Mary at Rose Hill

This statue of the Virgin Mary is found at the Fordham University Rose Hill campus along a highly popular path. It is found slightly tucked away behind a large shrub located across from the Spellman building which houses many Jesuit fathers.  It is on the path between the ram van drop-off (a major public transportation stop) and Keating (the primary educational building on campus) so it is a heavily trafficked area and many people get the chance to see it. The meaning of this statue has changed for me over the course of the semester as I walk past it systematically every Wednesday morning and afternoon. The way in which my perception of this statue has changed is similar in the way that the character John's perception of the church changes over the course of the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin.  

The first couple of weeks I saw the statue, it almost served as a source of annoyance and frustration with the overt display of religion. Because I have very few personal experiences with Catholicism I found it distracting to the learning environment I was seeking. However, as the weeks went on I became more comfortable with the statue and accepted the statue as a symbol of beauty and hope and greater meaning; I grew excited to see her on my weekly pilgrimage to the Rose Hill campus from the Lincoln Center campus. In James Baldwin's story Go Tell It on the Mountain, he explores race, family tension, and other themes through the vehicle of a community church in Harlem, The Church of the Fire Baptized. The main character, John, experiences his own frustrations with the church until, in the final chapter, he experiences a religious transformation on the threshing floor.  

As John is not sure of how he feels about the church or of Gabriel, his step-father, I am not sure about how I feel about this public display of religion. Unsure of how it fits into my life like how John is unsure of how it fits into his own life before the religious transformation. John describes in the middle of his transformation that he feels first "an awful bitterness in his heart, wanting to curse" and then later "in his heart there was a sudden yearning tenderness" (Baldwin 229). This transition demonstrates a character development from one of overall negative energy to one of positive energy in John's perception of the church and the potential salvation that it holds. As the statue came to hold an element of hope for me, so the church became a beacon of hope and positivity for John in Baldwin's novel. 

In this time of modernity, it seems that there is a common thread of difficulty in finding balance between the general movement towards secularization and wanting to find a relationship with the, church or religion in general, that does not contradict one another. Both myself and the character John explore and grapple with this relationship and although there is still progress to be made for us both, there is courage in simply beginning this journey.