"Each Black Madonna is unique. Each one's story is a composite of legends, differing from place to place. But most evolve from a common, mythic tale. Set around the time of the turning of the first millennium, it is the story of a shepherd or a child or children, who, perhaps searching for a stray animal, enter a forest and find a statue of a black Mary in a cave or in a tree, often guarded by animals.

"The movement toward pilgrimage begins as a hunch, perhaps a vague curiosity. We cannot anticipate these whispers, but we do hear them, and the numen aroused has teeth in it. Thus a quest is initiated, and we are compelled or shoved into places of possible epiphanies.

"At the shrines, the anticipation of approaching her weaves a connective tissue between pilgrims. We all gaze in the same direction. We are immersed in a collective search, yet we remain deeply solitary. On pilgrimage, there is an abiding contradiction inside each visitation: I seek her, yet, when I kneel before her, it is I who am found. Shoulder to shoulder with countless other pilgrims, I have come to recognize this common response. There is a surprising transparency, a sweetness, and courtesy between us strangers. We have all left home to find home. We have all been found and we recognize each other. We have all come home to her and we experience a profound commonality of spontaneous ingathering. For me, this paradigm of searching and finding defines the experience of coming before the Black Madonna.

"Many of her shrines have the comfortable feeling of casual chaos. They smell sweetly of banks of candles, incense, and lamps, but they stink of smoke and the close press of crowds pushing along toward her. In the smaller, deeply shadowed shrines, the milling churn of pilgrims, the heat, and the lack of air carry the distinct weight and shape of a hot cave matrix. I have been in some shrines as small as dark bedrooms. These you enter alone, as if to speak intimately to an elderly relative. But at other shrines I feel no invitation to approach her. I just stand before a statue. I kneel, light candles, pray, search the image--perhaps marvel at the superb carving. But I am not invited to cross the threshold into her mystery."