Joan Weimer’s second memoir, Awestruck: A Skeptic’s Pilgrimage, just out this year, opens with a dramatic prologue:

The plane is so near the ground I can make out individual palm trees, their fronds whipped into a frenzy by a tremendous wind. Wet red tiles on the roofs are close enough to count. Abruptly the left wing drops and I’m looking straight down at Florida. The plane shudders, and keeps on shuddering.

“Do you know what’s going on?” I ask the man beside me.

“The pilot aborted the landing at the last minute,” he says.

“Did we almost crash?”

The shake of his head doesn’t mean “no,” it means “would you believe it?” and “it’s not over yet.”

The wing staggers back toward horizontal but the plane is still shivering, fighting for altitude. My body is vibrating too, but not with the plane, not with panic either. It’s something else–the buzz of heightened attention, intense interest. I close my eyes and ask myself how I feel about dying. To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. That’s what Whitman thought.

 How could it be lucky to die when my life is brimming with new possibilities? I’ve recovered from a spine injury that threatened to cripple me. Soon I’ll be on sabbatical, living in Europe for five months. Right now I’m flying to Florida to help a playwright adapt my first book for the stage.

And if I don’t get there?

It will be all right. The words come from a strange voice in my head–not Whitman’s, not my own. I can’t identify it and I don’t trust it. What does it mean, all right–angels and harps, or darkness and silence, or…. The voice cuts me off. Whatever death is, it will be all right.

The voice continues:

Over the throb of the engines, words speak themselves in my head: Into Thy hands I commend my spirit. Who said that– Jesus on the cross? His words have no business in my head–a Jewish head, though it never enters a synagogue. We are in the hands of the Lord. More words I don’t believe. If I’m going to die, I don’t want it to be with a head full of lies. I close my eyes and follow my breath, slow and steady, unafraid. That I can trust. But my body is telling me–it feels–I actually feel that I really am held in someone’s hands.

Feeling too uncomfortable to tell her atheist husband about the other-worldly intercession during her brush with death, the author makes a date with a friend, who upon listening says, “Sounds like you met the Black Madonna.” She refers Weimer to a book called The Cult of the Black Virgin by Ean Begg. Weimer reads Begg’s statement that the Black Madonna sometimes:

comes to us in dreams and visions, in sickness cured, in rescue from catastrophe an in chance encounters with the numinous.

Because she is Jewish, Weimer’s response is relief mixed with vexation:

So I’m not crazy–at least I’m not the only one who’s crazy in this way. I’d hate to think it was a Christian saint who gave me the most luminous moment of my life, but the image of a dark mother–that feels oddly right. I wonder–when I felt the end of my life approach, did I float back to its beginnings where I lived in the darkness of my mother’s body in seamless intimacy?

Readers are in for a treat as Weimer quests for understanding through antiquity and modernity, history and spirituality, daily life and deep psychology.

I met Joan Weimer while I was teaching in a city near her new home in Arizona, and I arranged an email interview with her. Here is a transcript of our Q & A:

Sheila
When did you know you had a memoir on your hands and feel that you would commit to writing the story of your travels across Europe to find out more about the Black Madonna?

Joan
As a memoirist, I’ve learned to be suspicious of my own motives, to inspect and interrogate my behavior. I was particularly suspicious of my pursuit of the Black Madonna. Once again I needed a sabbatical project–which was exactly what had sent me to study Constance Fenimore Woolson and led eventually to my first memoir Back Talk.

But I was frustrated with the two books I was working on, a labyrinth history that was beyond me, and a memoir I was writing about liminality. Everyone in my family was on some sort of threshold, a place that’s supposedly full of creative possibilities but often feels like sitting in a sailboat with no wind. After about a hundred pages, my writing got becalmed, too. It was only the passages about my mother, who was stuck between a life she hated and a death she feared, that had life in them.

