The Invitations of Mary Series
©MS 2026

An exercise in remembering that the Queen of Heaven was also a woman who had to live through the story.

Yesterday was the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

And today, apparently, I’m beginning something.

I didn’t exactly plan it this way.

I have been writing about Mary lately—not only the Mary of doctrine, feast days, apparitions, rosaries, and devotional titles, but Mary herself.

Or at least the woman I keep trying to imagine beneath all those centuries of devotion.

Then I realized something about the calendar.

There is an old Catholic devotion known as the 54-Day Rosary Novena, traditionally associated with Our Lady of Pompeii. It consists of six consecutive nine-day novenas: traditionally, twenty-seven days of petition followed by twenty-seven days of thanksgiving.

Fifty-four days of the Rosary.

Fifty-four days with Mary.

And beginning immediately after the Assumption puts us almost perfectly on a path toward October 7—the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

Technically, counting August 16 as Day One makes October 7 Day 53 and October 8 Day 54. So this isn’t one of those wonderfully tidy Catholic calendar coincidences where the mathematics miraculously behaves itself.

But I don’t particularly mind.

October 7 still falls almost at the culmination of the journey.

And it gave me an idea.

For the next fifty-four days, I want to spend some time with Mary.

But perhaps not quite in the way you might expect.

The Mary Beneath the Blue Mantle

Catholicism has given Mary some extraordinary titles.
Mother of God.
Queen of Heaven.
Queen of Angels.
Seat of Wisdom.
Mystical Rose.
Ark of the Covenant.
Our Lady of Sorrows.
Mother of Mercy.
The Immaculate Heart.

They are beautiful.

But I’ve discovered something as I’ve been returning to the Catholic faith:

Sometimes all that gold makes it difficult for me to see the woman underneath it.

We encounter Mary crowned.

Enthroned.

Surrounded by angels.

Standing upon the moon.

Wrapped in immaculate blue robes.

Her hands are folded perfectly.

Her expression is serene.

Even when she’s grieving, she somehow manages to grieve beautifully.

And I believe there is something we risk forgetting when that becomes the only Mary we allow ourselves to imagine.

Mary had a body.

Mary got tired.

Mary got hungry.

Mary laughed.

Mary probably got irritated.

She had chores.

She had relationships.

She lived in a community.

She had plans for her life before Gabriel appeared and spectacularly rearranged all of them.

She became pregnant.

And unless hers was an extraordinarily unusual pregnancy beyond the miracle of its conception, pregnancy probably did some of the same deeply inconvenient things to her body that it has done to women’s bodies throughout human history.

Which means I am perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that at some point the Mother of God leaned over a basin and thought: This is miserable.

And somehow, that makes me love her more.

So That’s What This Is

These next fifty-four pieces aren’t intended to create a secret biography of Mary.
I want to be very clear about that.

We don’t know.

Scripture leaves enormous portions of Mary’s life completely unrecorded. I’m not claiming that Mary definitely burned dinner, hated a particular chore, experienced morning sickness, laughed at Joseph’s jokes, or reacted to anything in precisely the way I imagine.

This isn’t an attempt to sneak fiction into theology and call it tradition.

It’s a writing exercise.

A devotional exercise.

Maybe even an exercise in empathy.

I want to take what we do know about Mary’s life and occasionally stop between the verses.

Gabriel appeared to Mary.

Fine.

But what was she doing five minutes before he arrived?

And after she said yes and Gabriel left—

what did that room feel like?

What was it like waking the following morning knowing she was carrying Jesus when absolutely nothing around her looked different?

Who did she desperately want to tell?

Who was she terrified to tell?

Did she feel sick?

Did she wonder whether Joseph would believe her?

Did she ever sit quietly with one hand against an abdomen that wasn’t showing yet and whisper something to the child she couldn’t feel?

And that’s only the beginning.

Because eventually Mary becomes a mother.

Not a Madonna. A mother.

There was a baby who cried.
A toddler who needed watching.
A little boy who asked questions.
Meals.
Laundry.
Illness.
Travel.
Family.
Work.
Exhaustion.

There were probably moments of tremendous laughter that nobody thought to record because they weren’t important to salvation history.

Then that little boy grew up.

He left home.

He began preaching.

Crowds began following him.

People began arguing about him.

Eventually people wanted him dead.

And Mary had to experience all of that not merely as the woman chosen by God…but as his mother.

Then came the Cross.

The Resurrection.

The earliest Church.

And eventually the end of Mary’s earthly life and the mystery Catholics celebrate in her Assumption.

I want to walk through all of it.

Slowly.

Humanly.

Why?

Because I’m returning to Catholicism after a very long time away.
And part of returning has meant discovering which doors allow me back inside.

Research is one of them.

I’ve been doing plenty of that.

Church documents. Devotions. History. Sacramentals. Rosaries. Scapulars. All the glorious rabbit holes Catholicism has been accumulating for approximately two thousand years.

I love it.

But research can tell me about Mary.

I’m discovering that imagination sometimes helps me sit beside her.

Not because I believe my imagined Mary is necessarily the historical Mary.

But because asking these questions makes me remember that the historical Mary existed.

Before she became a statue on my shelf, she was a Jewish woman in Galilee.

Before millions of people called her Mother, one little boy did.

Before Christians repeated Hail Mary, full of grace across centuries, Gabriel said those words to a young woman who had absolutely no idea what was about to happen.

Before the crown—

there was probably flour in her hair.

Before the Assumption—

there were tired feet.

Before Our Lady of Sorrows—

there was a mother who laughed.

And before she became the woman whose image would eventually stand in churches throughout the world, Mary had to wake up every morning and actually live the life she had said yes to.

That’s the Mary I want to spend fifty-four days getting to know.

Not instead of the Queen of Heaven.

Not instead of the Theotokos.

Not instead of Our Lady.

But alongside them.

Because perhaps one of the most extraordinary things about Mary is that we don’t have to choose.

The woman carrying a water jar through Nazareth and the Queen of Heaven are the same woman.

The young mother leaning miserably over a basin and the woman generations call blessed are the same woman.

The mother trying to understand her strange, extraordinary son and the Mother of God are the same woman.

The woman standing beneath the Cross and the woman assumed into Heaven are the same woman.

Grace did not erase Mary’s humanity.

It moved through it.

So for fifty-four days, that’s what I want to explore.

There will be theology where theology belongs.

History where we have history.

Scripture where Scripture speaks.

And where all three become silent, sometimes I am simply going to ask: What might it have been like to be Mary?

I don’t expect to find definitive answers.

That’s not really the point.

I just want to sit with the questions.

And perhaps, somewhere between the Annunciation and the Assumption, the woman beneath all that beautiful blue fabric will feel a little less distant.

For the next fifty-four days: Let’s meet Mary.