I slide my hand to the hollow of my neck and feel the sterling silver bee charm on my necklace, resting beside the glass pomegranate. I bought the bee six or seven months ago for no reason except that I felt drawn to it. Maybe the pull I felt was simple nostalgia. When I was growing up, bees lived inside a wall of our house, making honey that sometimes leaked out onto the floor. The wall would hum. Sometimes the house would hum. After I told Mary in the myrtle tree that I wanted to be a novelist, I went home and wrote a first chapter about a girl whose bedroom wall is full of bees that slip through the cracks and fly around at night. I even took it off to a writer’s conference, where the teacher pronounced it “interesting”—the despised, dreaded word—suggesting its potential as a novel was “small.” Small. At times, I still hear his voice in my head, saying the word.
On his advice, I turned the chapter into a short story, but for a long while now I’ve felt nudged to go back and write the novel after all. Despite my nudges and prayers, though, I don’t much believe in myself as a novelist. I tell myself I’m wearing the bee charm because it expresses something about the fertilizing power of women moving into their fifties, but I don’t know.
“How much for the statue?” I ask the young man who has materialized at my elbow.
“Twenty dollars,” he says.
“Five,” I tell him.
He throws up his arms as if halting oncoming traffic. “Lady!” he cries. “Do you have a gun in your purse?”
I blink at him, while Ann tugs on the back of my dress and takes a step toward the door.
He grins. “You must have a gun, lady, because you’re killing me!” he says, and to prove it, he staggers backward a few steps, his hand flying to his chest, feigning a mortal wound.
Ah, the drama of bargaining!
“All right,” I tell him. “Ten dollars.”
He bows—the Thespian Merchant of Kuşadasi—and takes the money.
South of Ephesus our tour van begins a spiraling ascent up Nightingale Mountain to Panaya Kapulu—Mary’s House. Until we boarded the ship and saw the list of tour outings, I was not aware the Virgin Mary had a house anywhere, much less in the woods on the summit of a mountain in Turkey. Supposedly she lived out her days there as an old woman. I found this fairly stunning in itself, but the fact that I would stumble upon a chance to visit the house after what transpired between Mary and me in the cathedral in Athens—well, it seemed uncanny. I felt like I was supposed to go.
Not that I believe it’s really her house. I’m guessing the whole thing is another lovable “fictoid” of the Catholic Church. As we jostle along on the seat of the bus, it doesn’t matter that much to me whether the ruins of the house belonged to Mary or not. In some way, I am going to the house of Mary as an old woman.
As the van crawls around the steep curves, the plain of Ephesus slips in and out of sight. On the seat in front of us, an American woman hums “the wheels on the bus go round and round.” Ann writes in her journal while I gaze through the window. For a moment, I consider asking if she’s okay, wondering if this is the right time to coax her into a conversation about the sadness I sense in her.
“Round and round . . . round and round.”
Laying down her pen, Ann cuts her eyes at me and whispers: “I’m going to ask her if she has a gun in her purse, because . . . she’s killing me!”
I smile. For the rest of the trip, we speculate on whether this person or that has a gun in their purse, depending on their ability to irritate us. There’s something unbecoming about it, but it makes us laugh, and any thoughts I have about delving right now into Ann’s hidden distress dissipate.
Rifling through the tour material in my expandable bag, I find the little booklet on Mary’s House I bought in the market in Kuşadasi. It was on a table marked GUIDE BOOKS in English, but I discover it’s not so much a guidebook as a story.
It begins with a mystical, bedridden German nun named Anne Catherine Emmerich. In 1822, the forty-eight-year-old nun began to have vivid and highly detailed visions that described the house in which Mary died, along with its precise location near Ephesus. The accounts were transcribed verbatim by Clemens Brentano, the German poet, and published around 1874, fifty years after the nun’s death. They sparked a series of scholarly expeditions and excavations that led to the remains of an ancient house identical to the details in Anne Catherine Emmerich’s visions. It was Panaya Kapulu.
