Our Lady of the Lost and Found

by Diane Schoemperlen

  After much amazed rejoicing, those present form a procession to carry the statue down the mountainside to the bishop’s church in the town of Manresa. Midway down the steep slope, those bearing the statue suddenly find themselves unable to continue. Their feet simply will not move another step. After some grunting and groaning and much furrowing of brows, they decide it is a miracle. Mary is making her wishes known. The bishop orders a magnificent church to be built on that very spot. It is the shrine on the mountainside that will be known forever as Our Lady of Montserrat.

  It is to the Benedictine monastery erected on the same site in the eleventh century that Ignatius of Loyola travels in 1522. On the road to Montserrat he meets a Moorish gentleman.

  —As is so often the way with people traveling alone, Mary said, the two strangers struck up a conversation. After the usual pleasantries and many complaints about the winter weather, the conversation worked itself around to God who, as usual, was being blamed for the bone-chilling wind and the relentless cold. My name came up too. The Moor said I could not possibly have been a virgin after I had Jesus. Ignatius did his best to explain it, but by the time the two parted company, the Moor was still not convinced. Ignatius rode on, stewing and brooding. He thought he should turn around and track down the Moor and punish him for his blasphemy. But his mule balked and refused to go back. The animal, with a gentle nudge from me, carried Ignatius down a different road. And so at least one crime that might have been committed in my name was averted.

  Upon reaching the monastery at Montserrat, Ignatius offers a full confession that takes three whole days. He then gives his fine clothes to a poor man and dons a penitent’s sackcloth robe. On March 24, 1522, the eve of the Annunciation, Ignatius prays all night to Mary and in the morning hangs up his rapier and his dagger forever.

  Then, having given his mule to the monks, Ignatius descends the mountain on foot and goes to the poorhouse of Saint Lucy at Manresa.

  —As a wealthy Sicilian maiden, Lucy was betrothed to a pagan nobleman at the age of fourteen, Mary said. But she was having none of that. She had other ambitions. She aspired to be a virgin martyr. So she gave all her worldly goods to the poor and spurned her fiance. Outraged, he denounced her as a Christian to the authorities and she suffered much persecution at their hands. In response, Lucy gouged out her own eyes and presented them to her fiance, who had always admired them. She became the much-loved saint serenaded in the song “Santa Lucia,” and is always portrayed bearing two bulging eyeballs on a plate.

  Ignatius stays at Manresa for one year. Like Lucy, he renounces all vanity, all pleasure, and all pride to be taken in the physical body. He flagellates himself for his former sins, lets his hair, beard, and fingernails grow unchecked, and lives on bread and water, with some herbs thrown in for Sunday dinner. He weeps so copiously at mass that the monastery doctor warns him that he will go blind if he does not stop. He prays for seven hours a day and spends the rest of the time in a cave. Tormented by guilt for his own sins, he prays that after death his corpse will be laid upon a dung heap so it can be eaten by vultures and wild dogs.

  —An excess of penance, I’d say, Mary commented. He grew so thin and weak that he suffered hallucinations and psychotic mood swings. He made himself so miserable that he began to contemplate suicide. Clearly he had gone too far. I had to step in and set him back on track. Fortunately, it worked. And the rest, as they say, is history.

  While at Manresa, Ignatius writes much of his famous Spiritual Exercises, a work which is, in effect, a step-by-step course in mysticism. In the following years, he travels to the Holy Land, is imprisoned for forty-two days by the Inquisition, studies at Barcelona, Alcala, Salamanca, and Paris. He and several of his friends are ordained priests in Venice in 1537 on June 24, the feast day of Saint John the Baptist.

  —More body parts on a plate, Mary said ruefully. As quick as you can say, Bring me the head of John the Baptist, King Herod had him hunted down and Salome had the plate in her hands. In those days in that part of the world, it was called a charger, not a plate. Do not let this confuse you. Do not let this bring to mind an image of a dashing white knight, armor glinting in the sun, on a fine white stallion, mane blowing in the wind. Hold in your mind the picture of a severed head, a yellow plate, and blood, red blood, lots of wet red blood.