One thing I did trust was synchronicities, especially when they seemed to nudge me in a direction I didn’t want to go. They made me feel they might be more than a nudge from my own unconscious–a message not to be sneezed at–but some kind of guidance from a larger field of force. I can still feel the shock when my colleague told me I’d met the Black Madonna, and the strange shiver when I opened the book and read that the
Black Madonna behaved exactly like the dark figures that I’d come to believe had rescued me twice, first from crippling and then if not from death, from the fear of death on that plunging plane.

Because I needed a project and the two books I was attempting were dead in the water, I made a conscious decision to act as if the summons fromthe Black Madonna was real. To my amazement, that decision set off a chain of events so startling and mind boggling and literally shocking that I had a hard time making what was true sound true. It makes me think that no matter how opportunistic or shabby your original motives, the process of pursuing any kind of research, into your own life or someone else’s, is a kind of pilgrimage. You’re seeking illumination, even transformation, and that search changes what you study and it changes you.

Sheila
I was interested in how, while writing the story of finding Black Madonna statues in many European churches, you begin working with and journeying through memories of your mother. You write:

It’s my mother’s voice accompanying me through the huge bronze doors of St. Peter’s. “I don’t want you to grieve for me when I’m gone.” No? Then why did she plant those nettles in my heart?

I am touched by the way you describe your mother as you are standing in looking at a tall white statue of Artemis of Ephesus:

My real mother. She’d have laughed at Artemis’s rows of breasts and told me her own breasts hung on her chest like a cocker spaniel’s ears. I remember how she would stand in her last years balanced on her walker and let me hug those flat breasts to mine. She’d say, “Can you feel those lumps along my backbone? I’m turning into a stegosaurus.” I miss my mother’s boney back. I miss her laughter.

And I am in love with these words from your ending:

You struggle and suffer and then you notice a new thing in a familiar place, and suddenly you discover you’ve arrived where you need to be.

Your outside journey is through Europe, but your inner journey is through the images and perceptions that rise up concerning your sticky relationship with your mother, with religion and with yourself as daughter, wife, and seeker. Ultimately you experience a change of heart that is profound.

What began to tell you as a writer to explore the thread of your connections and disconnections with your mother?

Joan
From the beginning of that journey, my encounters with the Black Madonna triggered painful memories of my own mother that I’d managed to repress. That was when I realized my journey was about those two mothers, one mortal and one archetypal. In this case, I was writing not about something that had happened but about something that was happening, something I’d set in motion. There were times when I wondered if I was writing the book as a result of the journey, or making the journey so I’d have a book to write.

Sheila
I think you do a wonderful job of showing us that actually these notions are one and the same.  Writing the journey is the journey. Of yourself at the Basilica in Loreto you write:

Each breath makes me lighter and larger. I love this place. Here I feel at home. It’s a shock but it’s true. For the moment it doesn’t matter that this is a Christian house of worship or that Loreto is an important Catholic shrine. There’s something here for me that’s powerful and real. If I could stay long enough, I could become–I don’t know what. Someone larger and wiser. Tears well up, all’improvviso.

And in keeping with noting the journey you are actually on, with or without reasons for writing, you tell us some ways in which your husband is not always the most supportive of your traveling desires. At times in the story, I find myself irritated with David for not accompanying you when it seemed to me you needed him to help you feel secure getting around in foreign countries. Early in the book, when he needs hospital tests, you are right there for him. Women’s issues. I do admire your going on your way to those sites you wanted to see anyway and finding out that in fact, you need to be alone for the magic insights and connections to occur. So in actuality David did do the helpful thing for your discoveries and your book, though not in the moment for your comfort.

Joan
My chosen pilgrimage created real tensions with my husband. David and I have sustained our love affair over 35 years, and we were both afraid that my venture would estrange us. David’s children had become evangelical Christians while he remained committed to his atheism, and if I were to become a believer (in who knew what?) it would certainly have put distance between us. As it turned out, my adventures led me to a pervasive sense of wonder and a feeling of connection with the universe that doesn’t require any religious observance.

Sheila
Did your sense of your pilgrimage change through the writing process?

Joan
Yes. The big surprises came at my desk as I read and pieced together memories and events and discovered patterns, connections between now and then, here and there.