The story leaves me spellbound. I start to wonder if maybe the house is for real. One writer pointed out that if the ancient city of Troy vanished for three thousand years until Schliemann rediscovered it by following clues in the Iliad, then why not believe that a two-thousand-year-old house could disappear and be recovered by following clues in the visions of a saintly nun?
Yes, why not?
Actually, there are two equally probable theories about where Mary lived out her life: in either Jerusalem or Ephesus. While on the cross, Jesus entrusted Mary into the care of his disciple John, an event recorded in the Scriptures. A strong and enduring tradition holds that later, when the persecutions in Jerusalem began around AD 37, John fled to Ephesus, taking Mary with him. A number of historical and ecclesiastical documents support the possibility. For sure, Ephesus came to be a thriving center of Christianity by the second century, and at the epicenter of it was the spiritual presence of John and Mary.
I lower the booklet, drawn back to the van window, squinting into the shadowed green valley. The ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus are spread below, glinting and ivory, diminutive as Lincoln Logs, but still discernible. Using an aerial map in the back of a guidebook, I pinpoint places we visited earlier in the day: the Great Theatre; the Odeon; the Library of Celsus; columns lining Harbour Street like rows of jagged teeth. Somewhere down there amid all of that rubble and lost glory, Mary was declared Theotokos, the Mother of God.
I did not remember this strange piece of history until last night. I sat awake in the dark berth of our cabin, staring at the moon, at the bowl of the night lit up like a stadium and the sea swishing past, lunar and shining black, and it suddenly came to me—Mary became the Mother of God in Ephesus.
I got up and searched the guidebook by flashlight, finding a passing reference: In 431 AD the church officially proclaimed Mary Theotokos, “God-bearer,” more commonly referred to as “Mother of God,” at the Third Ecumenical Council in Ephesus.
What happened to Mary at Ephesus seemed deeply related to how my own experience with her was unfolding. In one spiritual and theological swoop, Mary went from human Jewish mother to a divine Mother Goddess. Or—as scholar Charlene Spretnak describes it—from biblical to biblicalplus. She became “big Mary.”
How did something like that happen—a young woman from Galilee ending up enthroned and gloried in the art and cathedrals of Europe? How did she land at the center of icons, rose windows, liturgies, music, miracles, healings, processions, offerings, shrines, and feast days? How did “little Mary” come to be worshipped as a full-blown Goddess in everything but name? And frankly, she’d come pretty close with the names, too. They roll through my head like lavish floats in the Rose Parade: Queen of Heaven, Mother of All Living, Star of the Sea, Merciful Intercessor, Mystical Rose, Mistress of the Angels . . .
I could not go back to sleep. I’d been thinking about Mary since those moments in the Athens cathedral. My encounter with her there had set off a backlash of feeling. If I pursued her, it would mean a whole compass-change in my spiritual life. There were people who would think it was fatuous, if not theologically egregious. I suppose some part of me thought so, too.
Part of the problem was that the larger-than-human Mary had fallen on hard times. Not only had she been expelled from the Protestant world, but a strong “progressive” movement to downsize her had been under way in the Catholic Church since Vatican II. Feminists had taken up the cause of getting Mary off her pedestal. I had been right there among them, at least ideologically, insisting we take Mary’s humanity back.
So why did this astounding magnification of Mary’s at Ephesus excite me? How much of Mary’s humanity did we have to take back before we could handle the grand, cosmological Mary? Was it crazy to think I could reclaim that part of her, too? I stared at the lacquered surface of the water, torn with doubt.
Eighteen months ago, when I ended seven years of Jungian analysis, my analyst’s farewell gift to me was a picture of a woman making her way through a forest. Surrounded by an entourage of wild animals, she follows a dove, which flies just above her head.
Nervous about leaving the relationship, I tried to make a joke. “Are you telling me it’s a jungle out there?”
“I’m telling you that you’ll be fine if you follow your spirit and travel with your instincts.”
