The Lady of the Angels and Her City: A Marian Pilgrimage by Wendy Wright (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Lady of the Angels and Her City: A Marian Pilgrimage by Wendy Wright Dorain Llywelyn S.J. (bio) The Lady of the Angels and Her City: A Marian Pilgrimage By Wendy Wright. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013. 247 pp. $19.95 The growth of literature, both scholarly and popular, on the mother of Jesus, is relentless. The inexhaustible figure of Mary compels, attracts, and resists simplistic categorization and reduction. Wright has set herself a doubly daunting task, since the locus of her study of Marian devotion is her hometown of Los Angeles, that “sprawling, humming, magnificent, and tawdry urban environment . . . that polyglot, cultural hodgepodge” (3, 151). Appropriately, therefore, mirroring both its topic and its sociocultural context, Wright’s book offers many things. Readers will find here, among other things, a history of the development of Marian devotion, a late middle-age autobiographical Bildungsroman, loving but sociological portraits of today’s Los Angeles and contemporary U.S. Catholicism, a theological disquisition, a survey of recent Mariological currents, and a series of Marian meditations. Structured in eighteen chapters, each bearing one of Mary’s epithets, Wright’s “pilgrimage” is winding and multifaceted. Both in tone and structure, the book is frequently conversational rather than formally academic. Her chapters take interesting and sometimes unexpected excursuses that parallel the author’s own journeys—crisscrossing busy freeways, but somehow arriving at the desired point. Chapter 7, “Mystical Rose,” for example, begins with record of a conversation with Wright’s daughter as they cook together, before proceeding to considerations of the Litany of Loreto, the changing demographics of West Hollywood, the archetypal symbolism of the rose, the origin of the rosary, a famous Marian statue from Talpa, Mexico, the challenges of multicultural parish ministry, and a recent apparition of Mary in the Mojave desert. On a first reading, Wright appears to wear her scholarship lightly. Refreshingly free of jargon, the book is accessible to non-specialists. Subsequent re-readings, however will reveal a trenchant, perceptive, and learned mind at work. (The very useful annotated section on “Sources and Suggested Reading” confirms the impressive breadth and depth of Wright’s own reading). This is a theology rooted very much in the concrete, the product of an enfleshed encounter with specific place, people, and story. Wright’s vignettes are densely populated, the fruit of detailed field research. Experiences from an array of immigrant cultures anchor Wright’s considerations of how Mary functions in the lives of today’s Angelenos, including such varieties as Croatian, Igbo, Armenian, Bolivian, Hmong, among many others, for whom their particular devotions to Mary under one or other of her limitless titles are intimately connected with their communal identity. The particularity of Los Angeles does not limit the impact of her insight. Rather, given that the city is home to immigrants from all continents, its very specificity opens up global vistas. Even with the risk of smugness, there is some truth in repeating the notion that what is true of California today tends to be true of the world tomorrow. The Catholics of Los Angeles show eminently what the U.S. “futurechurch” is already becoming: majority-minority and devotional in its religious practice and culture, a faith in which Mary has a more important place than she has been given by many strands of Anglo Catholicism for almost two generations. Methodologically, Wright’s exploration is an interesting exemplar of Sandra Schneiders description of spirituality as a “self-implicating” discipline, in two [End Page 256] senses. First, Wright’s own persona is unabashedly present. This autobiographical hermeneutic adds a distinctive and important voice to contemporary Marian theology: I know of no other contemporary scholar willing to give such prominence to Mary’s maternity, by dint of connection with her own life experiences. This fact is all the more striking given that historically, Mary first appears in the theological imaginary as mother and that prayers to Mary are largely offered to her in her maternal, atropopaic dimension. Second, Wright’s own research engenders change: this Marian confession recounts Wright’s conversion to Catholicism “because of Mary” (6). It is an account of an ongoing intellectual conversion to the Marian phenomenon. The author’s...