who is the patron saint of this smell

farm shrines and feeling fine

When I would visit my family in the summers, it was my enduring petition that we drive north to visit the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in New Franken, Wisconsin. It was about two hours up the freeway, and for whatever reason, no one was as enthusiastic about visiting as I.

Feedback from family members included: “It’s far.” and “No.”

I first visited the site of the only approved Marian apparition in the United States the summer of my high school graduation. Some friends and I were headed to a weekend on the shore of Green Bay, and we were game for a hallowed detour. Small signs for the site begin to pepper the freeway about twenty miles to the south, and we followed the arrows that pointed the way.

There are a handful of miles between highway 57 and the shrine itself, and in between, you’ll pass only farmland — acres of fields, a smattering of barns in various conditions, animals if the season is right. The first thing a member of our expedition party asked as we drove closer was appropriate: “So who is the patron saint of this smell?”

Suddenly upon the horizon - in the midst of the siloes and the grass and the homesteads - a large Vatican flag appeared. There is a new visitors center now, and there is an extraordinary outdoor rosary walk in the garden out back. The main chapel itself is truly beautiful, but the very best part of the whole of the shrine is the oratory.

If you’ve ever been in your friend’s dad’s basement in northern Wisconsin and you’ve ever been in a Roman Catholic church supply warehouse and you’ve somehow managed to imagine the two of them inhabiting one another, you’ll have some idea of what the oratory of the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help is like. I entered the first time through the doors at the bottom of the staircase from the main chapel. The air was warm and gentle. The light was dim, and the wooden panels of the walls were fragrant and sturdy. Saintly paintings and racks of candles lined the walls, and at the center, an outsized plaster statue of a pale Mary stretched her hands in blessing over the vases of flowers and votives arranged at her painted feet. It was saccharine. It apologized for nothing. I loved it instantly. I still love it desperately.

Our little apartment now is over one hour in the other direction. To reach the shrine from here, it’s not so much a journey up into the boons as it is a journey out of the deep-boons from which we now begin. I found myself south for an errand last week, and in the back of my mind, the invitation simmered: just 30 minutes from here. Not so bad. Maybe worth a visit…

And it was.

My Lent has generally been swallowed by the chaos of a large, difficult move — a constellation of low-grade disasters that somehow carried our household from a place that never felt like home to another one that was home once to me as a markedly different person. I confess to you, my brothers and sisters, that I have twice this season consumed meat on a Friday quite simply because it had been days since I’d even remembered what day it was. Mea culpa.

I have been off of Twitter for Lent, and I suppose this has been a blessing in some ways. I have persisted in the Daily Office now on my own outside the structure of the parish from which I’ve been sent. I have been moderate in most of the appetites I have prayed to soothe throughout the season. I have been more charitable than I’d imagined possible considering the circumstances. But though these are the fruits of a holy Lent, they are not its purpose.

I have longed to be silent and alone with Jesus. I don’t want the words of the Office or even the vitality of the Mass, though I am always wanting to want them. In truth, I simply want to bury myself in the vast, unknowable tenderness of Christ’s grace. I want to be unseen and unremembered everywhere but before Him. I want to rest my head against His knee and offer this vigil as a sacrifice of humility and praise. I want to spend the whole of my life in contemplation of His face.

These were the acute longings of my heart on the day I drove the additional 30 minutes to the farm shrine. It is still winter here, and the wind whipped my unbuttoned coat behind me like a cloak as I scuttled toward the chapel doors. I was alone, but the Sacrament was there, waiting.

The oratory was just as I’d left it on my last visit — warm, kind, earnest — all held together by the sweet must of oil and wood and residual incense from the upstairs chapel. I knelt at the wooden prie-dieu before the giant plaster Mary, and the expanse of the earth opened beneath my knees.

I sometimes feel childish in how often I pray to God asking him to remind me that he loves me. And (almost worse!) he does, every time. I hear it always: I love you. I love you. I love you. And my heart throws itself back in relief: thank you. Thank you. I love you. Thank you. If I were of true spiritual maturity, I wouldn’t be so insufferable and demanding. But I am both, for now.

It proceeds similarly with prayer. God will meet us anywhere for prayer. There is grace and benefit in making a pilgrimage, but we need not venture north or south or to one derivation of holy place or another in order to speak with him. But when I visit the shrine, I think I am asking for a particular sort of conversation. I am hoping, in some sense, to feel as set apart as I wish I were the rest of the time. I am hoping to become like the fields themselves — endless, forgettable, unnavigable. In this season, they are blanketed with snow. They are pure and enchanted, hiding their promise not in shame but in discretion. I want to touch the edges of these things in prayer. I want to be unsure where the boundedness of my own being ends and where everything becomes Him, always, unstoppably wild and eternal. I want to feel God’s own breath blessing my emptiness and my promise.

I was alone there at the feet of Mary for about an hour. An older couple came in later, and I moved to the back pew to give them room to pray together. A woman about my age entered next, shaking snow from her bright winter jacket. She had a bouquet of flowers with her that she delicately unwrapped and placed in one of the empty vases before Our Lady. I prayed for all of them. The flowers were from the gas station, and they were irrationally beautiful.