Her words became a distillation of wisdom squeezed from those fruitful seven years. I framed the picture and hung it in my study.
Now, sitting on the bus to Ephesus, my head lolls against the warm, vibrating window. As my eyes sink closed, the picture of the woman in the forest floats against the thin membrane of my lids.
As we arrive on top of Nightingale Mountain—known as Bulbul Dagi—our Turkish guide divides up the passengers on the van and explains in her venturesome English that the first group will “propel” into the house, and when it has “exhausted itself,” the “terminating group” will enter. Ann and I are assigned to the “terminating group,” along with a teenage boy in a Bart Simpson T-shirt who mortifies his mother by shouting, “Yeah, we’re the terminators!” pronouncing it like Arnold Schwarzenegger. This prompts the guide to offer a little talk about how “overcome with holiness” the place is, not just for Christians, but Muslims. “We revere Mary, too,” she says.
The path to the house is lined with olive trees and thick emerald woods. It curves up a small knoll and disappears into patches of light, loamy smells, tiny dollops of wildflowers the color of butter. As we step onto the walkway, the entire group grows subdued and whispery, our revved-up tourist motors—the rushing to get somewhere, the grasping for experiences, checking them off like items on a grocery list—becoming eerily still. Perhaps, like me, the group has flashed back to the guide’s comment about the place being overcome with holiness. Surprisingly, there is a palpable serenity in the air, that immense feeling in which everything returns to itself, just as it is, just as it should be.
Then I hear Gregorian chanting. It wafts down the hill from the direction of the house. Ann and I follow the sound to a spot where four monks and two nuns are singing their prayers. Their rosaries swing from their fingers, catching the light. Behind them, swathed in olive trees, Mary’s House is tiny, L-shaped, made of sand-colored stone, with high windows and two petite, rounded domes on the roof. As the chant rises and falls, we sit on a stone wall beside the door to wait our turn to enter.
“Do you ever think about Mary?” I ask Ann.
She regards me with serious eyes, blue like her father’s. “I guess the first time was when I was here before. We went to this monastery—Varlaam—and I saw her painted on a wall. She sat on a golden chest and had stars on her forehead and shoulders. Our guide, Kristina, said it was Mary’s ascension into heaven. I didn’t even know what that was.” Ann looks over my shoulder and squints, as if focusing on the details. “The room was dark, so we shined our flashlights on the wall so we could see her better. When she lit up, I got teary. I bought a postcard of the painting and for a while I kept it by my bed.”
“I didn’t know that,” I say, thinking of how much I do not know about my daughter, moved by the image of her standing before the Queen of Heaven ablaze with flashlights. “What was it about her that got to you?”
Ann looks into her palms that sit on her lap like small, empty cups. “I think it was how majestic she was. I can remember what Kristina said: ‘Mary ascended to heaven and became a queen and the connector between heaven and earth.’ Part of me was shocked, thinking, how could all that happen without me knowing? The other part wanted to cry because of how beautiful it was.”
We are quiet for a moment—the small, awkward aftermath of revelation. She looks away and I wonder if she has retreated, but she says, “What about you; do you think about her?”
I relate my own accumulated moments with Mary more or less as I recorded them in my journal in the Athens cathedral. When I tell her what I asked Mary for beneath the myrtle tree at Palianis convent, Ann’s mouth drops open a little. I hear myself tell her about the image I can’t shake—the girl who lies in bed while bees fly about her room in the dark—and the idea of writing a novel around it, but I gradually begin to feel uneasy that I brought it up, that I exposed it like this.
I drop the subject and try instead to explain the pull I feel to relate to Mary as an expression of the Divine Feminine. This feels awkward, too. “It’s . . . disconcerting,” I say.
“But why?” Ann asks and I realize how free of baggage she is when it comes to Mary. Is the difference generational?
Like me, Ann was raised in a traditional Protestant church that put little emphasis on Mary. I tell her about Ephesus and Mary as Theotokos. “That’s more or less when Mary became the feminine face of God,” I say. “Not officially, but for a long time people experienced her like that.”
