I’m no longer Catholic, but I still carry a statue of the Virgin Mary

PERSPECTIVE | She became shorthand for a feeling of a home

(Lily illustration)

After a long day in a string of long days on my summer road trip to see the states I hadn’t been to yet, I parked at a chapel at Grand Teton National Park. I had to pee, and churches usually had bathrooms, so it seemed as good place to stop.

I assumed it would be vaguely Christian, but when I opened the door, it was a familiar scene except for the timber walls: pews, alter, cross, and a statue of Virgin Mary.

“Oh,” I said into the empty room. I forgot about the bathroom and instead kneeled to say a prayer, even though I haven’t gone to church regularly since college. This was a little bit of home — whatever that was anymore.

I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia that was like a lot of suburbs of Philadelphia (and New York and Boston) that flourished after World War II: largely blue collar and largely Roman Catholic. I went to Catholic school through sixth grade, made my first Holy Communion in second, and was given a five-inch high statue of the Virgin Mary for my confirmation in eighth. I did all that because it’s the religion I was placed into. Why would I think anything else?

Stop telling me to ‘stay safe’

In high school, my views on homosexuality, gay marriage, women’s rights, abortion and birth control hit the polar opposite of the Church’s. I was in college when the pedophilia scandal broke. Now in my 30s, the Church continues to work to make it harder for abuse victims to seek justice while seeking to weaken the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate. I don’t see a place for me in the Roman Catholic Church. It’s not a gap that even a Cool Pope can bridge.

Still, I’ve had that statue with me since eighth grade. I took her to college, my first apartment, my second, to the first house I bought. I didn’t feel like I had to hide her when I put my house up for sale because most people in New Jersey wouldn’t blink at seeing a Virgin Mary statue in someone’s dining room, or even on the front lawn.

As I drove through parts of the country where less than 100 years ago Catholics were frequent targets of the Klu Klux Klan, though, seen as both idol worshipers for our devotion to Mary and bad immigrants swarming the country, I didn’t bring up my childhood faith at all.

I didn’t think anyone would burn a cross on the hood of my Jeep if I wore my Miraculous Medal — not when I’m a generic looking white woman who could be whatever flavor of Christian you wanted if she kept her mouth shut. Radicalized Christians, while still pressing down on those of Jewish faith, have most shifted their hate and rage onto another group of immigrant others, mostly brown, but I still didn’t want to say anything that marked me as an other.

The deeper I got into the trip, though, the more I latched onto signs of home, and one of those was Mary. In Taos, N.M., when I saw a mural of her on the wall of a shop, I took a picture. When I found a straw bag with her image in Abiquiu, also in New Mexico, I bought it. And when I found her in a national park in Wyoming, I stopped to say a prayer (even though, I learned later, it’s an Episcopal church).

Mary became shorthand for a feeling of a home, even if that home as I know it is now gone.

It’s a home of fluffy white Communion dresses, singing in church on Christmas Eve, of hunting down plastic eggs with my 10 (then 15, then 20) cousins on Easter Sunday at my grandparents’ house, one that is now rotting in foreclosure because the people who bought it used it to cook meth.

My family, through death, divorce and moves, has changed, and the Catholic Church has changed here too. It’s shrinking in the U.S., and within it, moving South and West, according to the Pew Research Center. The number of churches in the Diocese of Camden in New Jersey has halved in the last decade. My parish closed in 2014 and remains empty with faded signs on the doors, a squat mid-century modern building a barren reminder of what used to be.

By the time I got to Grand Teton, I knew I wouldn’t be staying in New Jersey after my trip, so Mary became a marker of something left behind. My strongest tie isn’t to a faith that reveres a woman for being both a virgin and giving birth, but to the framework for a family whose traditions formed within it. Carrying my Mary bag or wearing my medal is to remind me of my love to and from them, not any church.

In late July, I returned to New Jersey to prepare to launch a new life in Colorado, and routed one of my morning runs to my old Catholic elementary school, which is now a preschool. There, on the side of the church that is no longer a Roman Catholic church, Mary still stands, hands outstretched, face down. She had a crown of fake blue flowers on her head. Oh Mary we crown you. Or at least somebody did.

On the trip, another marker of home became Barenaked Ladies’ “Rock Spectacle,” a favorite from college. Some days, I listened to it three or four times in a row while driving over mountains, fields and plains. In “The Old Apartment,” the singer goes back to a place that was once his home, repeating over and over again “this is where we used to live.”

This is where I used to live, I thought as I crossed myself in front of that Mary statue. And then ran back to my mom’s to start packing.

Jen A. Miller is author of “Running: A Love Story.”