history

Mary in the Mountains

January 16, 2012 By Sarah Reinhard 3 Comments

We were driving from the airport in Albuquerque, New Mexico, up through the mountains to Los Alamos. My husband (who was then just a really committed boyfriend) looked at me and said, a bit shocked, “You never told me it was beautiful.”

To an Ohio girl (or guy, for that matter), the mountains of northern New Mexico, with their soaring height and expanse of flatness, are quite a sight. The New Mexico color palette is quite a bit different, too, and in mid-July, it’s more brown than green.

My aunt says she’s always shocked by the brightness when she comes back to Ohio.

That first visit to New Mexico was something. I first went out west following my college graduation, and I think, looking back, that I found God there.

As I hiked with my uncle and talked philosophy with my aunt, I found myself cheerfully small. I looked around at the great monolithic stone structures, felt the burn of the different altitude, experienced the dryness in the air, and it was more than I could explain.

It’s still more than I can explain.

When my husband was finally able to join me in a visit out west, he saw at once the many factors that contributed to my crush on New Mexico. The sky! The mountains! The atmosphere!

All that…and more.

I think of the feeling of driving up the road up the side of a mesa when I see pictures of the shrine to Mary in Montserrat, Spain. The rock is pale and reaching up, up, up. The shrine seems to be almost carved from it.

And then there’s the statue.

She’s black from all the candles that have burned before her. That black represents the people coming to her, pleading for her help, asking for her to look on them and remember them to her Son.

They go to this place of beauty, to the Woman of Beauty. Mothers always have a beauty that their children appreciate more than anyone else, and Mary’s no different.

This statue may not look like much, and the miracles attributed to it may be legends. But I’m inspired by the color, by the faith of centuries of people before me.

I love the quote of one historian about this image:

“In all ages the sinful, the suffering, the sorrowful, have laid their woes at the feet of Our Lady of Montserrat, and none have ever gone away unheard or unaided.” [source]

Our Lady of Montserrat will surely be on my mind the next time we travel out west. I have no idea when that will be (though I always hope it will be soon), but there’s no hurry. The beautiful vistas aren’t going anywhere and my experience will be sweeter for having waited to savor it.

She’s also a reminder that nothing is too small, nothing too mundane, nothing too inconsequential, to take to Mary. When I feel like I’m climbing mountains to get through my day or to deal with a particular challenge, I’ll turn to Our Lady of Montserrat. That’s Jesus on her lap, after all, and if she can hold him, I can at least sit down for a chat.

Further reading:

statue image credit: University of Dayton

Filed Under: Faith, Inspired by the Virgin Mary, Mary Moment Mondays Tagged With: Faith, history, Mary Moment Monday, Virgin Mary

Mary’s Dowry and the Rosary

October 6, 2011 By Sarah Reinhard 1 Comment

By Stephanie MannBefore the 16th century English Reformation, England was called Mary’s Dowry. The English people and their monarchs had great devotion to Mary. They often went on pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham.

When Henry VIII broke away from the universal Catholic Church and the authority of the papacy, all that changed. Henry ordered Mary’s shrines destroyed – even Walsingham, where he had travelled on pilgrimage. Soon the altars on which Her Son was worshipped and adored were torn down.

The people who wanted to worship Jesus and honor Mary as they and their ancestors always had could feel very alone. The parish churches they once attended looked different, without the altar, or candles, or statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints. The Sacrifice of the Mass and the Eucharist was gone, too.

They would rather pay a fine every month than attend the new services in those churches. They might have to wait months before the young Jesuit or Franciscan priest, wearing a disguise because he was considered a traitor to the state, came back to the local Catholic noble’s house to offer the Sacraments.

What could they do? They could pray the Rosary. They didn’t have to use beads; they could use their fingers.

Praying the Rosary they meditated on the Catholic Church’s teachings on the Incarnation, the Paschal Mystery, the Sacraments, Mary’s special role, and the Communion of Saints. If they were thrown into prison for not paying their fines, they could recall Christ’s Passion and offer their own discomforts, cold and hunger. As they witnessed the dreadful execution of a Catholic priest, they would pray for him as he suffered.

