Maria of New Mexico
Fr. Ken always took a week of vacation during Lent. Somewhat odd timing for a “vacation,” but it served as his yearly retreat from the noisy world and chaotic day-to-day of parish life. When he was a younger priest, he would go for week-long recollections at various monasteries, but in his silver years he preferred a true withdrawal into southwest New Mexico’s enchantment. The Gila National Forest’s 3.3 million-acre sprawl feels like a place where the land never fully chose between wilderness and silence, desert giving way to pine, river cutting through stone like a whispering prayer too old for words. He spent the time in true silence, praying, hiking, fishing, reading, and sitting in solitude far from anything resembling a cell phone signal.
He was about three days into his camping solitude, and after he had recited the Angelus, he started again on his midday hike when he saw a shadowy figure up ahead where the trees thinned, giving way to the rocky desert foothills. He thought surely there could not be another soul out this far, so he called out. But the silhouette only seemed to dash further on. He tried to pick up his pace, but his bad knee, the one that had not bent right in years, would not let him. As he hurried along, he called out again, “Peace be with you, friend,” and the voice, a female voice, echoed back, “And with your spirit, Fr. Kenneth. Pay no mind to an old sinful woman in the wild.”
Filled with a holy fear and awe, he was infused with the knowledge that he was in the midst of a holy soul. The land was not enchanted solely because of its beauty, but because she was here in it. “Please,” he called out, “have a midday chat with this fellow Gila pilgrim.” She came out from behind a rusted rock formation and begged, “Please, Father, I am not put together or clean to be speaking with a priest.” Her hair looked wild and white as rapids, her skin as coarse as the desert floor, and she was as thin as a cholla cactus swaying in the wind. He thought she was a native, or maybe Mexican. Her clothes, if you could call them that, were thin, faded, and full of holes. “Please give me your coat, for I am barely covered.” He did so, and then felt the urge to ask her to pray for him.
The world might have seen no more than a withered street beggar, one common at every Albuquerque intersection, but a light, unperceivable to the eyes, radiated from her sunken face. “No, Fr. Kenneth, it is I who should be asking you to bless me.” She dropped to her knees, and he gave her his priestly blessing. Then he dropped to his knees, and she prayed for him. The decade-old meniscus pain in his knee instantly vanished, and any doubt that he was dehydrated or hallucinating all of this vanished away. “Please tell me who you are and why you are here,” he said.
“My name is Maria, and I have not spoken to anyone in many, many long years. And even if I had run into any soul out here, I would never tell them my story. But since you are a priest and have asked of me, I will tell you.
I crossed the border with my family as a teenager, but only a couple years later I left them too. The lifestyle of the United States impressed me, and I wanted all the worldly things I saw around me. I dropped out of school to party with my friends, and then even strangers, and then even alone. I had no papers, so I began dancing at a strip club for cash under the table. Soon I started selling myself on the internet, pictures, videos, livestreams. I gained many followers, but I liked the attention so much I made it nearly free. The high of exposing myself to subscribers was worth more than all the money. To keep the views coming, I had to do more and more extreme and humiliating things, but the thirst cannot be quenched by any man’s attention.
Soon just any man’s gaze would not do, and I developed a taste for a specific kind, the newly religious men who parade as keyboard warriors for orthodoxy, defenders of the algorithm’s newly found Christian virtues. Men who change their profile pictures to Crusaders or some obscure patristic philosopher, but have yet to master themselves before trying to master complex theological arguments. I would stalk these pixelated suitors in the same forums where they pontificated. The more righteous they seemed, the more pleasure I took from getting them to view my content.
Many of these men, I read in comments, were planning to meet at a relic exhibition for a parish mission a few hours from me. I thought I would make an appearance. Going from digital to real life felt like spectacle enough to make me go viral. I dressed in my most revealing outfits and looked my finest, but I knew the eyes behind the Charlotte Tilbury were dead.
The moment I pulled up to the church parking lot, I felt a nausea that was crippling. I sat in the car for what seemed like hours trying to get my wits about me. I finally made my way to the building, but with each step a throbbing pain pierced my head. As I made it to the doors, I felt the urge to vomit come upon me so strongly that I went around to the courtyard and hunched in the grass. I tried several more times to enter, but the sensation returned to the point of gagging with each attempt. I splashed my face in a birdbath and looked up at the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe that adorned it. With the gaze of her gentle smile, my symptoms left me, but at that same moment I knew it was the stench of my rotten soul that was causing my sickness.
