The Journeys of Mary: Part 1

By Mary Ann Donovan

At age four, Mary, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth, made her first journey. Accompanied by her mother Anne, her father Joachim, her sister Mary Heli, and her niece Mary Cleophas, Mary went to Jerusalem for her Presentation to the Temple. Some of the other journeys that folowed included trips to Sephoris, Bethlehem, Matarea, and Heiropolis as well as many other trips to Jerusalem.
When her son, Jesus, began his public ministry, Mary moved from Nazareth to Capharnaum. With her friends, the Holy Women, she followed Jesus as he travelled around Galilee and throughout the Holy Land. Ultimately, Mary followed Jesus to Golgotha and the foot of the cross. After the Crucifixion and Ascension, Mary relocated to Ephesus, Turkey. She travelled to Jerusalem and back again to Ephesus before ending her earthly life there.
The Journeys of Mary is the story of Mary's life and the life, Passion, and death of her son. In Part I of a trilogy, Mary leaves for Ephesus. As she travels with St. John the Evangelist and her maidservant Leah, Mary reflects on her early life and the journeys she took with her husband, St. Joseph. With him as her escort, Mary travelled to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country around Sephoris. As the wife of Joseph, she travelled to Bethlehem where her son was born. When the life of Jesus is threatened, Joseph takes Mary and the child to Egypt where they lived for many years until their return to Nazareth.
The Journeys of Mary is the story of both the interior journey that Mary takes as the mother of Jesus and the exterior journeys she takes as she lives out her life fulfilling the will of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781491833469

Mary Ann Donovan

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The Journeys of Mary

PART I

MARY ANN DONOVAN

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© 2012 by Mary Ann Donovan. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/16/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4685-6670-3 (sc)

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Contents

Foreword

1824

Stephen

Nathan

Mary Cleophas

The Road

The Journey Continues

Rest

Approach

Purification

Nazareth

Flight

Egypt

Nightmare

The Return

Ephesus

Hannah

Nativity

The Cave

Visitors

Royal Visitors

Arrival

The Journeys Of Mary Continues In Part II, At Ephesus

About The Author

This book is dedicated to my husband, David,

and to our children,

Mary Lynn, Ann Marie, Margaret Jean,

and to their families.

All are the source of grace and love in my life.

All give joy and meaning to my journey.

FOREWORD

Anna Catharina Emmerick was born on September 8, 1774 in Westphalia, West Germany. She died on February 9, 1824. Although she lived just under fifty years, she experienced visions of events that covered thousands of years. Some visionaries see events that are yet to be and are, therefore, deemed to be prophets. In other instances, visionaries hear voices or see visions in which they are given messages or directions which they must follow. Anna Catharina’s gift was different. She did not see the future or receive messages to be acted upon in her present time; it was her gift to see the past. She envisioned events from the beginning of time until after the church had been established by the Apostles.

As difficult as it is for many to accept the validity of her visions, it is impossible to deny them. She saw historical events with such intricate detail that it is difficult to explain the visions as mere hallucinations. She was not well educated; she was not a scholar; nor did she live near any university or academic institution where she would have had access to historical information. Yet, she was able to document names, geographical places, even the type of weather on a given date. Such information would not have been generally known to someone who was not an authority in a particular field of historical study if, indeed, it could have been known by any contemporary of Anna Catharina at all.

At the age of 28, Anna Catharina was admitted to an Augustinian order. Shortly after taking her vows, she received the visible stigmata of the Crown of Thorns. Nine years after her admission to the convent, all religious communities were suppressed, and she was forced to seek refuge with pious souls who took her in and cared for her. At the time that her convent was officially closed, she received the additional stigmata of the Wounds of the Passion on her hands, feet, and side. A cross appeared on her breast as well. She suffered greatly from these wounds of Christ which bled continually.

Anna lived in an age of anti-clericism; therefore, the officials of the state were anxious to prove that she was a fraud. They put her through many painful and humiliating tests in an attempt to make her wounds heal and thereby discredit her. However, it was to no avail. Despite their efforts, her wounds remained.

A steady stream of visitors came to see her and to witness her stigmata. Among those who came was a famous author, Clemens Brentano. He was at the height of a brilliant career when he visited with Anna Catharina. The moment that he saw her, he was immediately and profoundly affected by her piety and suffering. He became intrigued by the visions she saw every day of her life. He decided to forego all his plans and projects in order to spend his days at her side, writing down the visions as she dictated them to him. For the last five years of Anna Catharina’s life, Brentano was her scribe. She referred to him as The Pilgrim.

