As a musician, my father was
seldom home in the evenings, but on his nights off he often led us in saying
the Rosary. My mother, her two sisters, and I would sit in the dining room while
he walked up and down, beads in hand. The Rosary consists of five Our Fathers
and fifty Hail Marys. How long does it take to say all those prayers? If you’re
a kid, half your life.
“Why do I have to say those
same words over and over?” I ask my mother.
“You’re supposed to meditate
on the lives of Jesus and the Virgin Mary,” she says.
“But it’s boring!”
“Shhh. Your father’s about to
begin.”
I stare at the bread crumbs from dinner that litter the yellow tiles under the table. The
maid is waiting in her room for us to finish saying the Rosary so she can sweep
and go to bed. I glance at my mother’s stockings, which she has rolled like
donuts around her ankles to keep them from getting runs, and decide that when I’m
allowed to wear stockings I will never roll them like that. I envy my father, who
is allowed to walk while he prays, instead of having to sit still.
After the last Hail Mary is
said, however, there is a reward: the Litany of the Virgin Mary, a list of
fifty epithets of the Mother of God, which my father recites in Latin. After
each name, we respond in chorus, ora pro
nobis (pray for us).
Here is a sample:
Speculum iustitiae (Mirror of justice)
Sedes sapientiae (Seat of wisdom)
Causa nostrae laetitiae (Cause of our joy)
Rosa mystica
(Mystical rose)
Turris eburnea
(Tower of ivory)
Stella matutina
(Morning star)
I don’t know why this list of
names thrills me. Years later I realize that they have something in common with Homeric epithets such
as “white-armed Hera,” and “bright-eyed Athena.” At age nine, though, I have not
yet heard of Homer, and I don’t know Latin. I can make out a few words, but
even if I understood all of them I would find them puzzling: what is a tower of
ivory, or a mirror of justice, and what do they have to do with the Virgin Mary?
But I love the rhythm of the
Litany, my father with his raspy smoker’s voice pacing in synch with the names,
and us responding ora pro nobis, ora pro
nobis. On and on go the names, Mother
of our Creator, Virgin most powerful….And this extraordinary collection of praises is dedicated
to a woman—one who as a teenager was visited by an angel, which was just the
first of a series of amazing things that happened to her.
And now that She is in
Heaven, sitting between God the Father and her Son, Jesus, with the Holy Ghost
in the form of a dove hovering above her head, She looks down upon me kindly (Virgin most merciful) and with special
understanding, because she was once a girl like me.
The presence of this
quasi-divine Lady in the heaven of my childhood gives me something that the images
of God the Father, with his white beard, and God the Son, with his brown beard,
could never give me: a sense of identification with the divine feminine that
puts me in the ancient lineage of females—Babylonian girls praying to Ishtar,
Egyptian mothers praising Isis, Greek wives sacrificing to Hera—who, from time
immemorial, have sought help and consolation from the Mother of us all.
