Thieves Never Steal in the Rain by Marisa Labozzetta

Author:Marisa Labozzetta [MacKinnon, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771832199
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Published: 2015-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

***

She had read about the window in the Boston Globe, over her morning bowl of granola and cup of coffee. The faithful were flocking to the delivery entrance of St. Mary’s Hospital to pay homage to the image discovered by a man waiting to drive his friend home from a routine colonoscopy.

“Maybe it’s because I’m a sinner, because I don’t go to church. Maybe that’s why God showed her to me,” the man was quoted as saying. “Who says it’s the Mary? I can come up with several dozen explanations,” a bystander claiming to be a high school physics teacher and a lifelong Catholic had argued. “Besides, other apparitions come with a message for people to repent and turn their hearts to God. Where’s the message here?” A Harvard psychology professor had reported that such apparitions were classic examples of Gestalt psychology — the mind making sense of a random image. “You are organizing it in a way that is familiar to you, that’s meaningful to you,” she had said. “It makes sense of that in a familiar way, and a familiar way is faces.”

Standing next to Joanna at the site, a short man with an Italian accent and wearing a worn leather jacket and fur-lined hunter’s hat outlined to his wife with a gloved finger what he was seeing. In great detail he described a cascading white veil; hands extended outward in an embrace; the shadow of a face. Joanna could make out nothing but a large fogged area that resembled a mountain — narrow at the top, wider at the bottom — nearly covering the entire first-story window.

“It’s the Madonna of Guadalupe!” someone shouted from behind.

“Do you know the story of the Guadalupe?” a Hispanic woman on the other side of Joanna whispered to her. The woman wore a leopard-patterned chiffon kerchief knotted beneath her chin and a brown quilted parka. Middle-aged, she was probably not much older than Joanna, with a serene but lined face that invited speculation about what had given this woman joy in life and what had caused her despair. Joanna’s mother would have approved of her perfectly applied makeup. This woman in her elegant kerchief would never run out of the house as Joanna sometimes did, looking slovenly and hoping not to bump into someone she knew. The spiciness of her perfume reminded Joanna of benediction after High Mass.

“Not really,” Joanna admitted. She knew little about the legend, except that back in the 80s she and her husband, Elliott, had seen the image hanging in every dusty bar and bus stop in Mexico.

“A very long time ago Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to a peasant in the countryside near what is now Mexico City. She asked him to have a church built in her honor, to prove the people’s love. When the peasant told the bishop, the bishop asked for a sign of proof of this story. He sent the peasant to a place where roses couldn’t possibly grow, yet he found them there nevertheless.

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