So I just started talking. As in, I started talking to Mary in my normal voice. No pious warm-up supplications, no exclamatory words of greeting and praise. I talked to Mary, as if we were friends. I told her I’d stopped boozing, was depressed and anxious about it, didn’t really know if I could pull it off, and there were girls I wanted to date and books I wanted to write, but I also wanted to be a good Catholic and serve the poor, but had to get my car fixed, and baseball has to be the most perfect sport, almost like God in its beauty and symmetry. I talked to her about Talk Talk, who’d just released their masterpiece album titled Spirit of Eden.

After a few minutes, I felt something strange and powerful. It wasn’t an apparition, it wasn’t voices in my head. I just knew I was being heard. A voice said: keep going. I was heard by someone who was glad that I was talking to her like my normal self. Because Mary was a Jewish teenage girl, I began to see her not as the white lady in the worldwide icons, her hands classed in prayer, eyes piously aimed upwards towards heaven. I saw her the way I did this girl Lisa that I knew in my old clubbing days in the 1980s. I used to see Lisa at Cagney’s, Poseurs, and the original 9:30 Club, and we had an instant non-sexual liking for each other. It was the kind of thing that happens with some people where you can just kind of instantly talk in a personal way about what’s going on in your life.

[This is an interesting perspective on Mary, and Mark goes even further with it in attempting to unwind what happened between Mary and Jesus at the wedding feast in Cana. I’m not sure I entirely subscribe to his perspective on that point, but it’s worth reading. And as a fellow Catholic, I would definitely say that Mary comes to us in our brokenness as a mother in faith in the manner we need, so we can most effectively ask her for her prayers on our behalf. — Ed]