Early on, you developed this fear of miracles. You grew afraid, for example, of the first fifteen minutes of the movie The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima. . .
It all begins with those three Portuguese children, who have been sent out after Sunday Mass to take their family’s sheep to the Cova de Iria, a pasture just west of the village of Fatima. It is a cool spring morning early in the twentieth century. The boy, Francesco, plays a fife while the two girls jump rope. Hundreds of miles away a great war rages, but here at the Cova, new mountain grasses are drenched in sunlight. Before eating lunch, the children decide to recite the rosary. Lucia, the oldest girl, begins: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I believe in God the Father Almighty—
No, let’s do it the short way, says Francesco.
And wait for the echoes! adds Jacinta, his younger sister.
And in unison, the children shout across the valley: Hail Mary!
Hail Mary! the hills answer.
The children smile at each other, then shout again: Hail Mary!
This time, a thunderous boom responds.
What’s that? asks Francesco.
There must be a storm coming, says Lucia, who looks questioningly up at the sky.
How could it be, with the sky so bright?
I don’t know, says Lucia, but we better head for home.
Arcs of light flash over the near hills as the children hurry down the trail, egging the sheep on with small sticks. The two girls, however, slow down when they find themselves surrounded by a luminous mist. Francesco is right behind them, but sees no mist. What are you looking at? he asks.
Inside the fog, next to a small oak, the vague outline of a robed woman appears. Lucia and Jacinta turn sharply away, all raw fear, burying their faces in their hands.
What’s the matter? blurts Francesco. What was it? What did you see?
Look! says Lucia, pointing blindly toward the oak. Over there!
I don’t see anything, Francesco protests.
But in a rich and honeyed voice, accompanied by enraptured flutes and harps, the robed figure speaks: Don’t be afraid; I won’t hurt you. Come here to me, won’t you?
The two girls slowly uncover their eyes and turn around to face the vision. Come closer, the female voice requests. There, that’s better. You’re not frightened now, are you?
Perhaps Lucia and Jacinta can lose their fear as they fall under this radiant woman’s otherworldly spell. Perhaps these girls’ faces can light up from within as Lucia quietly asks where does Your Excellency come from? But for you, a modern girl of eight, the whole scenario of an arc of lightning wrapping you in luminous mist and speaking to you in your very own language gave you the bone-deep heebee-jeebees. Watching The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima convinced you to never be caught out in the pastoral wilderness with a rosary in your pocket. For who knew what could happen if an Ethereal Excellency chose you as Her confidante?
The movie's answer to that question is not reassuring. For one thing -- once you get past the initial apparitional freak-out-- Francesco is still flabbergasted. Who are you talking to, Lucia? he asks.
A Lady.
I don’t see her. Where is she?
Here, on the little tree. Don’t you hear Her?
The youngest girl, Jacinta, has the solution to her brother’s dilemma. She says to say the rosary, Francesco. He quickly kneels down, kisses his rosary, and prays.
What is Her Radiance’s beef? you wonder. Is She peeved at Francesco because earlier he had wanted to recited an abbreviated rosary? Is She playing some strange cosmic peek-a-boo? Does She dislike little Iberian boys? Or is Francesco really the lucky one, the one who will not have to endure the fate of actually seeing Her?
As it turns out, he is not to be so lucky. Lucia, I can see Her now! he exclaims. I can see Her plain!
All of them kneeling now, the faces of the children silently ask the question from which there is no turning back: What is it that You want of us?
Do you wish to offer yourself to God, to endure all the suffering He may please to send you, and to ask for the conversion of sinners? Leave it to an apparition to read your mind and to answer your question with a series of questions. Yet perhaps Her Luminescence is actually being gracious, and polite. Now, the children, if they so desire, have a choice, an exit, a way out of the wild history looming ahead of them. But—youthful mystics that they are—tall Lucia, brave Jacinta, and semi-pious Francesco answer in the affirmative.
Then you will have much to suffer, the Lady warns. May the grace of God be your comfort. . .
Much to suffer! Be your comfort! A rosary became a dangerous possession in your eight-year-old world—material that could give you away, like a bleeding wound in shark-filled waters. For who knows that some Mother of God isn’t out there right now, scanning the horizon, looking in meadows and valleys and backyards for unattended children with rosaries on their persons?
You decided to take no chances. You usually kept your rosary inside its little plastic snap-shut case, the one that said My First Rosary, next to the small radio in your bedroom. After your exposure to the first fifteen minutes of The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, you put the whole package inside a small cedar-lined box from a curio store in Yellowstone National Park. You locked the box and stowed the key away underneath the largest stone in the far reaches of your back yard—a safe but relatively unapproachable place. For some time, you avoided the tree-filled paradise of the back yard. You learned to keep your curtains closed during thunderstorms, lest an aberrant stroke of lightning morph into the Mother of God. But suppressing miracles, you came to see, would require the utmost vigilance and practice.
