What This Small Thing Carries

A friend asked me once why I wear a medal. She is not religious, and she asked the question with genuine curiosity, not hostility. She wanted to understand.

I tried to explain. I said something about Mary, about intercession, about the history of the medal and the chapel on the Rue du Bac. She listened politely. At the end she said: But what does it actually do for you?

It was a better question than the first one.

What it does for me is this: it reminds me that I am not the only one in the room.

I do not mean this in a vague, spiritual-but-not-religious sense. I mean it specifically. When I hold the medal, I am holding an object that connects me to a tradition of prayer that is nearly two centuries old — to the millions of people who have worn this medal, prayed this prayer, asked for this intercession. I am not alone in my asking. I am part of a very long line of people who have asked before me.

This matters more than I can easily explain. There is something about the weight of accumulated prayer — the sense that you are adding your voice to a chorus that has been singing for a long time — that changes the quality of the asking. It is less isolated. Less desperate. More like joining something than like shouting into silence.

The medal is also, for me, a practice of attention.

I am a writer. My work requires a particular kind of attention — sustained, patient, willing to sit with difficulty without resolving it prematurely. This is also, I have come to believe, what prayer requires. And the medal helps me practice it.

When I reach up to touch the medal during a difficult moment — a conversation that is going badly, a piece of work that is not coming together, a fear that is larger than I can manage alone — I am doing something small and physical that interrupts the spiral. I am returning to the present. I am remembering that the present is not the whole of what is real.

This sounds simple. It is simple. But simple things, practiced consistently, change you.

I have worn a Miraculous Medal for twenty years. I have lost two and replaced them. The current one was given to me by my mother when I was going through a period of particular difficulty — a health crisis that lasted two years and required more courage than I knew I had.

She put it around my neck and said: You are not carrying this alone.

She meant herself, and she meant Mary, and she meant everyone who had ever worn this medal and prayed this prayer. She meant the whole long tradition of people who had been afraid and had asked for help and had found, somehow, that help was available.

I believed her. I still do.

My friend asked what the medal does for me. I did not give her this answer, because it was not ready yet. But this is the answer: it reminds me that I am not carrying this alone. Whatever this is — the difficulty of the present moment, the weight of a particular year, the ordinary accumulation of a life.

It is a small thing. It fits in a palm. But what it carries is not small at all.