A young Catholic boy like me whom the nuns had labeled "brassy and bold" prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary (or "the BVM" as we called her) on a regular basis because she was supposed to intercede for all those humans like young Catholic boys who just couldn't resist throwing snowballs at the prissy girls clustered on the playground or who wore their shirt tails out and called the nuns, in their black and white habits, "pengees" (for penguins, of course).
Even as we did these things we knew they would scorch our souls, but they weren't big sins, and we felt, given the infirmities of our young age and limited maturity, that we warranted a little mercy to temper justice. In our court system Christ handled the justice, so we went to the BVM for mercy because, as St. Anselm said, "The Mother of God is our mother. May the good mother ask and beg for us, may she request and obtain what is good for us." (He must have attended Catholic school and needed a favor now and then.)
St. Anselm had it right: for us Mary was first and foremost a mom, someone we felt we could depend on. After all, she'd stuck by Christ through some pretty rough and embarrassing times, and at the end, when he told her that she was not only his mother but the mother of everyone, she accepted the duty because she knew that people were going to have to be cared for and comforted in his absence. Pope Paul VI said it nicely in his 1974 encyclical, Marialis Cultus: Mary is the "promoter of the justice that liberates the oppressed and of the charity that succors the needy."
Nice words on his part, but Mary did not always have such an open-armed welcome in the Church. Debates raged for centuries over the meaning of the immaculate conception, the annunciation, her assumption into Heaven, her vow of virginity. One of the sticking points of assimilating Mary into the Christian pantheon concerned Mary's earthly body, something that confounded the bearded patriarchs of the early Church. Having been born of human parents, unlike her son, they asked, did her body do what all women's bodies do? And if so, did her physicality detract from her exalted role as Christ's mother?
Part of their problem also came from the fact that many members of the early Church still half believed in such goddesses as Isis, Artemis, Cybele, and Demeter, to name a few, beliefs that focused on the fertility of the earth and body and the congruence of bodily and cosmic cycles. The new converts quite naturally conferred these qualities on Mary, treating her as another incarnation of the goddesses they had worshipped before. (A statue of Isis nursing Horus is remarkably similar in form to later paintings and statues of the Madonna and Child.)
The Church's solution to this problem only partially succeeded in separating Mary from her corporeal origins. They divinized her body, making it "without stain," and tried to avoid talking about it altogether by calling her "the living throne of the eternal Wisdom." And they also disparaged "the cult of Mary," people who had devoted themselves more diligently to the worship of Mary than Christ. Epiphanius, the late fourth century patriarch of Constantinople, "noted with outrage" Arab women offering the Virgin Mary cakes and wine at the shrine where their ancestors worshipped Ashtoreth. "Others in their folly, wishing to exalt the Ever Blessed Virgin, have put her in place of God."
But the people, just like us young Catholic boys, didn't forget where Mary had come from. Where Christ acquired being human like an immigrant acquires a new country, Mary was human from the start. Our kin with Mary links us blood to blood, and her essential humanness attracts everyone who must wrestle with the sludge and terror and makeshift quality of ordinary life. When Christ went around preaching, Mary kept the home together. At the wedding feast at Cana, it was she who was worried about the domestic success of the occasion; it was she who comforted the disciples as Christ anguished on the cross. Mary's love is unconditional and "familiar," tied to family, to intimacy. We young Catholic boys believed in and respected Christ, but we depended on Mary.
The West Side of Manchester, NH, where I lived for a decade, is primarily French-Canadian, among whom respect for Mary ranks high. The big cathedral on this side of the city, though named "Saint Marie," is colloquially known as "Notre Dame," Our Lady. Notre Dame Avenue is a major thoroughfare, and people had named an old bridge over the Merrimack River (now replaced) that had linked the East Side to the West Side as the Notre Dame Bridge. Catholic Medical Center, one of the city's two hospitals, has a statue of Mary over its entrance on Notre Dame Avenue, and one of the leading realtors on the West Side is -- you guessed it -- Notre Dame Properties. Even the church of St. Patrick's a few blocks from St. Marie's has a statue of Mary out in front of the rectory.
Scattered around the West Side like roadside shrines in Italy are what we call "backyard Marys" or "bathtub Madonnas" (for the practice of sticking a cast iron tub vertically in the ground and then putting the statue of Mary inside the arch made by the tub). Made from plaster or plastic or marble or wood or cement, these backyard shrines vary as much in their shapes and vintage as their owners. Sometimes the shrine makers display them prominently on the front lawn, "frontyard Madonnas" placed in a stone house resembling the grottoes often associated with Mary. Others set theirs in the backyard, away from public view. Some ring the statute with pin point Christmas lights and false greenery or silk flowers, while some just store a statue off-handedly in a corner made by the fence or squeezed in between two bushes.
At some houses Mary at Fatima stands with the children gathered around her skirts, her hands clasped together in prayer; at others Mary beams down in her usual open-palmed pose, head tilted slightly to the left and down, eyes gazing on those looking up at her. Sometimes she'll have a rosary or a scapular medal hung around her neck.
And the face of Mary is never the same face. On some sits a generic mass-produced gaze. On others the face is girlish or matronly or blandly beatific, and on still others one could swear there is discomfort and concern and a tint of sadness. But her feet are always firmly planted on the fanged snake of temptation and the devil as she stands confidently on top of the world.
Often with an embarrassing artlessness (a string of Christmas lights wound with tinsel for a halo, rocks glued to the bathtub to make it look like a grotto), these Madonnas express the simple desire of their owners to be connected with something larger than themselves, but a "larger" that's not too mysterious or too distant, or that violates their sense of what is true or common or real. That's why they choose Mary. In only a few yards did I find a statue of Christ. Christ seems to be for the churches, for the established meeting places, for the official acts of life. A statue of Mary visible from the kitchen window, on the other hand, feels "okay," part of the accepted normal, one of their own who will care for them without any prepayments or fine print. Frederick Harkins, in an essay titled "Mary's Meaning for the Individual," said that people can trust Mary because "she is still the Mother in whose strong arms the God man slept when He fled from Herod's jealous sword. In their sorrows they can...know that their sufferings are not unnoticed, not endured in vain."
It's important that such small, mundane icons exist. It's good to know that as the social landscape becomes corporationed and the frequencies on which we are allowed to communicate get fewer and more filled with static, someone makes the effort to evoke the mysteries and pay attention to the spirit. And the statues are interesting all by themselves, these blends of the domestic and the mythical and the Christian and the pagan, representing human desires and visions as common and miraculous as the grass growing around their pedestals. They are signs of care and comfort in small ways on small properties, a recommendation that we pay attention to the portable mysteries residing neighbor like just outside our window. Best of all they prod us to remember that there is greatness in treating each other like human beings with common roots in the mysterious and the awesome -- and that's a message that cannot be said often enough.
(August 1997)