I saw few crutches in the monastery of Jasna Góra. I saw no gaudy wall of hanging bandages, arm slings or prosthetic limbs to tell the world that miracles of a personal kind have happened here. The Black Madonna of Czestochowa is not a woman who does small wonders: her concerns are on a grander scale. The madonna is an ancient icon, Byzantine in style, that hangs above a small altar in a quiet oratory just off the main basilica. Her dark features are covered with a silver facade so that only the face and eyes gaze out at the people who stand in awe before her.
Couples in love, old men tasting widowhood, young nuns in search of ecstasy, pregnant women and old grandparents come and stand or kneel, and I presume pray, for their individual dreams and hopes to be fulfilled.
My therapist is not against prayer. She told me once that my mother’s lack of physical intimacy with me at an early age could be the cause of my melancholy. She suggested that life in infancy without the tenderness of a mother can be traumatic, and the wound can fester through life and cause problems in late middle age when the prospect of death becomes more real.
She often explains to me that it’s good to be mothered. Sometimes in the dark of night, when there is no one else to offer comfort, it is even possible for me to become mother to my own interior child. And through therapy I have learned to stop saying: “I must be tough with the world and hard on myself.” I realise now that such self-loathing was what led me into darkness.
So for me the Black Madonna of Czestochowa is a very potent and tender image. And she is real insofar as the beautiful Byzantine icon actually exists, above the altar, in the real world as a monumental presence that is not a figment of my imagination but a cornerstone of Polish history.
Ever since the icon was placed in the monastery on the hill above the town, back in the 14th century, surrounded by high walls that even the cannonballs of enemy armies couldn’t penetrate, and ever since John II Casimir, king of Poland, made her queen of his kingdom in 1656, the Black Madonna has had a political role. She is not just queen of heaven, but of Poland itself. She is the sovereign icon of an entire nation.
So it was no surprise that Karol Wojtyla’s visit to Czestochowa soon after his rise to the papacy frightened the Soviet Union and the communist leadership in Poland out of their wits.
I suppose it dawned on the new pope that to invoke the blessing of the Black Madonna might tip the balance of power in favour of his nation’s freedom and future at a time of crisis, when Solidarity was facing down the old regime.
A great sense of human dignity
In the monastery of Czestochowa I always feel a great sense of human dignity. It’s apparent in the pilgrim’s private rituals. It’s apparent in the m
adonna’s inscrutable gaze. And I sense the same human longing that stirs in the music of Henryk Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki present here too, in the whispered sighs and songs of the pilgrims on their knees. I feel that the heart of the icon, to paraphrase WB Yeats, is beating.
And I don’t care any more when my friends tease me about such innocence, or try to uncouple me from the delusion that some great mother in the sky is holding us, or that some heaven beyond this world is waiting for us. Because I know as well as anyone else that there is only silence beyond the grave.
But faith is an act of the imagination: it offers us an alternative way of seeing things, a perception that allows us to live calmly in this lifetime and find happiness in the present moment.And the eyes of the icon are extraordinary, in the way that the eyes of the Mona Lisa are. They sear the soul with a template of human compassion. The madonna's eyes awaken in me a child who is still loved and has permission to love, even if that is a myth surrounded by a universe of desolation.
I need no cures here. There are no cures for human isolation. But the very act of being in the present moment is heaven enough; her sorrowful face gazes at me with pity and compassion and a new child is born in me again, every time I look up into her eyes.