Stella Maris

My father was stationed in New London, Connecticut for a time during his days in the United States Navy. Knowing this, and eager as I always have been to seek out connections with him, I ventured into the seacoast town while staying nearby for a wedding. Down near the water I saw a curious blend of newly renovated historic homes and dilapidated buildings, glitzy new shops and dingy storefronts. I also saw something that captured my imagination.

Standing in front of a granite-grey cathedral from an earlier time was a sign that read Star of the Sea. What a descriptive phrase, I thought. I wasn't familiar with the name, but I wanted to know more about its origin.

So I looked in books, asked around. I dug. And what I discovered was more beautiful even than the phrase itself.

It’s commonly believed that the appellation “Star of the Sea,” or “Stella Maris,” came from St. Jerome. Some claim that this is untrue, that actually he wrote “stilla maris,” a drop of the sea and that apparently a later scribe either mistranslated or “corrected” Jerome, in the process leaving behind an enduring phrase. Many early church fathers referred to the mother of Jesus in this way, including Alcuin and Isidore of Seville (you may know the latter as the patron saint of the Internet!)

In the ninth century a French Benedictine monk named Paschasius Radbertus wrote this:
Mary Star of the Sea must be followed in faith and morals lest we capsize
amidst the storm-tossed waves of the sea. She will illumine us to believe in
Christ born of her for the salvation of the world.

And Bernard of Clairvaux encouraged those tempted and struggling with sin to “look to the star, call on Mary.”

In other words, all the properties that we associate with stars we also attribute to this beloved woman. Something in human nature requires a cynosure, a guide; we know that our sense of direction is fallible. We want to be able to look up through stormy skies and see a light piercing through and illuminating a way that is right. (Where that light leads—that one is up to you.) Without a lodestar, we feel completely vulnerable. Ever been lost—I mean really lost—in the woods? If so, you have known the universal human need for guidance.

We are not navigators, now. In many ways we are adrift, having lost any real connection with land, water, wind. In the time of Radbertus sailors navigated by means of the stars, so the phrase “Star of the Sea” had real meaning. Most of us could not find our way with a map and compass, much less by dead reckoning.

I don’t mean to suggest that the kind of connections mentioned above are the destination. They cannot be recaptured in the same sense as in past centuries, and perhaps this is not even desirable. I don’t believe that “Nature” equals God. God the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts that we see with the naked eye.

But these are footprints. Traces. Signposts that say someone has been here. Someone left this for me.