At home on Mary’s hill

The fiesta Mass of the Archdiocesan Shrine of Our Lady of Schoenstatt  in Talisay City will be celebrated today, Oct. 16,  at 3 p.m.

It was “Covenant Sunday,” which is how the third Sunday of each month is called at the shrine of Our Lady of Schoenstatt in Lawaan, Talisay City, Cebu.  As we promised ourselves, we went up the hillside to attend Sunday Mass and pay a visit to our Lady at her little chapel.

All the while, I kept in mind the words of Sister Charito Maria, a Schoenstatt nun and the person who introduced us to the hilltop shrine, that here one would always feel “at home.” And so we did—spouse Jun, daughter Yeni and myself. We brought nothing but a mental note of our petitions. We must have come here no less than 20 times, out of need and desire more than obligation. I drove to the place, just ten minutes away from our residence. In our car, we kept three umbrellas, one for each of us, especially as it rained hard that day.

We climbed up the stone steps leading to the shrine, red, black and blue umbrellas above our heads—viewed from above, we probably looked like ladybugs climbing the hill in tandem. Big tents awaited the shrine pilgrims at the top, and we snuggled under the one nearest the makeshift altar. Others, those who came late, sought shelter in the tiny chapel itself, whose official name is the Shrine of Our Lady of Schoenstatt, Mother Thrice Admirable, one of 2,000 shrines worldwide, each a replica of the original in Germany.

The rain was as heavy as it was unstoppable, and clearly the Mass would be delayed, the plan to hold it outside no longer an option. The sound system laid out in the garden had to be relocated to inside the chapel to minimize the hazards of electrocution. The Schoenstatt Spirituality Center below the hill, venue for big assemblies, would have been an alternative site, but it was used for a seminar for young people. The rainy season was at its peak. Elsewhere, the  fence of a middle-class subdivision gave way to the water rushing from a higher level. But, on sunny days, people coming for a visit or for the Sunday Covenant Mass would just spread themselves out across the garden, lapped in the luxury of the breeze that puffs without letup,  repeating to themselves the promises and resolutions they have written on small pieces of paper to offer during the Mass, later to be dropped in a clay jar for burning.

I remember one such Sunday when Jun, Yeni and I came to thank the Lord for answering our prayer for our daughter to pass the bar examinations. Earlier, on the second Sunday of the September before, likewise the second Sunday of the bar examinations, my husband and I spent a whole day at the shrine, before the Blessed Sacrament, which Sister Charito Maria graciously exposed for us, in sympathy with our concern. The hours that we spent on our knees were hours of intense, silent conversation with God. I believe that the Blessed Mother was there praying with us, interceding for us with her son, and, together with her son, with the Father. We never felt a deeper peace, and even now talk with nostalgia about the time we spent in prayer at the shrine, pausing only to eat the sandwiches that we brought with us, as we looked out from the top of the hill at the spread of the sea below. At the height of the rainstorm that Covenant Sunday, Sister Mary Agnes, the superior of the Schoenstatt Sisters in Cebu, met the people assembled with her big, black umbrella, announcing that the Mass would be inside the shrine and that we should be ready to be jam-packed in the chapel which normally could hold only about 20 people. We all managed miraculously to fit in, a 100-odd crowd. Those who opted to remain outside, under the tents, followed the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass through a veil of rain. I could not help thinking that God was embracing us. And that same embrace I find in the image of Our Lady of Schoenstatt: as the Mother of Jesus, the Mother of God and our Mother, tenderly holds the Child Jesus in her arms, she holds us too, her children. It is as though she wants to lead us on a journey of prayer towards her son. Perhaps, this is why Mary is called Pilgrim Mother. Three years ago, at about this month, Sister Charito Maria visited our village to draw us into this journey with the Pilgrim Mother. She told us that the Pilgrim Mother’s work is to distribute God’s graces, to invite us to advance her work by contributing to the “Capital of Grace” through personal renewal and by inspiring others to do the same. Our role, therefore, is to be like our Pilgrim Mother, always “on her feet,” to use Bishop Julito Cortes’s words when he addressed the convenors and devotees during the first Schoenstatt Cebu Convention in November 2010. And so, in our village, we gathered 15 residents, representing 15 households, who would journey with the Pilgrim Mother (as represented by a small replica of the image of Our Lady of Schoenstatt), on a mission to bring blessings to the homes that she visits. By opening their doors to the Pilgrim Mother, and praying as a family before the image, believing and trusting in her powerful intercession to obtain graces from the Shrine, and encouraging the spread of these blessings by taking the image to the next home, the group makes the circle of graces turn and return, bringing each one to “inner transformation.”

This was the vision of the father and founder of the Schoenstatt Movement, Father Joseph Kentenich. Incidentally, the world will celebrate the 100th year of the founding of Schoenstatt—literally, “lovely place”—in 2014, when pilgrims from all over the world will converge at the site of the original shrine in Germany. But the pilgrimage starts here, in silence, in the heart. It starts in the home, which the Pilgrim Mother makes her own, and in the journey that one makes as one goes up one’s hill to renew oneself. This uphill journey evokes for me a poem by Christina Rosetti:

Does the road wind uphill all the way?

Yes to the very end.

Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.

But in taking this journey, I will make my own this little prayer that Father Kentenich made to Mary:

Let us walk like you through life.

let us mirror you through life.

strong and noble, meek and mild,

peace and love be our endeavor.

Walk in us through our world,

make it ready for the Lord.