Pop89: Slowing Down, Touching Ground

By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com

Eight years ago, my younger sister and I caravanned across the country, dipping into the states, stopping over in Chicago, Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, then heading back North again. She was starting over in life, moving from Toronto to Banff.

In those days felt lost, adrift, unmoored. The geographical cure was my solution to every problem. A long drive was just the ticket. If nothing else, one gets the illusion of steady progress.

We stayed the night in the Convent Inn. (Once a school, my mom was a student there.) Our sister from Medicine Hat awaited us in our room with a bottle of wine. We toasted each other, then made our way to the Val Marie Hotel for supper. Out front, a horse nosed around for grass, loosely reined to a hitching post. (Over nearly eight years here, I’ve seen maybe three horses with their reins looped around the wooden crossbar while their riders enjoy a beer or a cup of thin coffee or Friday’s supper special inside.)

Before bed that night, I wandered down to the end of the hall into what was once the chapel and is now a kind of ecumenical quiet space. Against the wall was an elaborately carved Lutheran altar, covered with gift-objects including a bundle of sage, a tarot card, a small bird skull and a rosary.

The rosary seemed appropriate. After all, this was Mary’s Valley, so named by Father Passaplan, the region’s first parish priest. After saying his first high mass in the local pool hall, using the billiard table for an altar, the priest named the town Val Marie to put it under the protection of Mary in a time of severe drought.

This past year the area was hammered by heat and drought. But the church was closed last summer, so there was no mass, high or otherwise, to send our petitions to the Mother. It was a sad day when the bishop came to unbless the sacred objects of the church to ready it for sale to the highest bidder. I surprised myself with sobs. We sang our old favourite hymns, one last time, songs around which we’d developed a history. Knowing we’d never be singing “Come Back to Me” in our church again, I couldn’t contain my tears.

I recalled the night Theresa taught me the hymn, standing in the church basement, under the Knights of Columbus roulette wheel, sweeping up dead crickets, lowering chairs from the tables for a wedding reception the next day. Theresa was our sacristan; she prepared the altar for mass every Sunday until she died, too young and suddenly from a stroke. The short time she was in a coma, the Andree family and I recited a decade of the rosary in their living room amid a basket of laundry waiting to be folded.

Throughout my life, the rosary has made sporadic appearances. When we were young, my father led the whole family in Friday night Lenten recitations. Dad still prays it, using the nobs on the steering wheel to keep count of his Hail Marys. My grandmother prayed the rosary all through the war, and somehow, I inherited her yellow crystal beads when she died.

Recently, I returned to the prayer beads. I like the subversive history behind it, how the Church fathers tried to suppress the petitioning of The Great Mother by the poor of the world, fearing their devotion was ill-directed. But mostly, I like how the circle of prayers begin with the womb and end with the tomb and in between are filled with Mysteries Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious and Luminous.

Upon waking in the Convent basement over a decade ago, my sisters and I all agreed, our sleeps were exceptionally deep and restful. For a moment, I felt moored, like a horse tethered to a hitching post. Val Marie was a peaceful and quiet respite. I would be back. Little did I know, for good.

I’m reading a book about the history of the rosary called “The Way of the Rose,” Clark Strand and Perdita Finn. The authors theorize that apparitions of The Madonna began around the rail travel people was introduced to the world. Before trains, people “travelled as fast as their feet could carry them, their horse could bear them, or the wind could drive their sails.” Life was local. Industry was determined and contained by the nearness of resources. After the trains, there seemed to be no limit to how far and wide industry could reach.

The railroad undoubtedly brought supplies, food, work and families together. (It also brought my white ancestors from New France to Lafleche, my own grandmother disguised as a nun because nuns travelled the trains for free.) But it also sped our lives to the point that, as Strand and Finn point out, “our bodies began to move faster than our souls” and “the ground was no longer our Mother but a source of friction that slowed us down.” And so, the authors speculate, The Mother appeared to the young and the poor to assure them she was still with us, but to warn us to not forget the Earth as our Mother.

When the church closed, I asked if I might take Mary with me, promising I would build a grotto, a place where people could come and sit and be still and connect with the Mother.

With the utmost care, I lifted the four-foot statue from her side altar and carried her to my car. I buckled her into the passenger seat, lifting the visor so she could see “her” valley as I gave her a spin around town. When a truck came up over a rise, I braked suddenly and threw out my arm to stop her from falling forward. She now sits in my living room, patiently waiting for her new home.