Immaculata in the Mud

A Guest Feature from Renée Roden at Sweet Unrest

Note from Alli: I am delighted to share a guest post today from

Renée Darline Roden

at

Sweet Unrest

. I had the pleasure of meeting and spending time with Renée at the Ignatian Creators Summit organized by Jesuit Media Lab. Creativity can feel lonely at times and finding vibrant friends in field like Renée felt like a breath of fresh air! We hatched the plan of a Substack-Swap and I’m so excited to share her work with you.

To find more of Renée’s beautiful writing, subscribe to her substack

Sweet Unrest

or pre-order her book ‘Tantur: Seeking Christian Unity in a Divided City’ which comes out on June 15th.

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Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash

The first time I felt God, I was playing Bernadette Soubirous in a middle-school play.

I was twelve and playing Bernadette, French peasant who received one of Europe’s most popular Marian apparitions in 1858, in a small homeschool thespian’s group performance of The Smallest of All.

The production values were sparse. We had one weekend of performances. The stage was a linoleum-floored platform in a school gym. Certainly, no grander a welcome mat for the supernatural than the mud of Massabielle.

But I remember sitting on my bed after opening night, surrounded by quiet in my bedroom, kneeling on my flower-embroidered comforter, still dressed in the French peasant costume my mother made me, and feeling a distinct something run through me. Some kind of ecstasy, spark, inspiration: something divine.

Perhaps acting is half delusion: deluding yourself into believing you can leave yourself behind, channel another’s spirit: a heady delusion that you can carry the same gifts they have inside yourself for an hour or three.

Or perhaps, it’s part revelation: part revealing something you have in common with a spirit far greater than your own.

Either way, there I was, feeling God, after kneeling on the stage each night for the better part of a week, pretending to see a vision of a woman in a white dress, who called herself the Immaculate Conception.

Perhaps this was the moment that I knew I was going—come hell or hypocrisy—to fall in love with that woman who called herself the Immaculate Conception.

I’ve never resented Mary. And I know that many of my peers have been presented a version of Mary that has—quite frequently—made them resent her. Much is made of Mary being a virgin, Mary being a Mother, Mary being “without sin.” On the face of it, all those things are good. But they are not what make Mary who she is.

These facets of Mary—her impossible virginal motherhood—make her a sort of patriarchal Good Girl: don’t do this, don’t do that, because Mary did everything right: she was obedient and said yes. Mary becomes a cudgel, to beat women into submission: we are never taught to examine how she said yes and what exactly it was she said yes to (ignoring the shadow side of every yes, which is a no—no “yes” comes without cost). Obedience (to what?) is emphasized rather than the adventure that Mary was obedient to: her life was an explosion. Who among us, man or woman, is brave enough to give our yes to that?

But the Mary Bernadette met was not some sort of aspirational feminine. She presented herself as a mystery: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” And Bernadette, an uneducated girl in the eyes of the clerics around her, presented those words without adornment. She quoted a theological concept, only shrined as dogma four years before, and without trying, she entered a conversation from which her station in life had previously excluded her.

Mary welcomes all her children into the heart of the church—we are all the main characters on the ecclesial stage. Each of us has a mission, and there is no divide between “the professionals” and “the plebians.” To be like Mary is not to be some idea who only exists in the minds of theologians, documents of popes, or fantasies of men, to be like Mary does not mean our hands are clean from the mud of the world. To be like Mary is to be up to our elbows, digging to reach the grace we know is buried in the ground. Mary is not honored primarily for the biographical fact she gave birth to God; she is honored because she is the first disciple who can claim she made her entire life available to God.

As Bernadette, I dug into trays of “dirt” (that is, crushed up Oreos ~ theatre magic~) and “drank” the dirty water, like Bernadette (stuffing Oreo crumbs into my mouth).

Perhaps when I sat on that bed—clean, but with Oreo crumbs still in my teeth—I felt those drops of water that began leaking out of the ground for Bernadette. Sainthood is messy—learned by doing rather than by reading—and to follow Mary does not automatically mean the world of men will applaud you. Your mud-covered face may not fit any image of beauty or desirability laid out in magazines. Not even saints are shown with their mud on them—it’s all scrubbed off in church. No one teaches you how messy grace is in Sunday school.

I am the Immaculate Conception. She can’t be pinned down, the lady of Massabielle. You can spill a lot of ink about who she is, the concepts that define her, but ultimately, you just have to dive in—to mud she promises is water. Wasn’t that what she did, all those years ago?

You don’t go into the “saying yes” game to God, hoping for easy belonging or rote approval. Following grace will probably make you more of a cipher, not less. Your life will be more hidden, what drives you more opaque: the spring is there, just buried in the mud. Hers was, though we scrub the mud off in our encyclicals and statues.

I hadn’t thought those thoughts yet, as I sat on my bed, letting go of Bernadette. I simply knelt there, feeling something as I said goodbye—you always have to say goodbye to a part you have put on. But I remember the taste of those Oreos, and the lights of the stage haloed, bright auroras around nothing except what the sight Bernadette saw and I was pretending to.

I am the Immaculate Conception. And I held all those lessons, pondering them in my heart.

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As you can tell by this post, writing is only one of the artistic mediums in which Renée excels. She is also a talented playwright and will be leading a Playwriting Workshop through the Jesuit Media Lab. She led a session at last year’s Summit and it was an incredibly engaging and fun exercise!

Thank you once again to Renée for sharing this beautiful piece with us! May you each have a blessed Feast Day of our Lady of Lourdes!

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