Our Lady of the Forest by David Guterson Page A

and your old men shall dream dreams. Someone else shouted Behold the handmaiden of the Lord be it done unto me according to Thy word! and a shrill, addled voice cried Hail Holy Queen Mother of Mercy our life our sweetness and our hope to you do we cry poor banished children of Eve! Another pilgrim lit a candle and pleaded Mirror of justice, vessel of honor, virgin most venerable, virgin most renowned, eliminate all sin. The priest heard the half-blind widow, too, Were we led all that way for Birth or Death? and saw that her hands were clasped in prayer while she recited T. S. Eliot.
    The visionary’s ecstasies began in earnest in the midst of these exhortations. The gathered host fell gradually silent and the priest, too, dropped to his knees because he felt loomingly conspicuous. He observed that in the throes of rapture, Ann appeared more diminutive than ever, her hood close like a monk’s cowl, her angle of carriage preternaturally forward, her gaze directed toward the tops of the trees, her hands clasped in desperate supplication, and he tried to commit her image to memory since he was convinced now by the scene at hand that inevitably he would be required to participate in the unfolding of this spectacle, that this was to be an apparition, with its accompanying inquest and hysteria, he could neither avoid nor escape. It was going to have an effect on him, an impact on his ministry. When she fell forward someone cried Lady of the Holy Rosary, consecrate our hearts this day! but no one else took up this call or felt it proper to renew their prior clamor and there was again silence while the visionary lay like a small heap of lost children’s clothing on the wet forest floor. It was like that moment at the end of a symphony when no one is certain that indeed it is ended and for a brief hiatus there is no applause because each member of the audience fears leading the rest toward embarrassment. No one did a thing, not even the priest, who had to admit that he too felt spellbound and in the presence of something holy.
    The moment passed. His wavering skepticism righted itself. The priest felt certain that a literal interpretation—the actual presence of a Madonna from heaven—was absurd and erroneous. He did not believe that Mary had descended from her blissful place at the right hand of God to speak to a mushroom picker. He did not give credence to apparitions, not even to the seven the Vatican had legitimized, believing instead that the deposit of revelation ended with Jesus Christ. The priest understood his spiritual frisson, his moment of yearning toward a facile acceptance, as a small leap of natural desire, undoubtedly archaic at source—autonomic fear of stars, of thunder, lightning, the shaking earth, of large waves, darkness at noon, a shadow across the sun. A polytheistic urge or impulse to meet a forest wraith. In his role as self-reflective anthropologist, the priest thought of pagan seekers who starved themselves intentionally in the hope of passionate revelation, in the belief that the hallucinations of hunger would grant them dreams and names. Pain, sex, crack cocaine, copious sweat, a near miss with the reaper—by these means are spirits induced when otherwise spirits are most reluctant to show their hideous faces. By these means, the dying beast seeks life. By contrast the priest’s elected route was a stark one of scholastic contemplation. There was no drama in that, of course, which was precisely what made it difficult. Blundering on like the magi in the widow’s poem could not hold a candle to the advent of a ghost who speaks to a pauper in the forest.
There were times we regretted/The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,/And the silken girls bringing sherbet
—the widow’s recitation still echoed in his ears and he regretted it all, a familiar regret. He didn’t know why he was a priest.
    When the visionary stood and faced the crowd he noted again how small