And it inspired me for a moment my own shadows fled to talk to the lovely shadows of the Temple. As Tóibín recounts Mary’s visit to the temple, she recollects: “And then I remember turning and seeing the statue of Artemis for the first time in that second, as I stared at it, the statue was radiating abundance and bounty, fertility and grace, and beauty maybe, even beauty. In reading the book, my interreligious radar turned on as well, for at the beginning and end of her Testament Mary confesses her “secret,” low-key but real connection to Artemis, the great goddess whose great temple stood in Ephesus, where Mary lives out her last years. If you've never read it, you can find it here.) For the same reason, I also omitted reflections on the “Cana of Galilee” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov, since high school my favorite chapter in any literary work. (I was reading the book, by the way, in hopes of using it for my homily today, on the wedding feast at Cana, but decided it would have been too complicated to do so. Unable to stop the inevitable and sway her son to play it safe, she leaves the wedding before he does, and returns home. Eventually the signs of Jesus become too much, and they must kill him. That he changed water into wine - without her prompting - was a marvelous thing that she too was not prepared for, but which was also out of proportion with ordinary reality, as if a warping of the world most people could comfortably tolerate, just as the raising of Lazarus (recounted here as before Cana) was an upset to the expected, inevitable pattern of life followed by death. The wedding and crucifixion scenes are connected in Tóibín’s telling, since Mary had gone to the wedding primarily to try to get her son’s attention and warn him about the danger his “signs” was bringing upon himself. John, and not the other Gospels, and thus is directly limited to the wedding feast at Cana and the terrible, climactic scene where Mary stands by the cross of her crucified son. The Testament of Mary draws on the Gospel according to St. I needn’t summarize it here, since America has already printed a fine review by Diane Scharper, which you can read first. It is a meditation in the voice of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in her old age, as she looks back on her life. I spent a little time this week reading The Testament of Mary by the Irish novelist, Colm Tóibín.