Reflecting

It was my grandmother who made a goddess worshipper out of me.

I could never say this if I thought she read my blog. My paternal grandma is Baptist now, known to almost everyone she associates with as either "Grama" or "Sister Terry," scolds my father about not keeping his family in church, is firmly teetotal with a strong aversion to any woman who wears "gothic" accessories, and is the only person in my family to date who cried bitter tears when she found out that I was planning to marry and have children with another woman. I expect she'd probably be horrified to hear me say it, but there it is: It was Grama who imparted to me the richly pagan reverence for the Goddess.

You see, my grandparents used to own a bed-and-breakfast in Mount Shasta, CA. My parents and I, and eventually my baby brother, visited them annually. The bed and breakfast is still there, although under different ownership; it was called Sisson House 1904 then, and consisted of the blue Victorian on the right. This house was where I took my first steps, made my first snowman, and experienced my first and only blizzard.

When we made our visits, in between leaping off the porch railing to get stuck in the snow, playing with the stuffed animals who lived in the old sea chest on the back porch, and making paint-with-water pictures for rescue volunteers who dug out the people trapped by aforementioned blizzard, Grama and I would take baskets to hold blackberries and walk to the place she called the Mary Grotto.

A quick Googling session later, I am nearly certain that the place she took me to must be the prayer site constructed by Mary-Ma McChristy in 1992, meaning the site was only a year old when Grama began taking me through the blackberry brambles along quiet side roads to the grotto. Given that its street address is provided online, it must not have been as isolated as I believed -- just a little public garden conveniently located off a residential street where a multifaith guru had recently placed a plaster garden saint.

But it seemed so ancient, so mysterious and sacred to me.

 The statue in the grotto was probably two or three feet tall, and the sort of exquisitely dingy white that only comes of being outdoors in the weather.  I can be entirely sure of no other details, and even those I wonder if my memory has painted in -- no idea of whether she wore a traditional head covering, no clue what might have been in her hands -- nothing remains certain but long white robes and a faint Mona Lisa smile.  I am almost sure her feet, with their toes peeping from under the graceful fall of robe, were bare.  Is this accurate?  I couldn't begin to tell you.  But I'm certain the statue was ivory-white.

Mary stood in a clearing surrounded by greenery -- trees, ferns, and most probably the ubiquitous blackberry brambles of Northern California.  A little ways away there was a sudden steep drop, and a small waterfall was visible where a little clear creek splashed down in two sections over mossy boulders.

We went often, though probably not with the regularity or the space between visits that I recall, to visit the grotto.  One summer when we were visiting, I asked Grama if we could visit the Mary Grotto today and she told me, with clear irritation, that someone had stolen Mary.  I couldn't have been more than six, so I think she phrased it, "Bad people took the statue, and now no one can enjoy it anymore."

Some time later, though, she offered to take me on a walk, thinking perhaps that we could still enjoy the waterfall, and when we entered the place -- there stood Mary, just as she always had, though facing slightly more away from the waterfall and toward those who made pilgrimage to enjoy her garden.

Around her neck was a profusion of necklaces.  They were long on the small statue, cascading down from where they looped over the carved suggestions of hair or headcloth at her neck, draping over the cast folds of plaster linen at her shoulders, hanging down over her small draped breasts to lie against her hidden thighs.  Their colors were rich and dark against the snow-white, freshly washed statuary, making her actual features seem flat by comparison, but also somehow making her more real, making her more earthly, making her unlike any other Mary who kept vigil over small and quiet prayer gardens where small hoteliers brought their little granddaughters that they might learn to revere one of Judeo-Christian tradition's two great Mothers.

Something about the drapery of colorful offerings over her chaste robes made her seem a personality -- someone who, instead of standing gazing endlessly at the little waterfall, waited in her grotto, a piece of a greater divinity.  A divinity great enough to intercede for the casual pilgrims, but a piece small enough to wait for us there and smile upon her worshipers.  After all, I now think as I try to understand the way my child-self felt looking on the cleaned and adorned statue, why else do we make offerings to our gods except to grant them preferences for specific types of the matter that makes up the All, teasing out a few strands from their being to reweave into portions small enough for us to try to grasp, small enough to smile back at us and murmur their amens along with ours?

I remember my grandmother's joy at seeing Mary returned -- and not just come back from the unknown territory she had disappeared, but come back with her plaster hands full of offerings from the unseen others who loved her too.  I remember this and for a few moments I overcome that blindness to our families which is part of the human condition.  For a moment I cease to see her as grandmother and see her purely as another woman.

And, withdrawing the bit of my own personality with which I have imbued that small, chubby blonde avatar of myself who represents the little part of me that experienced this, I can see Grama Terry for a moment as a woman who reached out across the gulf of years and distance, and over the high narrow walls of religious propriety to make an offering of walks through the blackberries with that tiny stranger, bringing her into a deeper connection of shared reverence for the miniature Mother Mary.
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In one of my bead boxes I have a slightly discolored acrylic mother-and-child cameo which I got in a bargain assortment.  With it are a few other little trifles that have deep rich colors: three rounds of matte sodalite, some small garnets, two wire-wrapped amethyst crystals.  I'm not preserving these jealously.  If M wants to make earrings from them, say, or if a client wants garnets just like those, I'll happily remove them from this little squirrel-stash.  But in the back of my mind I have an idea that one day I'll return to the little tourist town in Northern California that I haven't seen since I was ten.  Armed with the 'Net-given knowledge that there is a shrine to the Holy Mother somewhere off of Alder Street, I will try to locate the Mary Grotto that Grama used to take me to.  When I find her, I'd like to have a necklace to add to the weighty profusion of offerings that hang around her plaster avatar.  I consider it just a tiny and personal gesture of thanks to the Mother-figure who, along with a Grama I can hardly believe bestowed this particular legacy, was so instrumental in my learning at a young age to revere a special kind of sacredness.