Searching For a Relationship with the Mother of God
As part of our series of book recommendations for the Dormition Fast, author Katherine Bolger Hyde reviewed A Long Walk with Mary: A Personal Search for the Mother of God, by Brandi Willis Schreiber.
A Long Walk with Mary is the furthest thing imaginable from a dry academic treatise. Neither is it a work of theology, hagiography, iconography, hymnography, or devotion, though it includes elements of all those things. Rather, it is a memoir—transparently vulnerable, deeply personal and therefore entirely universal—describing one woman’s year-long quest for a genuine, fulfilling relationship with the Mother of God.
Brandi Schreiber’s prose is masterful, alternately meditative, captivating, heartbreaking, and uplifting. The settings of her search range from her home and garden in the West Texas desert to a mountain town in northern New Mexico to the playas (hollows in the desert that fill with water in the rainy season) amongst which she takes her early-morning walks. These settings are populated by her dog, Lucy, by flocks of Canada geese that touch down in the playas, and by a family of foxes that lives under her garden shed, as well as by various humans who come and go in her life and teach her unexpected lessons about what the Mother of God could mean to her.
Brandi relates to the Theotokos through all her roles in life: Orthodox parishioner, daughter, granddaughter, wife, employee, expectant mother of a long-awaited child. In each role she discovers a new kind of connection to Mary, a new area of her life that can be transformed by her love.
Brandi Schreiber is typical of many converts from Protestantism in finding it difficult to relate to the Virgin Mary, whose role in our salvation is often downplayed to the point of near erasure in that tradition. But even those who have known Mary all their lives can find new ways of understanding and appreciating her within these pages. In walking along with the author and Mary, the reader can also find new points of connection, a new depth and resonance to our relationship with the woman who is the Mother of both Christ and His Church and therefore of every human soul.