  In 1534, Ignatius is given the title Master of Arts. With his friends, he forms a group called the Society of Jesus, which is confirmed by Pope Paul III in a papal bull on September 27, 1540. The members of the Society are known as the Jesuits.

  Ignatius continues to pray, preach, study, and write, always a mystic, always seeking the greater glory of God. He teaches that, although only God can save us, still it isn’t all up to him: we must cooperate in our own salvation. We must pray as if everything depends on God (it does) while at the same time living and working as if everything depends on us (it does). He continues to be too hard on himself, not eating properly, burning the candle at both ends, exercising his spirit but not his body. His health fails steadily. He is plagued by stomach ailments, high fevers, exhaustion, and hardening of the liver. On July 31, 1556, he dies at the age of sixty-five.

  In 1622, when he is up for sainthood, the judges of the Rota have sixteen hundred witness statements to consider on his behalf. These testify as to his purity, his piety, his relentless devotion to God. More than two hundred miracles are attributed to him.

  —There was the surgeon who had headaches and eye problems, Mary said, and when he held Ignatius’s signature to his forehead, he was instantly cured. There was the nun whose broken leg was healed when a piece of his robe was applied to her thigh. There was the woman who pressed his picture to her swollen stomach and her dropsy disappeared.

  On May 22, 1622, Ignatius of Loyola is canonized by Pope Gregory XV. Patron saint of the military and of religious retreats, he is frequently invoked against being overly conscientious.

  I already know how stories are made.

  I already know how a story is subject to centrifugal force, radiating outward from the center in all directions, like a web catching flies or a net catching fish. But remember, when marveling at how much light a story can shed, that it can also be mysterious, ambiguous, both a wonder and a weapon.

  Remember that light can be both wave and particle.

  In 1678, Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens said that light was made of waves. In 1704, Isaac Newton said that light was made of particles. As it turned out, twentieth-century scientists proved that they were both right. Experiments showed that, much as light, in its essence, must be understood as being both wave and particle, at any given nanosecond, it is one or the other, not both simultaneously. Discovery of the wave-particle duality of light marked the end of classical either/or thinking. It constituted a paradigm shift, the beginning of a radical new way of understanding reality as the province of both/and possibility.

  Remember that God said: Let there be light: and there was light. Remember that Jesus said: I am the light of the world.

  I already know how a story can become a vortex, spiraling ever inward, turning and turning upon and into itself, like the Ouroboros, the serpent forever swallowing its own tail, ancient symbol of eternal return; the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth; the union of opposites, light and dark, male and female, yin and yang, agony and ecstasy, heaven and earth. Remember the Garden of Eden: And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

  Remember also that Jesus said: Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

  Now I understand how one thing does invariably lead to another, although the path between the two is seldom well lit or predictable, and has little enough to do, in the end, with the logical exercise of action and reaction, cause and effect.

  History, after all, as Dr. Sloan made clear back in university, is n
ot prophecy.

  I think about History as global: the story of big things, of important public events, both tragic and triumphant, that have changed the world for better or worse. I think about history as local: the story of so-called ordinary people who have lived (or died) during the unfolding of those same cataclysmic events, never having had any intention or hope of changing the world.

  I begin to see how people, ordinary people, are, at any given moment, both wave and particle, both a part of and apart from history. How history, like time and light, goes on in spite of, not because of, us. How history is ever moving forward, both with and without us. I am not the first person to wonder when they took the story out of history.

  Much as Mary herself exists beyond the usual time/space continuum which all history must inhabit, the thousands of recorded apparitions do not. They did not happen in a vacuum: they happened in the world, the real world, so to speak.

