The unasked-for art of rural saint shrines breaks my heart open

May we notice the generosity that's here

(Audio below — read by me — for paid subscribers)

What if devotion is less about obedience and more about simple generosity?

As springtime sails in again with its sweet flowers and warm beams cutting through the colder shadows, I’m reminded with gratitude of the days of roving that I’ve been blessed with in my relatively travel-rich adult life, since I first took a solo flight overseas in my thirtieth year.

Last April I was lucky to visit Tuscany for the first time with my partner’s family for eleven days. While we wandered the ways and by-ways of those greening springtime hills of olive, the lenten sun shining as if newly washed, I was struck again and again by the constant, regular appearance of shrines.

In Italy there is a strong living tradition of building and maintaining roadside shrines, mostly featuring the catholic mother Mary. These Marian shrines are called Madonelle, because they feature miniatures of Mary (Madonna), with her iconographic standbys of blue robes, a baby, and sometimes white lilies, representing purity, or swords, representing the seven sorrows that vernacular tradition attributes to her.

In the abstract, this may seem like just more evidence of what we all know – Italy is super Catholic. But there is so much more to this tradition, and a lot of what matters about it, I found on this visit, is experiential.

Myself at a Tuscan wayside shrine to St. Catherine of Sienna, medieval mystic and author

Shrines have been a feature of the Italian roadside and domestic landscape for as long as anyone knows. And compared to much of the rest of Europe, the record in Italy goes back a long way, showing overwhelmingly that this tradition carries forward from pre-Christian times. Some beautiful examples of the pagan precedent for today’s wayside shrines appear in frescoes found in the archaeological excavations of Pompeii. Many of these frescoes are held in the archaeological museum of Naples along with most of the other Pompeii artifacts, comprising, it seems to me, one of the largest collections of pagan religious artifacts in Europe.

Shrine to Isis from a fresco in a temple to Isis, Naples archaeological museum

And then in Christian times the devotional energy that had been lavished for centuries on diverse pagan gods was redirected toward Christian figures. But that doesn't mean these shrines aren't for everyone. When I walked by them, though a pagan, I was gifted over and again with a sense of the generosity of these (predominantly) Marian shrines. Just imagine! Someone made a shrine to gentleness, to nurturing, to miracles, and to the sacred feminine. Shrines everywhere to some of the most underappreciated and underpaid people on the planet, mothers.

Every time I walked by one of these shrines, as often as every twenty feet in some places, I was reminded of the overflowing human capacity for love. I was reminded that, just because, somebody wanted to give a blessing to everybody passing, every single day. And I was so touched! What magic! What devotion! And with no expectation of compensation. Just for the chance to make something beautiful, and to share.

A Madonella along the Via Francigena pilgrimage route in Tuscany

I turned forty this past December, and the older I get, and frankly, the harder the world seems, the more the desire arises in me to live deeper into life, to find every opportunity for devotion to the divinity in this world that I can.

These wayside shrines remind me that beauty and tenderness are still possible, and they start with us bravely setting out on the path willing to be surprised by beauty. They show me that despite hardship, we can indeed build external structures to remind us regularly of love. And that those structures matter.

When we share our sweet and seemingly unnecessary devotions, we help others flourish as well. We enter into little contracts with divinity, to call us into the embodied experience. On a good day, that embodied experience may be one of wonder and appreciation. On a more difficult day, that embodied experience may be a moment of leaning into simple hope. I swear, hopeful actions are nourishing to the soul. Even if the desired thing does not occur, devotion to the hoping itself nourishes.

May you be willing to be surprised by sweetness and hope today, even if it is just in the form of these words. I am holding you softly in my heart, in sunshine.

Danica Boyce