Nathan D. Mitchell describes the significance of the Rosary for English Catholics in this era in the fifth chapter of his book The Mystery of the Rosary. Like oppressed Catholics throughout the world today, they prayed the Rosary for strength and consolation.

Decades passed and finally Parliament in England allowed Catholics to worship freely, build churches, follow their vocations, vote, and hold public office.

The Catholic Church welcomed many converts, including John Henry Newman from Oxford, who joined the Catholic Church in 1845. He developed a great devotion to Mary and to the Rosary.

Years after his conversion Newman spoke to some young boys and reminded them to pray the Rosary:

Now the great power of the Rosary lies in this, that it makes the Creed into a prayer; of course, the Creed is in some sense a prayer and a great act of homage to God; but the Rosary gives us the great truths of His life and death to meditate upon, and brings them nearer to our hearts. And so we contemplate all the great mysteries of His life and His birth in the manger; and so too the mysteries of His suffering and His glorified life. But even Christians, with all their knowledge of God, have usually more awe than love of Him, and the special virtue of the Rosary lies in the special way in which it looks at these mysteries; for with all our thoughts of Him are mingled thoughts of His Mother, and in the relations between Mother and Son we have set before us the Holy Family, the home in which God lived. [source]

Newman lived to be a very old man; once his sight had failed, he prayed the Rosary instead of reading the Breviary. Pope Benedict XVI beatified John Henry Newman last year in England and proclaimed his feast day as October 9.

On September 24 this year both Catholics and Anglicans celebrated the 950th anniversary of the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, and Catholics are welcoming groups of former Anglicans into the Catholic Church in the first Ordinariate as announced by Pope Benedict. The name of the Ordinariate is Our Lady of Walsingham and it is under the patronage of Blessed John Henry Newman.

England just might be Mary’s Dowry again.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.
Our Lady of Walsingham, pray for us.
Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us.

image credit: Wikipedia

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Stephanie A. Mann is author of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation (Scepter Publishers). She is a member of the Catholic Writers Guild and blogs at www.supremacyandsurvival.blogspot.com.

Filed Under: guest post, Inspired by the Virgin Mary Tagged With: guest post, history, rosary, Stephanie Mann, Virgin Mary

Maria of Guadalupe

December 13, 2010 By Sarah Reinhard 2 Comments

A Mary Moment Monday post

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to interview Paul Badde, author of the new book, The Face of God: The Rediscovery of the True Face of Jesus. When I was reading his bio, I couldn’t help but notice that he wrote a book about Our Lady of Guadalupe, Maria of Guadalupe: Shaper of History, Shaper of Hearts.

He told me, in the interview, with quite a bit of enthusiasm, that Maria of Guadalupe was a precursor to The Face of God. He said that he felt that Mary led him to this current project with the Veil of Manoppello. In fact, he encouraged me to read Maria before I read Face of God, and that’s just what I did. His insistence spoke to where I was in the calendar year — the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12 coming up soon — and where I was in my pregnancy — ready to have the baby within a month, and wondering which Marian feast the birth would fall on.

My devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe runs deep and it is in this title of Mary that I find myself most able to relate to Mary as a person, as a mommy, as an approachable intercessor. I had a secret hope that my baby would be born on this feast, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t wait that long…and sure enough, he was born two weeks before the Guadalupe feast day. (I’m not complaining. The day he was born is not only a Marian feast, but a family feast as well.)

Among the Marian books I’ve read in the last few years, I’d have to rank this as one of my new favorites. Last year, I read Our Lady of Guadalupe: Mother of the Civilization of Love, by Carl Anderson and Eduardo Chavez. At the time, I was so enthusiastic about the quality of it that I lent it to my pastor with the breathless insistence that he HAD to read it. Reading that book helped me understand the Guadalupan message and the importance of the symbolism. Anderson and Chavez gave me new perspective and insight into a title of Mary that I had loved rather blindly, just because I liked it.

Badde’s Maria is a great companion work for anyone with any sort of interest in Our Lady of Guadalupe. Not only does he delve into the story in ways that I haven’t encountered before — from a European standpoint, for one thing, which is quite a bit different from our North American “everyone knows about Guadalupe” view — but he also shares his story of meeting Our Lady of Guadalupe.

