"I Blessed the Tattoo": Reflections on Spirituality & Popular Devotions

Threading my way through the maze of back streets in the barrios of East Los Angeles with the aid of my detailed AAA maps, I finally locate Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, park, and venture inside the dimmed interior. A gaggle of uniformed children and their teachers from the parish parochial school are filing out following the morning school mass. Alongside the church's right aisle a woman with several pre-school aged children hanging on her skirts is kneeling before a mosaic of the Sacred Heart. An older Asian gentleman shuffles slowly around the sanctuary's circumference, lightly touching the feet of the various polychrome statues as he goes. Nearby a cascade of fresh flowers decorate a Guadalupe Shrine. In an inset alcove, the parish's titular Virgin is honored in what looks like a hand wrought pastel mosaic erected in 1958 on the centennial of the Lourdes apparition. Mary's original proclamation inscribed in French, "Je suis l'Immaculée Conception," circles her image in cursive letters.

This Tuesday is a typical of the many days I had spent and would spend peregrinating the churches and shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary under her multiple titles and guises in the archdiocese of Los Angeles, home of America's "minority majority" city and a microcosm of the global Catholic church. During my travels I would also attend festivals and devotions under her patronage and speak with a wide spectrum of people who orient toward her in a special way. This trip is part of what I have come to call my "Mary in L.A." project, a project born of many impulses: a late life honing toward my home town, a re-surfacing fascination with the figure of the Virgin, an academic interest which has been tangential to much of my work in the history and present practice of Christian spirituality,¹ and an unfolding desire to experience myself more concretely as a member of that sprawling multicultural body of Christ, the Church, in all its familiarity and utter otherness.

This day's experience was typical in that L.A.'s churches are rarely empty, even on a week day. Rather, whether they are located in affluent suburbs or tucked away in crumbling inner city neighborhoods, they are places–in many cases oases–of prayer. Private, communal, silent, muttered, recited, sung, gestured, embodied, and enacted prayer. Much of the praying in these churches would be described as "devotional" or examples of "popular religion." Much if it, in dozens of tongues, is directed toward the Virgin in one or another of her thousands of names.

As I circle the dimmed interior of Our Lady of Lourdes with the other devotees, I become aware that a funeral hearse has pulled up in front of the exterior. The driver emerges and stands leaning against the hearse in the late morning sun apparently waiting for the time when his services will be needed. Soon, two young men in clothes that identify them as toughs from the surrounding barrio enter and kneel in one of the back pews. Faces buried in their hands, their postures belie the deep grief that brings them to their knees in this darkened Marian Sanctuary.

"SPIRITUALITY" AND ITS SCHOLARS

I begin this exploration of the relationship between "Spirituality" and devotional practice in its various forms, with this scene at Our Lady of Lourdes in the barrio of East L.A. because it is out of my explorations of Los Angeles Marian devotion, both through observation, visitation, and conversation as well as the more traditional scholarly practices of reading and archival researching, that the questions I have about that relationship have emerged. I identify myself as a scholar of Christian Spirituality. Although formally trained in the interdisciplinary field of Religious Studies, since the early 1980's I have followed and been involved with the emerging scholarly field of Spirituality. Especially, I have been part of the ongoing work of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, which has endeavored to articulate the methodological perimeters for this emerging discipline.² The field of...