all people. Remember the Song of Solomon: I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. Have you never looked at your own face in the mirror and thought that you both are and are not the same person from one day to the next?

  Try as he might, Meinrad cannot hide the light of his holiness. Soon the pious and the curious alike find their way to his hermit’s cell in the forest. He puts up with them as best he can, but seven years later, in 836, he moves again, to an even more remote spot, now called Einsiedeln near Lake Lucerne. Here he hopes to find perfect isolation at last and to spend the rest of his life in private prayer and contemplation.

  Rumors that Meinrad is being visited by angels at his new location begin to circulate among the faithful. Soon they track him down and begin traveling in large numbers to his hermitage for spiritual instruction. Resigned now to only an imperfect peace, Meinrad agrees in 853 to the construction of a small chapel where mass may be celebrated, the sacraments administered, and the statue installed. Years pass. The pilgrims pray for miracles, marvels, and miscellaneous graces. Our Lady of Einsiedeln does not disappoint them.