  Everything has a history and you cannot follow the thread of Mary’s history in isolation from all the rest any more than you can write the history of pain, for instance, without also writing the stories of the people who suffered it, or the history of gardens without the people who planted, weeded, and harvested them, or the history of astronomy without all the people who reached for the stars.

  I have always known that writing is an act of faith, the one which has always been my own salvation.

  Saint Teresa of Ávila

  In the summer of 1561 Mary appears to Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada while she is kneeling in prayer in the chapel of the Church of Saint Thomas in the walled city of Ávila in the rugged and arid mountains of central Spain. Teresa of Jesus is forty-six years old and has been a nun for twenty-five years. She is already known for her divine ecstasies and rapturous visions.

  —Only two years had passed, Mary said, since Teresa experienced what became known as her most famous vision: the Transverberation. That time she was visited by a short, handsome angel who was obviously a member of the highest group of angels, one of the seraphim who surround the throne of God in heaven. According to the Bible, the seraphim have six wings, two to cover their faces, two to cover their feet, and two with which they fly.

  Describing this vision later in her Autobiography, Teresa writes of the angel’s golden flame-tipped spear piercing her heart and penetrating down to her entrails. And when the angel drew out his spear, she was overcome by a love for God which was a pain so sharp she was moaning, a pain so sweet she wanted it to last forever.

  —It was this vision that was immortalized in the gigantic marble sculpture, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Mary said. Nearly twelve feet tall, it was created by the Italian Baroque artist, Bernini, in the second half of the seventeenth century. He portrayed Teresa as a helpless swooning woman, with her eyes closed, her head flung back, and her mouth hanging open in the presence of the angel. She looks to be on the verge of either fainting or having an orgasm. The angel has only two wings. I have never been especially fond of this piece. I like to think we have a lot in common, Teresa and I, and she was anything but helpless or hysterical, not by any stretch of the imagination.

  By the time Mary appears to her in 1561, Teresa has grown more or less resigned to being the recipient of such divine apparitions. She has already been visited by a multitude of saints and several times by Jesus himself, who once took her on a guided tour of her own specially reserved spot in hell.

  —Teresa did not much appreciate these visitations, Mary said. She found them disruptive, frightening, and very embarrassing if they occurred when she was out in public. She had even gone so far as to ask the other nuns to please hold her down if she began to levitate outside the convent walls. She had begged God to find another way to make his presence known to her and talked sharply back to him when he refused. Known for her wit, her charm, and her passionate energy, Teresa was a large, capable woman, a stubborn, sensible, shrewd, persuasive, ironic, edgy extrovert. She was always a precocious creature of contradictions, Mary said. But then aren’t we all?

  Born in Ávila in 1515, Teresa is one of ten children of an aristocratic family. Her inclination toward the spiritual life shows itself early. At the age of seven, she and her brother Rodrigo decide to run away to Africa where they hope to be beheaded by the savage Moors, thus ensuring early martyrdom and a quick trip to heaven. They don’t get very far before they are caught by their uncle and returned to their parents. Disappointed, the two children vow to become hermits instead and live lives of purity, humility, and devotion right there at home. This proves to be even more difficult than they expected.

  When Teresa is thirteen, her mother dies. Teresa grows into a beautiful, rather vain young woman, who is much distracted from the spiritual life. She spends a lot of time trying on dresses, choosing perfumes, fixing her hair, and reading racy romantic novels. Alarmed by his daughter’s increasing frivolity, her father sends sixteen-year-old Teresa to board with the Augustinian nuns at Santa Maria de Garcia in 1531. On November 2, 1535, she becomes a nun at the wealthy Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation at Ávila.

