Excerpt from the Book

A HIGH WIND WHIPS THE ZÜRICHSEE INTO WHITECAPS. Snow clings to the mountains, but in fields bordering the road, pale green is breaking through the patchy yellows and browns of winter. Beyond the neatly fenced fields and freshly painted stables rise hills draped with tall black pines, all that's left of the menacing Finsterwald or Dark Forest where the legendary origins of Einsiedeln Abbey and its Black Madonna lie.

I'm driving a little too fast for the winding country roads. Jet lag from our all-night flight to Zurich made us oversleep this morning, and we got off later than we should have for my appointment with Bruder Efraim at the Abbey. The road forks and I ask David to check the map. It would be humiliating to get lost on our way to a shrine that millions of pilgrims have managed to find, many of them on their knees or on foot or on a donkey. We're not given to asceticism. At our age, the flesh needs no encouragement to mortify itself.

David reaches over and touches my cheek. "Marry me," he says.

"What, again?" I press my mouth to his palm.

In the shorthand of intimacy, he's reminding me that whatever else this trip may be, it's a honeymoon. I need reminding. The frenzy of packing up our lives for five months-hauling rugs and boxes to the attic, getting leaky faucets fixed, updating our wills-reduced us to efficient partners, sometimes cranky ones. But every time we leave home and go where nothing is familiar, where everyone is a stranger, we discover each other with the same attention and wonder that we bring to a Gothic cathedral-craning our necks to admire the vaulted ceiling, descending into the crypt to stand on its ancient stones. When sun streams through the stained glass windows, we fall in love all over again.

But now there's a place in me where David can't come. I can't invite him in until I know if it's a palace or a padded cell for people who hear voices. Maybe I'll find out when I meet the Black Madonna face to face, just a few miles down the road. My belly is quivering with excitement, and something else. It's fear-that I won't find a trace of my dark beloved at this Catholic shrine. Maybe fear that I will.

I spot a sign for the Abbey and make a sharp turn onto a narrow road. Soon we're in a village with signs on every side, this way to the Abbey, no parking here, and I remember reading that every year this place has to deal with hundreds of thousands of visitors, from the hopeful to the desperate to the curious. I'm wondering where I might fit on that continuum when we pull into an immense parking lot. Across the road a vast plaza of gray cobblestones rises towards the Abbey. It's a massive white building with a red tiled roof. No flying buttresses, just an 18th-century church and monastery and school. In the bright morning sun, it looks utterly practical and matter-of-fact, not at all the sort of place you'd come to looking for a miracle.

"Didn't you tell me this Abbey was ancient?" David asks, obviously disappointed.

The Abbey goes back a thousand years, I tell him, but it keeps burning down. The last fire destroyed the whole village along with the church-everything but the Black Madonna's chapel. "Not very considerate of her," David says, "keeping her own house intact while everyone else's burns to the ground." Inside it's freezing, at least ten degrees colder than outside. But it's bright as a child's birthday cake, white columns frosted with peach and green and yellow flowers, murals and frescoes and gilding and little white cherubs cavorting over it all.

Right in front of us is a black marble chapel, startling in this lofty white basilica. It's a free-standing house with columns on its facade and an arched doorway. In front of the chapel, rows of pews are jammed with people singing a hymn. I catch the word Jungfrau, Virgin, but can't catch a glimpse of the Black Madonna. She must be deep inside her black house.

David gazes around him. "True Baroque," he whispers, "where nothing succeeds like excess."

I grab his arm and we hurry down the nave to the carved wooden door that leads to the monastery. A black-robed monk answers the bell and ushers us into an empty room that looks like the office of a bankrupt business whose furniture has been repossessed.

"Here's a fact for you to contemplate," I say to David. "Just this year, ten million people trekked to the shrine of the Black Madonna of Guadaloupe in Mexico. Ten million!"

"What were they looking for?"

"Miracles, most likely. If you need to be saved from cholera or drought or a storm at sea, a Black Madonna's your best bet." For weeks before we left home, I ran around libraries grabbing everything I could find about the Black Madonna and her shrines. "She'll rescue you from ambush, too, and pirates, even volcanic lava." Not to mention a plunging plane.