Crowning the Virgin Mary

The Boston Herald 

It never lost its magic the way most things do. You get older, you look up close and you see the strings on puppets, cards up the trickster's sleeve. Childhood pleasures seldom stand up to adult scrutiny. Except every once in a while, the magic lingers, and a long-awaited moment doesn't disappoint.

When my friend Beth was in fifth grade, she prayed for the one thing she wanted more than anything in the world to crown the Virgin Mary in the school's yearly May procession. Sister Mary Mauritia would be drawing a name out of a hat, and the girl whose name was picked would get to place the crown of roses on the Virgin's head.

It's impossible to imagine the importance of being selected for this honor unless you were ever a little girl in Catholic school. Everyone ached to crown the Blessed Mother. Beth prayed the night before the drawing, hardly sleeping, clutching her rosary beads in one hand and her scapula in the other. The next day in class she was certain her name would be drawn. And when it was, she knew exactly why.

Years later, when she gave birth to twin girls, she gave them both Mary as a middle name.

I never got to crown the Virgin Mary, not because I didn't pray hard enough. My parents didn't live in the parish where I went to school, so I wasn't even a contender.

I think that's what hurt most of all, that I didn't stand a chance.

I mentioned this in a column a while back, and about how my eighth-grade teacher phoned me one day out of the blue. I wrote that all I could think of as she talked to me for the first time in 30 years was that she had told me in front of the whole class that I couldn't crown the Virgin Mary because I didn't live in the parish and therefore didn't count. Somehow the you-don't-count part wound up in the headline. Though the whole rest of the column was about discovering that the teacher I thought was so mean was really a kind and loving woman, it was the headline, words she had spoken decades before, that stuck in her heart like a hatchet.

I told her this was ancient history, that it didn't matter, that I was no longer a child, that I understood my exclusion wasn't anything more than adherence to a once sacred rule, that I wasn't angry or hurt or anything. Still, Sister Grace wouldn't let up in her efforts to fix what she perceived to be still broken. I could hear her wheels spinning every time I talked to her.

When she called early this spring and invited me to St. Mary's in Beverly where she is principal, to participate in the May Procession and to walk with the May Queen and help with the crowning, I was touched. What had meant so much to me for too many years, now meant as much to her.

And so last Friday I walked from the school, down the street, across traffic, into the church with hundreds of students from grades one through eight, beside Kristy Lee, the eighth-grade May Queen who was kind enough to let me share in her spotlight. I sat in the front row with children half my size and though I should have felt awkward and self-conscious, I didn't. I felt honored and privileged.

It was a simple ceremony at the end of Mass. The children sang, 'Oh Mary we crown thee with roses today, queen of the angels, queen of the May,' and I followed Danielle Gagne, a second-grader dressed in First Communion white who carried the crown to the altar and stood beside Kristy Lee as she solemnly placed it on the Virgin's head.

It took less than five minutes, this ritual I have thought about for years. Reason says it should have been a disappointment. Most things you spend a lot of time wishing for are. But this wasn't. It was the closing of a circle, a sweet ending. It made Sister Grace happy and it made me happy, too.