November 1, 2011
Tuesday

Today is All Saints’ Day, or, to use an archaic term, All Hallows’ Day. That’s why last night was All Hallows’ Even, or Hallowe’en (lose the apostrophe if you’re very 21st century). In the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, this is a holy day of obligation, and when I was a Catholic schoolgirl who trick or treated about the neighborhood, it was a day off school to enjoy the candy haul, unsupervised by working parents.

Although I have an abiding affection for Holy Mother Church and often take umbrage at anti-Catholic expression when it is uttered in my presence, I identify myself as a Christian, with membership in a Lutheran congregation. Nevertheless, I attended Mass yesterday, at Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary parish in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Relics of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, specifically two ribs and a patella, are making a pilgrimage around the United States, and I wanted to view them.

You can learn about the life of this saint from an article in The Catholic Encyclopedia. (Be aware that this is the online version of the 1918 edition of this work. It has a definite 19th century flavor.) I am not named for St. Margaret Mary. From the time my mother knew she was pregnant, she was convinced she was carrying a boy, whom she would name Michael for her father who had died seven years before. She was all for calling me Michael anyway (I have seen a greeting card from one of my mother’s lifelong friends that addressed me as “Mike” and assured me that I would come to like my unusual name), but was finally persuaded to choose a girl’s name. So instead of Michael for her father, I became Margaret, for her mother. Mary, I’m assuming, was given in honor of her sister.

As it happened, though, when I was a year old (1948), a new parish was established in the Diocese of Harrisburg, a split from St. Francis in the city, where my parents had been married and where I was baptized. (Catholic parishes are traditionally neighborhood parishes, and families are supposed to attend the parish that serves their geographic location.) St. Margaret Mary Parish would serve the growing suburbs east of the city. I don’t know why this French mystic was chosen as the new congregation’s patron, but I do know that for a number of years (maybe six or seven?) I believed that the parish was named after me, because that’s what my father (the first choir director for the new church) told me.

Because I do not practice as a Catholic, it is as something of a stranger in a familiar land that I come to a wedding or a funeral or even an ordinary Mass in that tradition. I come as something of a nostalgic tourist and, right now, a fiction writer, since the story I am working on has as its central character a priest having something of a midlife crisis.

I have to say, I was somewhat disappointed. At left you see a picture of the reliquary that was on display at the front of the church. (The pictured is cadged from a Google image search. I did not take the picture myself. I’m not THAT much of a secular tourist. Also I didn’t have my good camera with me.) The lettering you see is on some stiff gauzy material, like crinoline, wrapped around a triangular tube closed at both ends. I really thought I was going to see bones on pins, like a display in a museum of natural history.

The Mass had five celebrants and a deacon, the homilist had a thick French accent, and although I didn’t take pictures, I did take notes. What struck me most was the particular shade of blue that appeared in much of the statuary and other iconography in the church. It’s an ice blue unto turquoise, and it’s the same blue I saw in a dream I had twice in the same night last week, a dream in which such a color was emanating as a beautiful light from a doll-sized version of myself that I happened to be holding and caressing

I left the Mass thinking about St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, who was ostracized by her community as a visionary and who chose to do private penance all of her life for having worn “superfluous ornaments” to a ball not long before she entered the convent.

I also spent some time today thinking about Margaret of Cortona, a particular friend of mine. She is the patron saint of overeaters and reformed prostitutes (among other categories of troubled souls), and I wrote about her in 2006 over at my weight loss blog. Today is the start of NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month). I decided to give it a go this year, registering Eat, Pray, Walk as the place where I will endeavor to post every day. Check it out if you are so inclined.

And thank you again for reading, so much, so often.