The Mary Month of May

I grew up in a Protestant family. My brothers and I went to Sunday school, got confirmed, and later married in the same Methodist Church on Pittsburgh’s Northside. Overall, it was a good experience. But I always envied Catholic girls, especially in May.

Our working class neighborhood was a mixture of Protestant and Catholic families. Kids were divided by schools: Spring Hill Public or Saint Ambrose Catholic. But it was a close neighborhood and we all played together after school. We were in and out of each others houses often, and one mother could stand in for another when it came to discipline or first aid. The differences were few but the Catholic girls seemed to have something special.

It was in second grade that my feelings of envy emerged. My Catholic friends were having their First Holy Communion. My friends got to wear poofy white dresses and headbands with flowers and little veils. They were given medals with pictures of saints, rosaries and most intriguing, scapulars.

A scapular is two small patches of cloth with holy pictures on them, connected by a loop of string. My girl friends told me that it protected them from evil and all manner of bad things, and it was a sin, they told me, to take it off. The idea of a passionate commitment to something, even a string with holy pictures, was very appealing.

Catholicism offered my friends other comforts. As a kid I would have liked a patron saint or a guardian angel, but the Methodist church didn’t offer any of those. Instead we were counseled, in an ecumenically respectful way, that all that stuff was Catholic and kind of magical. Now, this was at the same age that I was fascinated with writing in code, creating invisible ink, becoming a blood sister, playing with the Ouija board and making up secret societies. I was making myth and magic out of anything I could get my hands and mind around.

The best thing, though, that Catholic girls got was Mary. She was presented as motherhood and sweetness, but Catholic girls got a very clear message that there was a woman in heaven, that somebody understood the female side of things.

For Protestant girls, Mary shows up once a year-- at Christmas --to give birth. She might get dragged out again on Good Friday—but only in the background. No role model, no intercessor, no friend. My Catholic pals had statues of Mary. Some had the plastic glow-in-the-dark kind, and the older girls had painted plaster Marys, dressed in blue robes with big doe eyes like Barbie. And Mary was always standing on a snake. I certainly did not understand the symbolism, but I knew at ten that this 12 inch woman had some power you could not buy for Barbie.

Best of all, my friends had May altars. A May altar was basically a table with an old lace tablecloth thrown over it. They put their Mary statues on it with flowers and candles that they were allowed to light when they said their prayers. It still strikes me how feminine those altars were. The Catholic girls had total permission to identify with the feminine in spiritual matters. But no one gave little Protestant girls such romantic, mysterious things to do or own.

This carried over into all of a Catholic girl’s life. Mary got prayers, devotions, pilgrimages and even architectural consideration: there is a Marian shrine in every Catholic Church. Talk about having a room of one’s own. Mary’s presence meant that the Catholic Church included at least one woman at a high level. In her assumption into heaven, Mary had broken Christianity’s glass ceiling.

We pretty much get the shape of our beliefs early on, and what Catholic girls got was a She and a Her, someone like them, to pray to. And they got all those accessories: medals, scapulars, rosaries, ruffled altar skirts and little white prayer books. Protestant girls got black leatherette New Testaments, Jesus stories, but nothing that said, “We’re glad you’re a girl.”

Of course, later, Catholic girls ran into, the birth control problem and the wall that said, “You can’t be a priest”. But what I saw my Catholic friends get was faith in their girlhood and an image of feminine power. That’s not such a bad way to start out.

Wisdom Tradition of AA

I’ve been in AA a long time. I’ve been to meetings in many places in and out of the US. I’ve read the history books and heard fabulous “old timer” stories. I love the conventions and the regional “round-ups”.

But it was only this past weekend, talking to a Buddhist friend, that I got a new understanding about AA and how it works: AA is a wisdom tradition.

Yes, a wisdom tradition like Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, or other religions. Yes, I know “AA is not a religion, not a religion, absolutely not ever a religion.” Got it. But AA does have two important characteristics that define a wisdom tradition: Lineage and Transmission.

Lineage: these are the “begats”, if you will. Ebby Thacher begat Bill Wilson who begat Dr. Bob Smith, who begat the Akron Ohio group and from them there became the first 12, then the first 30, then they wrote the book and the traditions.

Transmission: Even though we have books and even The Big Book--AA is an oral tradition. We gather in groups on a regular basis and tell the stories. We tell our individual stories in a prescribed fashion: What it was like; what happened and what it’s like now. And somewhere in most AA groups or in the regional or national conferences we are also told --or are telling --the lineage story. We are taught the history. We revere (even though were not supposed to) those who knew Bill or Bob or Ebby or Lois.

We even bring transmission to the very personal level. We get a sponsor who tells us how they did the steps and how they work the program. From our sponsors we learn how to be sponsors and we teach newer members the wisdom that was passed on to us.

We get sober --and if we do the work and accept the teachings—we also can get wise.