Holy Mary Mother of God! She’s Black!!

Ursula Le Guin could have written her ‘Epiphany’ in Le Puy:

Mrs Le Guin has found God.

Yes. But she found the wrong one!

Absolutely typical…

And …‘she is black’.

In Le Puy’s Cathedrale Notre Dame a small black female form has more or less taken over from the white-bloke God typically presented in institutionalised faiths. In Le Puy, the powerful Black Madonna sits remote and distant on the huge black and gold background of the High Altar. She is so small and so black that you can barely see her face or that of her black baby son poking like a mask out of the centre of his mother’s robe. And every day of the summer months at a special mass at 7 in the morning she blesses a hundred or more pilgrims setting off on journeys across France and Spain towards Santiago.

Mrs Le Guin could have found the black-she-God at some 180 holy sites in France and another 400 or more sites across Europe. Most of these black Mamas seem to pack quite some miraculous Grrrrl Power.

Le Puy is one of the oldest Marian shrines, going back perhaps to the First Century. But the current sculpture is a replica from the late 1800s. Historians agree that the original statue was probably an Egyptian carving brought to Le Puy before the 11th century. Records from late 1700s say that she was made of wood, bandaged up like a mummy and had been painted over and over again. That Madonna and Child was burnt down during the French Revolution, reportedly, with the arsonists chanting ‘Down with the Egyptian’.

So let me extend Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Epiphany’. When a black(ish) woman (NB: Krishna is etymologically the female form of ‘Dark’ in Sanskrit) goes walkabout, she finds, quite correctly, that God is female, black, of indeterminate age (what woman tells you her correct age?) and origin, a migrant, doing what she can to fit into the local culture and who has been idolised and burnt down at the whim of men.

Nothing to see here.

There was more to see at Lyon’s Basilica Notre-Dame de Fourvière. Built in 1880 (or thereabouts) to bless French war efforts against Germany, it towers over the city, dwarfing the much older Lyon Cathedral in the centre of the old city. Notre dame de Fourvière is now deliberately international and multi-lingual with ‘hail Mary’ inscribed along it’s entry stairwell in many world languages, including several Asian and African ones. On display too are newly cast Mary figurines from around the world, including some beautiful black ones.

A family of Tamils who live in Germany draw my attention to the ‘Notre Dame de la Sante de Vailankanni’. Wiki tells me that Vailankanni a small town in Tamil Nadu and one of India’s own largest Catholic pilgrimages. It draws 20 million pilgrims a year, beating Rome hands down it would seem! The Vailankanni Madonna replica has been installed in Lyon, wearing a white sari with red and gold border emulating the Hindu Goddess of wealth, Lakshmi and just like the goddess Lakshmi in most modern representations, Sante de Vailankanni has the colour of a pukka memsahib, perfect peaches and cream! The Tamil family and I crack jokes about the Indian Barbie, though deep down every Indian woman is conditioned to dream of white skin. But, in a land where black Madonnas ooze power and passion, and white girls abound, the poor pale creature from deep dark Southern India can only disappoint, particularly as she stands next to the beautiful, politically correct, post-modern, dark brown, Italian contribution to the Mother of God gallery in Lyon’s number 2 Church.

Down in the heart of city, in the medieval Lyon Cathedral, I finally find something a skeptic can believe in. A huge photograph of ‘Sante Teresa de Calcutta’ looms out of a chapel, currently under construction. In Calcutta, her adopted home and my city of birth, Mother Teresa seemed quite human, and yet needed no Papal sanction to be recognised as a mother and a saint by the deprived and the destitute of the city. Here, in this grand old building she is instantly recognisable as the icon cast in the heat, poverty, and contradictions of the third world. Her life simply defies ordinary logic. A girl born in 1910 somewhere in the Ottoman Empire, somehow found her way to India at the age of 19. She never saw her own mother again. She spent the next 70 years working for the wretched of the earth, and is now adored as a Saint in the grandest edifices of the Western world.

Even the crustiest skeptic feels a little bit of a miracle when an old nun from her home town in India appears as a Saint in a glorious tourist venue in a glamorous French city! Hallelujah Santa Teresa of Calcutta and thanks for reminding me of my real home.