When Anna Catharina died, Brentano was left with hundreds of pages of recorded visions. For the next eighteen years of his life, he tried to make some semblance of order out of them. Although the visions are filled with historical information, they were never intended to be a chronological historical narrative. In a mysterious way, Anna Catharina’s visions were a spiritual journey that followed more closely the liturgical calendar of the church year. The church calendar is focused on the two great feasts of the Nativity and the Passion of Christ. Both feasts are preceded by a period of preparation that lasts many weeks. The Nativity is preceded by Advent; the Passion is preceded by Lent. Both are followed by a period of celebration. The remaining time in between the two great feasts is considered Ordinary time. Her visions followed the church year which begins not in January but in November with Advent. Often a saint’s day or special holy day would come, and the visions would be triggered by those events. When Brentano died, he had succeeded in organizing only a small portion of the visions into two works, The Bitter Passion which was published during his lifetime, and The Life of Mary which was published shortly after his death. His manuscripts from his journals fell into other hands; and between 1858 and 1860, a three-volume work, Life of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was published. In an effort to give some order to the notes, it appears that his original transcripts had some subsequent alterations made to them. More recent scholarly investigation and study of the original notes have resulted in an account more closely related to the original notes of Brentano. An English translation, The Life of Jesus Christ, has been published by Tan Books and Publishers, Inc. Edited and arranged by the Very Reverend Carl E. Schmoger, C.SS.R., it is truer to the original transcription of Anna Catharina’s visions as written down by Brentano.

The story that will be told in the pages to follow grew out of the visions of Anna Catharina Emmerick as recorded by Brentano. A work of fiction, The Journeys of Mary is a story of the years following the Crucifixion, a narrative of the events in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary until her death in 48 A.D. The visions that unfolded in front of Anna Catharina’s eyes have been the major source of information for this book. While some reference books and Holy Scripture have been used, it is with the truth of the visionary, not the historian that this narrative is told. If the details of the story seem to differ with more common versions of the same story, it is because they are as Anna Catharina saw them so clearly in her visions.

1824

Come in, Pilgrim. Her voice, once so strong and firm, now seemed weak and thin. Her words seemed to float softly on the air, a whisper barely audible in the stillness of the room. Sit down.

He pulled a chair next to her bed. The room was filled with a faint light from the windows which had been covered with white muslin. The gauzy fabric was not unlike the strips of linen that bound her hands, feet, and head. And, though it was hidden beneath her dressing gown, he knew the fabric covered her side and chest as well. Even though the dressings had been changed recently, the shadowy stain of blood seeping through the linen was beginning to show. The filtered light gave the room an ethereal quality, making the figure lying before him appear even more saintly. He knew how she suffered with constant pain from the stigmata. Yet, he never heard her complain.

We don’t have much left to do. It is as well as I do not have much time left. He nodded in understanding and said gently, I know. She seemed to be disappearing before his eyes, slipping away into another world. She seemed smaller, more frail; her skin seemed more pale and luminous than it was yesterday. His eyes moved toward the bandages, the faint pink traces were becoming more distinctly red as the linen strips filled with the blood seeping through from her wounds. How could one describe this? he wondered. How could one explain the wounds in her hands and feet as if they had been run through by nails? The marks on her forehead and around her head resembled the puncture marks left by the crown of thorns. She had a bleeding cross over her heart. Even saintly Francis of Assisi had not received such complete wounds when he received the stigmata. Who can understand such a phenomenon or even believe it exists, unless one has the privilege to witness it? Would I even believe it unless I had seen it with my own eyes? He said a silent prayer of thanksgiving for the circumstances that led him to her side over five years ago.

Let us begin.

Yes, he said as he took the small black book he kept in his pocket and opened to a new page, Let us begin. He was ready to write down every word she would say, ready to be the scribe who would record the visions this holy woman described to him. For five years he had sat by her bedside and listened to the strange and marvelous visions only she could see. He had forgone all his plans to paint or to write or to study. He knew in his heart that putting the words of her visions down on a page would be the most important work of his life.

And so it continued until she became too weak to speak of what she saw. Her soft voice articulated the images flashing through her mind’s eye. The only other sound was that of his pen scratching against the paper as he tried to capture every word she spoke.

About one year after the Crucifixion of Our Lord… a new storm rose against the Christians. Then it was that the Blessed Virgin who until that time had dwelt in the small house near the Coenaculum and in Bethania, allowed herself to be conducted by John to the region of Ephesus, where the Christians had already made settlements… .

TO EPHESUS

STEPHEN

The news spread like wildfire through the small community. The first blood had been spilled. Stephen was martyred outside the Temple in Jerusalem.

Nathan hurried back to Bethania. It has begun, he shouted as he entered the small house where Mary was staying. There was no one to protect him. The Jews felt no remorse.

The people of the small community of believers began to gather in the house. Nathan started to tell of the events he had witnessed. By hiding himself off to the side and saying nothing to anyone, he had blended into the angry crowd and watched