Our Lady of the Lost and Found, by Diane Schoemperlen.
New York: Viking, 2001.
$24.95 - 346 pages.

Kimberly Hahn, a home schooling mother and a Catholic convert who is married to Scott Hahn, the nationally known apologist and speaker, once stated that she had to overcome three obstacles before becoming a Catholic. “Those three obstacles,” she said, “were Mary, Mary, and Mary.”

For anyone with questions about the place of Mary in the Catholic faith, or her place within the broader context of all Christianity, one excellent place to begin looking for answers to those questions is in Diane Schoemperlen’s Our Lady Of The Lost And Found. Described as “A Novel Of Mary, Faith, And Friendship,” Schoemperlen’s book provides a lengthy, spirited and entertaining took at Marian history, legends, apparitions and miracles.

The narrator of this novel remains nameless; she doesn’t want busloads of tourists invading her life once the word has leaked out that the Blessed Virgin Mary has spent a week in her house. The narrator tells us much about herself — the satisfaction she takes from her writing, the joy that the small pleasures of life give to her, her acceptance of her own solitude and “normalcy.”

After giving us a synopsis of her life and reassuring us of her sanity, the narrator tells us how on a Monday morning, after eating breakfast and writing for several hours, she is on her way to the kitchen when she encounters Mary in her living room:

Fear not, she said.

I was too stunned to be scared. I put the watering can down on the coffee table and stared at her.

It’s me, Mary, she said. Mother of God.

I must have looked blank She went on, smiling.

You know. Mary. Lamb of the Redeemer. Queen of Heaven. Pilgrim of Peace. Daughter of Zion. Ark of the Covenant. Fount of Beauty. Summit of Virtue. Sublime Peak of Human Intellect.

Mary explains to the narrator that she needs to stay a week in her home, to rest, read and pray. After agreeing to this arrangement — the narrator is neither a practicing Christian nor even a strong believer, but does believe her own eyes — the narrator becomes fascinated by her houseguest. Mary tells her stories about her life and her appearances in the world over the centuries, and the narrator also researches stories after Mary’s departure.

Our Lady Of The Lost And Found had plenty of opportunities to become a compendium of schlock, with a Mary that would either appear cynical or ridiculous, or a story that would become a sort of spiritual hyper drama or a farce, yet Schoemperlen followed none of these courses. Instead, she plays the story of the narrator’s mystical visitor straight up, keeping Mary believable while at the same time including a tremendous amount of information about her place in human history in the last 2000 years.

We learn, for instance, not only the story of Mary’s appearance at Lourdes and Fatima, which are known to many people, but also of her appearances in places like the village of Knock in Ireland, where 14 people saw Mary along with St. Joseph and St. John the Evangelist; in Zeitoun, Egypt, in 1968, where for five years hundreds of thousands of people, Christians and Muslims, saw Mary atop the dome of the Coptic Church of the Holy Virgin; in Rwanda in 1981, where Mary appeared to seven young people, showing them among other things a river of blood made by Rwandans killing one another, a prophecy of the coming war between the Hutus and the Tutsis in which millions died.

Not only does Schoemperlen shine in her Mariology, but she also offers thoughts and, at times, meditations of some length on history, writing, the single life, science and faith and other topics. There is, for example, the wonderful though regrettably too short account of the narrator’s time in college with Dr. Sloan, a professor of ancient history:

We worked strictly according to Dr. Sloan’s two edicts that secondary sources were verboten, primary sources were all, and that in the beginning, history was an art form (awarded its own muse, Clio, by the ancient Greeks), a complex combination of myth, chronicle, and literature that was neither pure fiction nor pure fact but a sophisticated hybrid of the two ....

I began to see what Dr. Sloan was getting at: that history can only be lived once and any written record of it that follows must be read as a reconstruction, a simulation perhaps that must be deemed more or less accurate according to any number of variables.

These passages meant much to me; I had just imparted these same lessons to a group of history students the previous month and so felt a sense of affirmation in my teaching. Careful readers of Our Lady Of The Lost And Found will doubtless find similar epiphanies in this warm, intelligent story.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville.)

 

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