Angel in a Wooden Bra / Page 18 of 20


	Lutherans light no candles to Mary in Siena, a small walled city to the south, an archrival of Florence, there is a museum with 36 rooms of la madonna, la madonna e il bambino, la madonna col bambino e santo giovanni, la madonna col bambino e santi e angeli, la maestra (the virgin enthroned), la annunciazione (the virgin birth announced), la adorazione (where crowds of kings, shepherds, painters' patrons and their children admire the virgin and child), and the ones where Mary is about to be taken up, already rising towards heaven where Christ and the angelic host wait with her crown, and she stops mid-air to remove her belt and drop it to the crowd below. (they hang it out now in Pistoria on the altar during holy days.) but I am traveling with a Lutheran who reminds me in each of these 36 rooms that Lutherans don't believe in the divinity of Mary. that Lutherans don't pray for dead because they are now in God's hands. that Lutherans believe marble statues of dead saints are a form of idol worship. so, I resist kneeling with the Catholics before her statue. I don't light candles, or leave flowers at her shrine. the eyes of the madonnas, lost in peace and contemplation, don't follow me from gilded pictures. I watch the priest sing Latin from behind marble columns thick as old-growth redwoods, and leave through the human-sized side door marked 'uscita'.

Lutherans light no candles to Mary