A timed ticket to the numinous

Life, death, grace and the mountains.

A February sunset view from my hotel window of the Monserrat mountains, above Barcelona, Spain.

I began my visit to the shrine of the Black Madonna of Monserrat without any great expectations, but rather a sense of curiosity. I’d recently read Perdita Finn and Clark Strand’s The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary¹, hoping it would help me make sense of my own mother’s recent death², and my subsequent longing for a way into the sacred feminine. Reminded of their peregrinations around southwestern France locating Marion shrines, I realised that by happenstance, I was staying just an hour’s drive from a very famous one; their book give happenstances a high score.

It helped that the shrine of Our Lady of Monserrat is part of the monastery perched high in the iconic mountain range; I’ve never needed a second reason to go into the mountains. I find it ironic that so many people long to live by the sea, to hear it whispering in the background of their day, as I have done for the last year, whereas for me, it’s always been mountains that activate my heart’s trap door of awe; indeed, if I spent too much time at sea level, I start to feel ‘low’.

Like everything else in the modern world it seems, we had to buy a timed ticket and queue, gradually progressing up a staircase of dark marble, the walls panelled with mosaic portraits of female saints, including ‘Mater Eva’ (in a surprisingly modern knee-length sequinned shift dress), followed by Sta Perpetua and Sta Felicitas³ (a mistress and slave, both martyred in 3rd-century Carthage for their Christian beliefs) and more. As we ascended, the way became narrower and the crowd quietened; what had begun as a snake of tourists hushed into a line of pilgrims.

The final approach to the shrine of ‘La Moreneta’⁴ (the dear little dark one, in Catalan) is a cramped set of steep marble steps, tunnelling up through the high heart of the basilica and hardly wide enough for two people; it’s only when I reached the top and saw the nave of the basilica spread out below me that that I realised Her shrine sits directly above the alter.

The statue was smaller than I was expecting, just a few feet high, but She made up for that by the strength of her presence. I’d never been to a shrine before, so I wasn’t sure of the protocol, yet I found myself touching the cheap ‘medallion’ that was handed out with my entry ticket to the orb that sits in her outstretched hand; never before a pilgrim, I instinctively sought her blessing.

I felt confused, out of time and out of myself. I sensed emotions that felt too big to put names to, inchoate in the raw power of her presence. I took a rather mediocre photo, aware of the press of people waiting behind me, and, feeling rather speechless, went back down the stairs and into the basilica. I looked up at Her from below and smiled to see that here, right at the very heart of this patriarchal institution, perched atop a tumescent mountain range, the sacred feminine sits at the core. I felt deeply reassured.

Looking at my photo now, I can see how the touch of so many hands and lips through the glass have worn her hand to a pinkish colour. I’ve read varying accounts of her ‘blackness’ - from the feminist medieval scholar Lucia Chiavora Birnbaun⁵, who claims that she was intentionally painted black as she formed part of a tradition of Black Madonnas, which in Italy are located ‘over or near pagan sites of workshop of the Great Mother.’⁶ to the tourist website’s more prosaic explanation that it’s simply that the varnish has darkened with age⁷. Yet the same website will also state that this medieval sculpture was ‘carved in Jerusalem at the beginning of the religion.’

It seems the Black Madonna is a container for ambiguity, as well as grace.

Coming home just three days after meeting the Black Madonna we found that my partner’s robustly healthy ninety-three year old mother, with whom we share a home, was gravely ill and, after one night in hospital, she was given just a few weeks to live. She’s home with us again and, as I type this, I can hear both the soft hiss of the Atlantic and her gentle, but increasingly raggedy breathing. Her passing is breaking my heart, but I also feel so honoured to be part of it, holding vigil as she prepares with quiet dignity to make her final trip.

And I can feel the Black Madonna with me still in this numinous, luminous, time-out-of-time. I may not have had the honour of birthing in this lifetime, but once again it seems, I have the honour of companioning death; I just didn’t expect it again so soon. I guess we never do.

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1. Strand, C. and Finn, P. (2019). The Way of the Rose: The Radical Path of the Divine Feminine Hidden in the Rosary. London/New York: Penguin Random House.

2. Jody Day (November 2023) A Parting Gift. Substack essay

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetua_and_Felicity

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_of_Montserrat

5. Chiavola Birnbaum, Lucia (2000). Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy. 2nd ed, 2000: iUniverse.

6. Adele La Barre Starensier, Department of Art History, Drew University. Quoted in a review of Chiavola Birnbaum, Lucia (1993) Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy. Boston: Northeasten University Press, in ‘Medieval Feminist Newsletter’: Issues 18-24, 1994. University of California.

7. Tourist Guide to Monserrat. https://www.montserrat-tourist-guide.com/en/attractions/black-madonna-montserrat-spain.html