One major obstacle was your next-door neighbor-friend Pearl. With her family, she often attended the storefront Baptist church four blocks north of the street you both lived on. A Bible story devotee, her favorite thing to talk about on a drowsy afternoon when you both would sit in your room and get yourselves into a morbidly philosophical mood was the Beast of the Revelation. “He’s gonna be horrible,” she would remind you. “He’s gonna have six heads and eighteen feet with goat’s hooves, and he’s gonna have big black oily wings, and fangs, and claws, and he’s gonna have antennas and antlers and thousands of eyes.”
“Whoa,” you would say with awe. “That’s gonna be scary.”
This one autumn afternoon, though, after you and Pearl had gone through the above routine, she looked around your room questioningly and asked, “Where’d you put your rosary?”
You felt the hair on the back of your neck.
“Don’t you keep it here, right next to the radio?”
“Oh, yeah. I guess I put it away somewhere else.”
“I want to see it.”
“What for?”
“I just want to look at it for a second.”
“I’m not sure where I put it,” you lied. It was actually right in front of your noses, inside that locked Yellowstone cedar chest on top of your windowsill.
“I saw one on TV yesterday,” she told you. “I was wondering if it was like yours.”
If you had had your wits about you, you would not have let her continue with this line of discussion. But you had been caught somewhat off-guard. “So what were they saying about rosaries on TV?”
“Somebody’s rosary turned into gold, somewhere in Egypt. The Virgin Mary is appearing right before these people’s eyes, on the roof of this church. And people are praying with their rosaries and their rosaries are turning into gold.”
“Oh, sure,” you said, rolling your eyes. You tried to be nonchalant, waving her information away with a favorite saying of your brother’s: “You’re just messing with my mind.”
“No, I’m not! Really. It was on the news. Maybe it’s in the paper, too! Ask your mom.”
This was the autumn of 1969, and it had been at least a year since you had seen the first fifteen minutes of The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima. Now your fear of Her Radiance returned full force, and you stared dumbfoundedly at Pearl. Is my friend also some strange and sneaky minion of God? you wondered.
“Why don’t we get your rosary and pray with it and see if it turns to gold?” Pearl’s theory, it turned out, was that certain alchemical vibrations had enveloped the planet—because of the Mother of God’s appearance—and that all rosaries all over the world could potentially turn into gold. But you knew better than to let her trick you into getting that rosary out. It was bad enough that people were actually seeing Her, right at those very moments, a bubble of holy light on a rooftop of a Coptic Church in Zeitoun, Egypt. It was bad enough that this wasn’t just some movie about some century-old vision. Alleged vision. No, this was actually on the news, along with the moon landing and the Vietnam War, so, of course, it was actually real. The Mother of God had come light-years closer to appearing before your very eyes! And who was to say that She wouldn’t grow weary of Egypt? America was full of meadows and pasturelands and vales. . .
Although you made a full-blown project out of avoiding all news for several days—no television, no scanning the evening paper for Peanuts or Marmaduke cartoons—you still managed to run smack into an actual photo of the Mother of God on top of that Coptic Church. Madeleine Tolbert, the nine-year-old nun-in-training whose gym locker was next to yours, had a laminated newspaper photo of the Mother of God taped to the front of her three-ring binder. Walking next to Madeleine after physical education class one day, your eyes wandered and landed on the cover of that binder. An amorphous blob of light floated right above the bell tower of a church. You couldn’t tell what it was at first and squinted your eyes at it, puzzled. Madeleine saw you looking and chirped, “It’s the Blessed Virgin! She’s been appearing at a church in the Holy Land!” Just like the people who rubberneck as they pass horrible accidents on the highway, you could not tear your eyes away.
That giant glowing amoeba of light etched itself solidly into your memory and began making appearances in your dreams. . . Are you ready to suffer? asked the Blessed Blob as She floated above your bathtub filled to the brim with golden rosaries. Will you convert my sinners? the Virgin Marshmallow whispered as She oozed from underneath your bed . . .
You were bad off! You even grew afraid of closing your eyes after looking at a bright light because the afterglow images on the insides of your eyelids too closely resembled the Mother of God. You wondered if you should simply pray for all the information, all the strangeness, and all the fear to just stop, but then recalled that it was praying that had brought it all on for the children of Fatima—praying too much or even praying too little, like poor little Francesco who had wanted to recite the short version of the rosary. Existence was certainly too odd, too marvelous, and too unpredictable for scaredy-cat Catholic girls like you. You took to sleeping with your family’s blind German Shepherd, Sargeant, as a way to ground yourself, to ward off all the lurking Mothers of God. With Sargeant’s help, you wove yourself an earthly refuge before drifting into dreamland. And how well you learned to concentrate on the muddy, smelly, and most unheavenly things in the world: roly-poly bugs, belly-button lint, pork rinds seasoned with hot pepper sauce, and the way your older brother could make farting noises with his hand cupped up inside his underarm.
[This is part of my yet-to-be-completed work tentatively titled All the Lurking Mothers of God. Which has been writing itself seemingly forever. And ever.]