I write countless drafts because for me it’s only in revision–only in looking again and again–that meaning emerges. I don’t know if meaning inheres in the events we select and the way we string them together, or if we create it as we go. But I think it’s meaning we crave, and writing is the best way I know to make sense of my life. It’s the reason I encourage others to write memoirs. You’re not recording what you already know; you’re finding out the meaning of your life.

Sheila
What can you tell others about finding an aspect of life experience to explore?

Joan
When I teach creative nonfiction writing, I ask students to make a list of things they want to write about some day, and then a list of subjects they don’t want to write about. If you choose any subject from that second list, the stuff that’s troubling or scary or maddening, and find the courage to explore that chunk of experience and whatever sticks to it, I think you find yourself exploring the essentials of your life. Those tense or puzzling moments are a kind of synecdoche, parts that stand for the whole, specifics that represent the larger picture.

****

After she researched the Black Madonna by reading Begg’s book, Joan Weimer felt this way (as reported in her Prologue):

Damn it, I don’t want my vision to be about my mother any more than I want it to be about the Virgin Mary. I’d like to slam the door on both of them. But if I want my mysterious lover to find me again, I have to keep that door open–even if it means those dark mothers can enter too.

To achieve a readiness for life’s next stages, she needed to listen to her subject and she needed to enter the world of the images that resonated for her. Thomas Moore has written in Dark Nights of the Soul:

Everyone around you expects you to describe your experience in purely personal or medical terms. In contemporary society we believe that psychological and medical language best conveys the experience we have of a dark night. You are depressed and phobic; you have an anxiety disorder or a bad gene. But perceptive thinkers of other periods and places say that good, artful, sensuous, and powerful words play a central role in the living out of your dark night. Consider this possibility: it would be better for you to find a good image or tell a good story or simply speak about your dark night with an eye toward the power and beauty of expression.

Moore goes on to say:

In your dark night you may learn a secret hidden from modern people generally: the truth of things can only be expressed aesthetically–in story, picture, film, dance, music. Only when ideas are poetic do they reach the depths and express reality. In his highly original essay, “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson says that the poet “stands one step nearer to things” and “turns the world to glass.”

Later, Moore reminds us that Wallace Stevens described the poet as “a man of glass, who in a million diamonds sums us up.”
With this in mind, think about your lists of what you want to write about and what you don’t want to write about. Some of what is on your “want to write about” and what is on your “don’t want to write about” lists will almost certainly be related. I want to write about my life as a doctor, someone might say, but I don’t want to write about the way I am bored with this life most of the time.

Start with what you don’t want to write about and you will find your way to what it is you do have to say, to the synecdoche and the million diamonds. If you ignore the difficult subjects, your work will not be able to mine the complexities of life.
At the end of her book, in an epilogue, Joan Weimer sits in the Santa Cova near Barcelona, thinking about the legend that a Black Madonna was hidden there to keep it safe from invading 8th century Moors. Hundreds of years later, animals led shepherds to the cave. This day, Weimer is sitting in the cave and reflects on the fact that even when the Black Madonna of Montserrat was missing, she was there all the time. Covering her eyes with her hands, she sees light filter through and suddenly thinks of being a child playing peek-a-boo, the game that mothers teach their children so they learn that their mothers, even the world, can go away and come back. The author wonders, “Why can’t I trust that she loves me, even when she tells me I’m her darling and then snatches back her words?” She wonders if trusting the feeling of love from her mother would lead to being able to trust the other beloved presence she has experienced. “I need that,” she says. “I want it.”

Looking at the Black Madonna in her niche on the cave wall, the author asks herself:

Is it possible that I’ve come all this way to these saw-toothed mountains, trekked through the heat to this shrine, traveled to shrines in Switzerland and Italy, only to learn that not one of those trips was necessary?

She answers emphatically, “No. I couldn’t have made this inner journey without taking an outer one at the same time.”

Thomas Moore writes that to learn the intelligence of life, “you have to give yourself receptively to the transforming natural powers that remain mysteriously dark.”

Joan Weimer has lived that experience and in her recording of it, lights a way for others to have confidence that such a journey is of the utmost importance.