About the Book
"It doesn't matter what the goal of a pilgrimage is--the waters of the Ganges or the black stone of Mecca, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher or the Wailing Wall," writes Joan Weimer. "It doesn't matter if you set out because you have faith or because you don't. You set out on a quest and amazing things happen."
Joan has no intention of making a pilgrimage until a hurricane threatens to tear the wings off her plane, and she feels invisible hands holding her safe in a radiant blackness of astonishing beauty and power. Later, a friend tells her the mysterious presence on the plane behaved just like a Black Madonna. Joan has never heard of the black-faced images of the Virgin Mary who are famous for their miracles, and she wants no part of them. She walked away from religion in her teens. Besides, her Jewish mother would turn over in her grave if she knew her daughter was hanging around a Christian saint.
Still, Joan longs to recapture the ecstatic intimacy she felt on the plunging plane. She needs to know if she was hallucinating or if she met some sacred reality she'd never glimpsed before. But where to find it? She can't go looking for airplanes about to crash, but Black Madonnas are found all over the world. And the sabbatical travel Joan has planned with her husband will take them right past two of the most famous shrines.
But visits to churches where believers are adoring a dark Blessed Mother release stinging memories of Joan's own mother and revive painful questions: Did her mother really feel that Joan was not one of her children? Did Joan really believe that if her mother didn't love her, no one ever would, that if her mother couldn't see her, she didn't exist?
Joan wrestles with these questions as she walks the 6th-century labyrinth in Ravenna's glittering basilica, as she stands in the Holy House at Loreto where the Annunciation supposedly took place, as she climbs to a sacred cave in the mountains of Montserrat where legend says the Holy Grail was glimpsed. Could Black Madonnas really represent Mary Magdalene holding the child she bore to Jesus?
Joan never thought to look to Judaism for her dark beloved or for a way to make peace with her mother, but a woman rabbi and a Hebrew phrase show her the gift of love hidden in her own mother's darkness. Her journey makes her a magnet for signs and wonders that shock her body and pierce her consciousness with moments of pain and insight and ecstasy. Awestruck: A Skeptic's Pilgrimage is the eloquent account of that adventure.
