Pop 89: Folk Devotion
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
Mary’s been in my living room for a while now. I couldn’t bear to see her carted off after our church closed, not knowing where she’d end up. She could be stashed away in a closet or as a part of a restaurant decor, or in another church with another adoring family.
Actually, according to a council of bishops in the 4th century, Mary is not to be adored, only “honoured.” Only God can be adored. But I ask you: can anyone summon our adoration? Or our honour? Is it not something we choose to offer? And if we are so moved to kneel and beg for some assistance, comfort or intercession, is it anyone else’s business to tell us how to be moved and who should or could do the moving? That’s kind of like telling someone they can’t be thirsty because there’s no water for miles. One can neither halt nor generate a feeling inside someone else.
I have grown immensely fond of the Holy Mother as the years pass. She doesn’t tell me who to love or to spurn. She neither rejects nor tests others. She is a mother, after all, embracing each of us - you are lovable because you exist. Period. Your very existence is cause for celebration, or, at the very least, for care. Mary is there to give us a fair shot at a good life - she’s a good influence. Her spirit and presence installs a sense of conscientiousness and worth; we don’t talk trash when mother is in the room. She gives us a taste of what being loved feels like, so we can pass it on. But, what we do with her subtle, hovering love, her quiet whispers of tenderness and encouragement as soft as a breeze - some say, the very breeze itself - is up to us.
She is Mother Earth, the Land, the female presence amidst humanity’s messy project. She is the mother in Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” describing all women as a living river, flowing onward through life’s fits and starts. She is Louise Halfe Sky Dancer’s long-wailing mother. She is Tyre Nichol’s mother, to whom he ran for protection. And now, she is sitting behind me, looking over my shoulder as I write this.
This Mary is just one representation of The Great Mother, the one I was born with, named after, and raised with. Granted, this statue’s hair is too blonde, eyebrows too plucked, face too pale to be a fair depiction of the young woman who mothered the historical Jesus. But she sings to me, nonetheless. She’s John Lennon’s Mother Mary, “whispering words of wisdom,” gently urging me to not bite the hook, to lay my burden down, to “let it be.”
And now I have to let her go. I promised my fellow parishioners that I would find a home for her where folks could visit her. I had in my mind a shrine or grotto accessible at all hours to everyone. Something along the lines of the roadside chapels scattered all over Quebec - the size of a teeny toolshed or an outhouse (called a “becose”, a morphing of the word “backhouse”).
In Quebec, the chapels were the size of a close. You’d open the door outwards, and directly in front of you was a kneeler and a statue of whichever wildly painted saint was the muse of the quartier. You’d kneel down and close the door behind you (like in a confessional, only alone with Mary, your unburdening would be honest, heartfelt, not a litany of made-up lies to fool the father confessor). Most times, there’d be a mason jar filled with fresh-cut flowers, the scent filling the space, mingling with the hot wax of votive candles.
Once, in the countryside around the village of St. Joseph-de-Beauce, where we were performing at a festival, my bandmate-beau Denis and I watched a line of cars drive in and out of a farmer’s field. We asked our host what was going on, and he explained, quite casually, almost dismissively, that there had been a recent visitation of La Madone, The Madonna. I found it funny, even charming, that as an educated and non-believing recovered Catholic, he could not believe in such things, yet he accepted his neighbours’ regular encounters with their “various gods and goddesses.” My beau, also sick and tired of the staunch and crushing Catholicism of Quebec, approached the subject with a similar benign respect. “This folk devotion is not a problem,” he explained. “I was never angry with the men and women in my village praying to Mary and all the saints and angels. It was the priests, the crowd-controlling bureaucrats that filled me with rage. And so, after the festival, we drove Rosie, my rattling old Cavalier, to the site where Mary was supposed to have appeared.
When we arrived, two older women came out of their house carrying small empty jars. “To take water from the source,” they said. “See?” They led us to a statue of Mary and explained that the apparition was more a jostling of the statue by a group of teens hidden in the trees. “But,” they stressed, “the small dried-up creek behind the statue sprang forth a fountain of water, and it hasn’t stopped since.” Denis took a jar and filled it with water from the source. “But you don’t believe in this,” I laughed. “No, but you do,” he replied. “Put some in the radiator, maybe Rosie will stop rattling.”
On the drive back to the city, for a good 100km, Rosie was quiet. I chose to interpret that as a nudge from The Mother saying: Don’t wander too far from my love. And so, I hope to find a proper edifice for her here. I’ve been offered a corner of land at the Crossing, looking North upon Val Marie, named to put the drought-ridden land under a mother’s protection.