Our Lady of the Rock: Vision and Pilgrimage in the Mojave Desert by Lisa M. Bitel (review)

As a medievalist familiar with apparitional accounts from the past, Lisa Bitel has taken it upon herself to increase her understanding of this religious phenomenon by investigating a present day Marian apparition. Since 1995, pilgrims have journeyed to a remote location in the Mojave Desert where seer Maria Paula Acuña reportedly converses with the Virgin Mary on the thirteenth of each month. Bitel, accompanied by photographer Matt Gainer, spent a number of years as a quasi-pilgrim herself in order to explore the diverse ways visitors and visionaries alike engage in age-old practices as well as utilize modern technology as they “make religion” at the apparition site of Our Lady of the Rock.

Bitel’s descriptions and analyses are thick and shaped by multi-disciplinary perspectives. She factors in not only the historical and theological import of such revelatory events within the Christian faith, but the local cultural context of the site on the borderland between Mexico and the United States, contemporary Roman Catholic ecclesial perspectives, and academic theories of sight, perception, and belief. She first situates her account in the two-thousand-year-old Christian revelatory tradition, illuminating the way in which ancient themes such as desert pilgrimage prepare the ground for such a new appearance. She then turns her attention to the visionary, showing how Maria Paula’s self-understanding and public persona, which have evolved over the years, are shaped by historical Catholic expectations about authentic visionaries. Although she is a lay woman (her activity in the Mojave necessitates that she lives apart from her husband and grown family), Acuña and her close associates in her “Marian Movement” dress in identifiably traditional religious garb. Her messages from the Virgin echo similar well-known Marian utterances recorded at sites such as Fatima, Knock, and Lourdes: they decry cultural and personal sin and urge conversion.

Next, the pilgrims themselves are considered: their varied motives, backgrounds, testimonies, belief or skepticism. Acuña’s complex relationship with those who come to the grotto is evident. While she clearly wants to spread the messages the Virgin communicates, the visionary is guarded about means of modern communication. She is not supported by local clergy. She is also protective of her own prerogatives as the chosen seer and interpreter of Mary’s monthly visitations. Most interesting here is Bitel’s exploration of the numerous methods of discernment of spirits and visions employed by visitors to the sacred site. She spends considerable time with three pilgrim informants who themselves claim to be privy to visitations: Juan, a ninety-year-old from Mexico whose precarious immigrant status has led him into difficult situations from which the Virgin has rescued him; Adelia, whose harrowing immigrant passage from Nicaragua led her eventually to consult Maria Paula, even as she questions aspects of the visionary’s ministry; and Carolina, a college-educated publicist who wrestles with her own doubts about divine interventions despite her experience of such.

The final chapters of Our Lady of the Rock are concerned with the changing contemporary visual means by which pilgrims “make religion.” Visitors bring cameras and cell phones in order to train them on the sky when Maria Paula’s actions indicate that a visitation is occurring. They pass on and refine tips to each other about capturing and interpreting the images that are said to indicate supernatural presence. The experience of Bitel’s photographer companion, both the way he is welcomed and later shunned, his skill as a visual journalist, and the limits of his medium to communicate what is essentially ineffable, are also treated. Finally, Bitel considers the use of new visual technologies, including the internet, where communal discernment of a huge range of historic and contemporary apparitions is taking place and shifting the sacra lingua of divine encounter.

The scholarly voice that narrates Our Lady of the Rock is well informed and...