Traveling with Pomegranates (15 page)

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 stone 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.

Right about now, if I let myself, I could get yanked into skepticism. I could entertain thoughts about the efficacy of what they’re doing, what I’m doing. Sending prayers into the universe. Are they heard? Can they change anything? Are our supplications a form of magical thinking? I don’t know the answers. In recent years, my praying has grown more meditative, a kind of sitting in silence. It has been a long while since I’ve made a concrete petition, but as I linger, waiting for my own moment with Mary, it is faith I wish for. I wish to shape my needs into specific, well-considered words and offer them to my own particular image of the Loving Mystery, believing like a wise child.

Poised beneath the arch, I look down to find myself standing on a dark, gray tile different from the others. Identified as the spot where excavators uncovered charred fragments of marble and stone, it is the location of the original fireplace.

Mary’s hearth
.

Perhaps she once stood here, tending it. Mary-Hestia.

I decide I will make my prayer right here, standing on the hearth, the center of the house, the center of me. The place of my mother. I can picture her stamping out her Easter cookies, and I feel again the hunger to let go of my striving and find the ability to become content and still, intentionally “superfluous,” as writer Helen M. Luke puts it. I want a refuge from my old conquering self.
Let it be
. Mary’s words at the annunciation come to me, and I realize this, too, is part of the passage into my fifties—the cultivation of being.

But how in the world do I reconcile it with my fierce need to write, the deep clamor to bring forth a new creative flowering in myself? It almost bereaves me to think of unrealized potentials dying inside, the small miscarriages of self.
I want to be a novelist.
It has been five years since I made that pronouncement to Mary beneath the myrtle tree, and it is not happening. I think of the image of the girl and the bees and I don’t know what to do with it.

The two most powerful impulses in my life have been the urge to create and the urge to be—a set of opposites—and they have always clunked into each other. How very like them to do so right now.

I am good at pushing things into either-or corners. A moment ago it was faith or rationality. Now, being or creating. I close my eyes and try to shift how I come at it. Both, I think, and start to imagine the hearth not only as a place of being but as one of creating. Why couldn’t it stand for tending the present moment and also for the fiery combustion of my work? The words
contemplative writer
form in a slow, measured way across my mind, as if being arranged on a Scrabble board. They give me the barest glimpse of a wholeness shining behind my divisiveness, the possibility of union.

I pray in a silent stream of words. Help my daughter. Help me hold the losses I feel inside and not run away. Show me the ways of being. Give me courage to find a new creative voice. When I look up, I am alone in the house.

I walk through the last room and out the side door. The brightness hits my eyes, a shattering kind of light after the dimness in the house. Ann waits beneath a tree. “I was about to come look for you,” she says, very motherly, strapping on her backpack and striding toward me across the yard.

As we walk toward each other, a honeybee lights on my left shoulder. I come to an abrupt stop, watching it from the corner of my eye. Perhaps this visitation is nothing, but it feels purposeful. As Ann approaches, she reaches out reflexively to wave the bee away and I put up my hand, shaking my head, as if to say, no, it’s a bee. A
bee
.

She steps back as she remembers our conversation and the connection dawns in her face. “Oh,” she says.

We stare at the bee, trying to be stock-still, glancing at each other, making surprised faces. The bee is a mystery, a metaphor, a pure synchronicity. I tell myself it is the imaginative eloquence of Mary.

It does not make the ache inside me go away. Or change the necessity of loss. It does not mean I do not have to go dig up the Old Woman’s bone. I know this even as I stand there. I know the bee probably has multiple meanings which will unfold with time. The real awe now is how personal it feels, how intentional. The awe is that the bee has come at all. Minutes go by. Five, six, perhaps more.