It is, at its core, a story, and that’s what kept me turning the pages and carrying it around with me, in the hopes that I would have a chance to tuck a few more minutes of reading time into my day. As a journalist, Badde talks to many different people, and when he relates what they’ve told him, he does it in a way that makes you feel like you’re sitting right there in the room with them.

This is not a book of sappy devotion or compelling evidence for why everyone should believe in and venerate Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe. What Badde does, instead, is weave a series of personal experiences and observations in with facts, history, and interviews. The result is a delightful read and a lovely aid for anyone wanting to better understand and explore this apparition of Mary.

One of the best reads of the year for me, and highly recommended.

Touch Your Jewish Roots

September 18, 2010 By Sarah Reinhard Leave a Comment

I received my review copy of Our Jewish Roots: A Catholic Woman’s Guide to Fulfillment Today by Connecting with Her Past, by Cheryl Dickow some time back. It was a book that intrigued me with its premise: “Understand how the teachings, truths and traditions of the Catholic faith rest so fully in the rich heritage of our Jewish roots.”

The thought of Jesus as a Jew had never occurred to me until I became Catholic. In fact, consideration of the Jews as anything more than bit players in the Bible was just never part of my introduction to Christianity. I don’t know how much of that had to do with my own ignoring things and how much had to do with them just never being examined for my age group.

Our Jewish Roots, while written with a specifically feminine audience in mind, is also an examination of Jewishness that I appreciated. It’s down-to-earth and I found that it added to my meditation and appreciation for how Jesus was raised, what our salvation background truly is, and most of all, some glimpses into the richness of the Old Testament.

My favorite part of the book is how Dickow examines 13 different Old Testament women, plus Mary the Mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, in light of what they can teach us today. Many of these women — Rebekah, Rachel, Miriam, Ruth — are old friends of mine. I remember being read their stories as a child during our evening Bible story readings and in Sunday school. I’m very familiar with them, and yet I found myself being reintroduced to them on new terms, meeting them as women instead of as characters.

Consider picking this book up, perhaps for a small group study or a special study for Lent. Its small sections lend themselves well to short devotional time. You’ll find yourself diving into Scripture through the women who are part of our shared heritage.

Filed Under: Books, Reviews Tagged With: Books, Catholic, Cheryl Dickow, Faith, history, Reviews

A Century Turns, by William Bennett

August 25, 2010 By Sarah Reinhard Leave a Comment

When I chose A Century Turns: New Fears, New Hopes–America 1988 to 2008, by William J. Bennett, from the BookSneeze reviewer program, I was curious if it would give me a historical glimpse of the last 20 years or just be an opinionated tome of political rantings. Curiosity isn’t always the best way to choose your reading material, but, in this case, it led me to the kind of quality nonfiction I might have missed otherwise.

A Century Turns is an in-depth look at the influence of the last 20 years on America. Instead of rote recitation of doings and affairs, the reader gets analysis through perspective. Century is not only readable, it’s a story that I didn’t know I had lived through!

Between 1998 and 2008, I graduated from college and entered the workforce in a new capacity. I earned a master’s degree, joined the Catholic Church, and married a man I didn’t think existed. I became a home owner. I entered the wide world of parenthood and became an active citizen in a whole new sense.

Reading A Century Turns at this point in my life, on the cusp of my third child’s birth, about a stretch of time during which I was pretty politically clueless, was interesting in a way that quite possibly no other reading I’ve ever done has been. I knew the names, but I had, in many instances, no idea that many of the major events had happened in the depth and range they had.

Bennett doesn’t just present the facts, but he tells a story, and that’s what kept me reading.

I didn’t realize I liked history until I read The Frontiersman, by Alan Eckert, a few years ago at my husband’s insistence. My husband doesn’t often rave about books, but he was unwavering in putting this book under my nose (not that I usually need much encouragement in that regard).

History, I found out, is not a static listing of events and dates, but is a story waiting to be masterfully told. A Century Turns reminded me of the delight I had when I read The Frontiersman, the feeling of “Hey! This REALLY HAPPENED!” It made me, in fact, want to read more history.

I received a complimentary this book because I agreed to review it. There was never any implication that I would give a good review, though. If you’re interested in reviewing books for Thomas Nelson, check out BookSneeze.com.