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Our Lady of Electricity
by Candace Dempsey
© Ellen Chavez de Leitner
Excerpts:
We were in deep need of divine intervention the day we climbed the dirt road to the house of the Virgin Mary, but we didn’t know it then. After three days of hard driving from Istanbul, we reached the cool spot in southern Turkey where legend says Mary, mother of Jesus, spent her last days. High on a mountaintop, where the wind carries the scent of wild herbs and hidden springs, it’s easy to imagine the Queen of Heaven, curer of broken hearts and cruel diseases, praying at her gilt-edged altar. We had come to worship this glorious Mary, resplendent in silk robes, golden crown and jeweled halo, mesmerizing even to fallen-away Catholics like me . . .
. . . . . . Outside the church, amid souvenir stands offering holy cards and plastic statues of the Virgin, we stopped to drink little glasses of hot tea. From that vantage, I noticed something startling about the surrounding trees. White dots covered their bark like pimples, high as hands could reach.“Bits of paper,” Eshbear explained. “People write prayers to the Virgin on tissue paper and stick them on the bark.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They believe Mary comes here each day to read them.”
“Prayers for what?”
Eshbear shrugged. “What if a woman can’t have a baby? What if someone is ill? It could be lots of things.”
Tree after tree was covered this way. So many scraps, so many sorrows . . .
