LOOKING FOR MARY, OR, THE BLESSED MOTHER AND ME
By Beverly Donofrio
Viking Compass, 246 pages, $23.95
In Perth Amboy, N.J., in late September, a thermal-pane window in a second-floor apartment started to steam up. From the street below, passersby began to notice an image in colored streaks visible only on the window’s exterior. For many of the hundreds of visitors who soon made the pilgrimage to Washington Street, the image on the window was an apparition of Mary, the Blessed Virgin. While the local Roman Catholic diocese maintained a cautious, “no comment” posture, crowds of the faithful came to pray, say the rosary, or press their hands against the window. One visitor told a local reporter: ” `Anything is possible if you have faith. If it is true and you’ve touched it, you’ve touched something holy, like a relic.’ ” Beverly Donofrio did not exactly set out looking for Mary. She started out picking up Madonna kitsch at yard sales, filling her rented house with felt banners of the Virgin of Guadalupe, glitter-bedecked postcards of Our Lady of Fatima, varnished prints of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Six years later, her devotion had grown to the point that she embarked on a silent, fasting retreat in Medjugorje, the mountain town in Bosnia where, since 1981, apparitions of the Virgin have been continually reported and millions have gone to be comforted and healed. Like the visitors to the window in Perth Amboy, Donofrio feels the Virgin’s immanent presence in things and places sacred and mundane. She is betting on faith.
“Looking for Mary” is, at turns, an engaging and exasperating book. A sequel of sorts to Donofrio’s first memoir, “Riding in Cars With Boys: Confessions of a Bad Girl Who Makes Good” (1990), “Looking for Mary” alternates between chronicling the author’s contemporary spiritual quest and recapitulating the sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious personal history that led her to Mary.
Donofrio grew up Catholic, got pregnant at 17, married her hapless boyfriend and gave birth to a son. In little more than a year, she threw out her junkie husband and began raising her son alone. She was, by her own account, a pretty rotten mother much of the time, doting on her son but resenting him for cramping her style, which she found ways to indulge all the same. She looked for love in all the wrong places. Yet somehow she ended up at 40 with a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University, a first book that would achieve cult status and a grown son who was as dependable as she had been unreliable. Unlucky in love once again, depressed and alone, Donofrio was available when, as she might put it, Mary came looking for her.
Mary’s ways, Donofrio decides, are “sneaky.” ” `That’s how she works,’ ” a religious visionary tells her. ” `She sneaks into your heart.’ ” The initial signs are innocuous enough: first, her growing collection of Madonnas. Then, Donofrio gets a job making a documentary for National Public Radio on Marian apparition sites around the U.S. People she meets along the way tell her to pray the rosary, which she does, ” `to see what would happen. I think something did happen. I say Hail Marys all the time, and it’s a comfort.’ ” Arriving in Medjugorje, she’s still not sure what to believe, though by the end, after witnessing a seer’s apparition, she feels “Mary all around, and so near, . . . a cape of comfort wrapping me in,” and reports that she has been given a sign to strengthen her faith: She has seen the sun spinning over Apparition Hill.
Still, devotion to Mary is a complicated matter for a modern woman, as Donofrio discovers. She is urged repeatedly to be patient and obedient like the Virgin. Other women she meets on the pilgrimage to Medjugorje dismiss the idea of women’s ordination:
” `It’s not feminine to want to lead. . . .’
” `It’s not about power.’ . . .
” `It’s about love.’ . . .
” `Look at Our Lady. Imitate her.’ “
Yet at her first confession in 35 years, Donofrio admits that while it is easy for her to love Mary, it is hard to love “this Christ martyr and his damned suffering.” “I ask Mary to help me understand why I should love her son and to help me give up my prejudices against him for being a man, and all that manhood conveys: judge and ruler, oppressor of women, testosterone driven, boss and superior.”
At the book’s close, Donofrio has moved to Mexico, “a feminine country with a mother God,” where “Mary is more prominent than Jesus.” At Donofrio’s favorite church in San Miguel, the statue of Mary behind the altar reminds her of Glinda the Good Witch, who “holds out her baby, Jesus, in all his blond Son of Good Witch glory.” Roman Catholicism, she maintains, “purports to be monotheistic, [but] is really polytheistic, and Mexicans make no bones about it.” The Holy Father would not be amused.
But this is not a book much interested in fathers; this is a hymn to mothers. Donofrio wants to have it both ways: She wants to mother and be mothered; to embrace the gentle selflessness she finds in Mary while claiming for the Virgin a powerful place in the godhead. Hers is a vision of mother as savior. Readers may be inspired, angered, bewildered, comforted–depending on what they are inclined to see in the streaks on the window.