  During her early years at the convent, Teresa suffers many bouts of debilitating illness. In 1539, she falls into such a deep coma that her attendants believe she is dead. This happens on August 15, the feast day of Mary’s Assumption when, after her earthly death, she, like her son, was taken up to heaven in her body as well as in her spirit. A grave is ordered to be dug for Teresa while the nuns keep vigil over her apparently lifeless body. Four days later she revives, a miracle she attributes to the intervention of Saint Joseph. But her legs remain paralyzed for the next three years

  . —Teresa was not happy with the way things were done at the convent, Mary said. She thought life there was too worldly, too easy, too trivial, filled as it was with tea parties, juicy gossip, and clever discussions of culture, philosophy, and that most treacherous of notions, platonic love. Teresa resolved to reform both herself and her order, to bring it back to its more proper practices of piety, poverty, hardship, and humility.

  This is not an easy task, and for many years Teresa runs into strong opposition from both civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Teresa does not give up. Her resolve is much strengthened by Mary’s visit in 1561, again on the feast day of the Assumption.

  That morning Teresa is meditating on the Bible passage that is always read on that day: And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.

  As Teresa prays for forgiveness, mercy, and strength, Mary appears before her with Saint Joseph at her side. Mary and Joseph wrap Teresa’s body in a brilliant white robe.

  —We came in quietly, Mary said. We dressed her gently in a pure white robe and explained that this meant she was now cleansed of any residual sinfulness she might have been still harboring in her soul.

  Mary takes Teresa’s hands in her own and assures her that her dream of founding a new convent dedicated to Joseph will indeed come true. Mary promises that she and Joseph will watch over it when the time comes. She places a shimmering gold collar around Teresa’s neck. Hanging from the collar is an expensive gold cross decorated with dozens of precious gems unlike any found on earth.

  Mary and Joseph stay with Teresa for a while and then they rise into the sky escorted by an army of angels. Teresa feels no fear but rather an indescribable sense of peace, comfort, and exaltation.

  Teresa continues her reformation campaign with renewed vigor. Now that she knows Mary and Joseph are behind her, nothing can stop her. A year later, she opens the first convent of Saint Joseph at Ávila. Thirteen novices don the coarse wool habit of the new order known as the Discalced Carmelites.

  —The word discalced, Mary explained, has nothing to do with calcium, milk, or bones, nothing to do with calcination either, that being a burning down to ashes, a complete combustion, a consumption or purification by fire. Discalced means to go witho
ut shoes, a custom adopted by certain severe religious orders to further demonstrate their rejection of all earthly comforts and luxuries. Of course Teresa liked this idea, believing as she did that all physical suffering was but another step on the road to heaven.

  Over the next twenty years, despite continuing ill health, Teresa travels constantly and founds sixteen more convents. She chooses her nuns for their intelligence, common sense, and good judgment. Her motto is: God preserve us from stupid nuns.

  —Amen, Mary said.

  Although Teresa frequently claims to hate writing, she is, in fact, a fast and prolific writer, author in her lifetime of many other books besides her Autobiography. She writes all the time, whether she is well or seriously ill. Often she writes in a small, cold cell without even a table or chair. She has the soul of a writer: a soul overflowing with contradictions, irony, self-doubt, stubbornness, wonder, and faith.

  On October 4, 1582, Teresa dies at the age of sixty-seven. Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and several saints gather at her deathbed and ferry her soul back to heaven. She is canonized by Pope Gregory XV in 1622. Three hundred and forty-eight years later in 1970 she is declared the first female Doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI. Also honored with this title in the same year is Saint Catherine of Siena.

  —Catherine was born in 1347, more than two hundred years before Teresa, Mary said. She was the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children. She had her first vision of Jesus when she was only six years old. In her extreme devotion to God, she was even more obsessive and rigorous than Teresa. She practiced every kind of self-mortification she could think of. She lived on herbs and water, and for eight years took no solid food other than Communion wafers. She wore a hair shirt by day and wrapped herself in iron chains at night. Her bed was a board, her pillow a brick. She drank the pus from the sores of lepers and cancer victims. Her brief and bizarre life was marked by many miraculous events.