I begged the Blessed Virgin to let me into the parish mission so that I could confess my sins. I was raised Catholic as a child in Mexico and knew that was the proper thing to do, even if I did not remember how. I wanted to listen to the mission and see the relics on display. And sure enough, I was able to. I stood in the back of the church with tears in my eyes, joyful tears. After the priest gave a blessing with a relic of the True Cross, I went back to the courtyard to thank the Virgin. In my head I heard an inaudible voice tell me to leave this world behind me. And so I did.
I deleted every single account. Threw my phone out the window and gave away any money I had left. I bought a simple camper I could pull and came up into the wilderness of New Mexico, where I have been off-grid ever since. Many nights I wanted to go back. The ache of attention, the burn of passion, the yearning for worldly desires haunted me so much that I ended up slitting the tires of my truck to stop me from crawling back to that empty life. I spent years battling this addiction and vices against chastity. Many nights the demons and wolves howled both inside and outside of my being. Both beasts and the demonic assaulted me. Santa Maria saved me each time, and her santo rosario was my only friend and aide.
I have made many mistakes. I have hurt many people. I have squandered many blessings and ignored many revealed truths. My addictions and disordered desires taught me that I have to be totally dependent upon God. It is either Him 100% or nothing for me. Total darkness or total light. There is no in-between. I know how weak and fragile I truly am. Left to my own fallen nature, I will fall time and time again. And it is through my struggles that I will purify my soul, make reparation for my faults, fulfill my vocation, and help save all those men whom I led astray into the slavery of lust. This is my story, Father. Have mercy on my soul.”
She then asked if he could hear her confession and say Mass so that she could receive the Eucharist. He did. She then asked if he could return the following year when he made his annual camping trip, and not to tell a soul about her. He promised.
Next Lent he trekked back to the place where he met Maria, where the woods met the desert. This time he did not find her there, but only a coyote. The coyote looked at him with a somber gaze, then looked off in the distance as it slowly walked away. It would turn back every few steps to see if the priest would follow. Fr. Ken caught the cue and marched behind in solemn procession.
They made their way to an old, rusted teardrop-style camper. Birds’ nests and wild desert bloom adorned it like flowers circling an Easter altar, and many beasts, desert cottontails, bobcats, gray foxes, roadrunners, and even a prairie dog, lay prostrate at the face of the camper door. As Fr. Ken walked forward, they gracefully cleared a path for him. He stepped up the deteriorated metal stairs and opened the squeaky door and saw Maria’s body lying on her bed. Birds had flown in from the open window and decorated her with creosote sprig arrangements that would make royalty blush. The aroma was sweet like wild honey. Outside, the animals whimpered in a low, humming chant that sounded sorrowful not because she was dead, but because she was gone.
Fr. Ken had brought wine and hosts to say Mass because he thought he would be giving Maria Communion again, but now he made it a Requiem Mass for the repose of her soul. When he left the camper, all the animals were gone, but in the desert red dirt the paw prints had scratched the words in large swatches: “Dios te salve, María.”
Fr. Kenneth hiked far enough out of the wilderness until he got cell phone service and called the authorities to alert them that he had found a deceased person while he was hiking. It took two days for them to show up, but when they arrived at her campsite, there was no sign of her body, just the lingering fragrance of sweet desert lavender.
Epilogue
This is a piece of hagiographic fiction, a story written in the style of a saint’s life, what the Church calls a vita. It draws consciously from one of the most beloved and theologically rich traditions in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox literature: the narrative of the great penitent who withdraws to the desert and is transformed by grace, Mary of Egypt.
I got the idea one night while telling my kids her story to put them to bed, yes, a more toned-down PG-13 version, but honestly, all the saints’ stories they like to hear end with, “and he was bludgeoned to death with a flaming axe and dumped into a river swarming with piranhas.” And I got the idea, what would Mary of Egypt look like in present-day USA?
The hagiographic tradition has always been a mirror, using narrative to carry theological truths, because the Incarnation itself is God choosing story as the vehicle for salvation.
St. Mary of Egypt has been a great friend to me over the years, and her story has always captivated my imagination. If you think my spin was wild, go read her life. Her feast is around the corner on April 1st.