My mind congests with ways Mary’s symbol has functioned. How she took on God’s tender side, “his” mercy, becoming the one everyone went to. The way she mediated the big thresholds in women’s lives—conception, birth, suffering, death. And because Mary possessed so much power as a female, it had to trickle down and empower women at least some, giving them new ways to see themselves.
Ann frowns, waiting. “So, I don’t get it—what’s the problem?”
I hesitate, realizing I’ve never tried to put it into words before. “Well, basically, the church reined in Mary’s influence by typecasting her as a virgin and a mother, completely sexless and selfless. So naturally, that’s what became the vision of perfect womanhood.” I let out a sigh. “It was really a way for the church to control women and keep them in their place.”
“Oh, nice,” Ann says.
“Yeah,” I say, “and a lot of women, not just feminists, got fed up. Some of them threw Mary out. Anyway, there’s a push to get rid of the old Mary stuff and rediscover her purely as a human being.”
I want to hold on to the moment, to the conversation, not just because of what’s being said, but because of the intimacy it’s creating between us. We are talking.
“I’m all for Mary being human,” I say. “Especially if we reinstate it in new ways.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, this whole thing about Mary being a virgin—we could reclaim the ancient definition of virginity—”
“Like a woman belonging to herself, being autonomous?” Ann asks.
I give her an impressed look, and she says, “I read your book. And the definition applies to Athena, too.”
I smile at her and go on with my rush of thoughts. “And I don’t see why the meaning of her motherhood couldn’t be opened up to include all kinds of mothering—birthing creative children, including ideas, yourself, God . . .”
My voice trails off as the split in me widens. It’s as if my head wants human Mary and my heart, divine Mary.
The chanting stops. The drone of insects rises around us, followed by the soft whir of voices from the group starting to congregate near the door.
“Yeah, I like all that,” Ann says, nodding.
“But I’d hate to see her divine nature stripped away—that’s what moved you in Varlaam.”
The tour guide appears at the front door of the house and motions the “terminating group” to enter.
Ann is saying, “All I know is—if Mary wants to be the feminine face of God for you, why don’t you just let her?”
The main room is large and austere, divided by a wide archway. As the last person to enter, I wander to a table that’s covered with candles and wait my turn to light one. Their flames throw a yolky glow against the s
tone wall. Everything smells like candle smoke and veneration.
Ann wanders off to read a plaque on the opposite wall, while I watch the little swarm of people in front of me, how urgent they look pressed together in the candlelight, jockeying for an unlit votive, wanting to believe in a loving mystery. The boy in the Bart Simpson shirt has morphed into an altar boy. I wonder what mercy he is reaching for over there.
Standing here, I feel the sadness of everything. The way life moves on through its courses—the leaving behind of so much. Ann’s depression. The hole in the floor. The lock of my hair fluttering into the well. The taste of pomegranate. . . . In a couple of days we will sail back to Athens and fly home and I will end up taking all of this back with me.
Tears prick at my eyes. What did I think? That I would come over here and meet the Old Woman and return home a new older woman? I fight a fleeting impulse to hurl myself out the door and down the hill, though I know it is not this house I want to flee—it is beautiful in the frail light and thick with Presence. It is the necessity of loss.
The crowd around the candles has thinned away. I take a taper and light it, watching the flame sprout before I anchor it back in its holder without any prayer at all.
Beyond the archway, an altar sits beneath an apse in the wall, holding the statue of Mary that was found in the ruins when the house was discovered. The place has been a site of worship for centuries. A coin was unearthed here from the reign of Anastasius I, who ruled only sixty years after Mary was proclaimed the Mother of God. In all this time the house has been restored numerous times, but, it’s said, always over the original foundation.
People approach the altar and stand there looking momentarily lost. Some cross themselves and make a quick genuflection. One woman, whom I’m guessing is non-Catholic like me, nods to the statue as if to say, Hi, how are you? They are all having their moments with Mary.
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