The Blue Lady - a brief history
I’ve often been asked, “Just who IS this Lady Blue who you are so interested in?”. I’m going to do my best to thumbnail her life and explain makes her so fascinating to both Laia and I (and has made it worthwhile to spend countless hours the last 3 years researching her life, visiting Agreda, the town where she lived, and making her a principal character of our newest full-length play).
The shortest thumbnail would be that she was a mystic Spanish nun named Sor Maria Jesus de Agreda, the confidant of King Felipe IV, the abbess of her convent at age 25, the author of a 3,000 pages biography of the Virgin Mary based on the revelations from the Virgin herself, and the subject of a legend about her frequent bilocations and missionary work in New Mexico and Texas. Some resume, no?
She was born Maria Coronel y Arana in Agreda, a town of 100 inhabitants in the rugged mountains of northern Spain in 1602. She shared the times of Miguel deCervantes, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Ignacio de Loyola, and Teresa de Avila. Her parents likely were conversos (the name Coronel is the same as the tax "farmer" of Fernando and Isabel, who converted in 1492). Perhaps in an attempt to appear more sincere about their faith, "they were passionately engaged in self-mortification and often saw supernatural interventions in their lives" (from Colahan).
When she was 13, as a result of a dream of her mother, they converted their house to a Franciscan convent for women, and her whole family joined the order. She had suffered from 13 with an exaggerated (but not unusual for the time) sense of shame at her sexual feelings, and punished herself to try to suppress them when she took her vows at age 17. She also suffered from poor health for an early age, and was so ill at age 20 that a death mask was made for her. During her first three years as a nun she regularly experienced out-of-body experiences, trances, and ecstasies. During these experiences, she saw other parts of the world, and preached Christianity to people who lived in stone houses and wore little clothing.
She desperately wanted to keep these events secret, but her confessor and her mother eagerly spread the news. Her confessor interest finally convinced the head of the Order to write a letter to Friar Alfonso Benavides, the head of the Franciscans in Mexico City. His letter convinced Benavides to make a trip to New Mexico to interview natives who claimed to have been visited by a “beautiful young woman dressed in blue” who taught them about Christianity and urged them to ask for conversion when friars arrived from Mexico. So began the story of the Blue Lady which still resonates today though both popular and scholarly history books in the Southwest.
Certain historical facts are clear – Benavides DID visit New Mexico, DID interview various native tribes (at Grand Quivira and Isleta), DID write a report to the king, DID go to Agreda to interview Maria Jesus, DID write a second report stating that he believed that she had in fact bilocated to the Southwest on many occasions and had preached to the natives (all the while never leaving the cloistered convent). All that is well documented.
What is not clear is what ulterior motives Benavides had for making connections where none may have existed and what motives the natives had for telling Benavides what he wanted to hear…. Only lots of speculations from hundreds of years ago.
However, even without the legend of her bilocations, Sor Maria was a woman with influence in the world of 17th century Spain. She maintained a 20 year correspondence with Felipe IV and expressed her thoughts to him in a powerful, direct manner. Both of them considered her his moral superior, and they clearly were friends. She offered sound political advice as well as counsel for his anxieties.
She ran the convent in an enlightened manner, was a successful fund-raiser (yup, that was as important then as now), and gave up many nights of sleep in order to write. Her masterwork was the 3,000 page biography, The Mystical City of God. She always said that the Virgin dictated the entire book and that she was merely the scribe. Bizarrely, soon after she finished the book, her confessor told her that it was the work of the Devil, and commanded her to burn it. He died shortly afterwards, and her new confessor told her that she must re-write it… which she did without complaining. What a memory!
The impact of her writing has been compared to Sor Juana (Mexico) and Teresa de Avila. All three felt they had been called to change the world, and they tried to do so with writing and political activities. Sor Juana and Sor Maria were both subject to multiple encounters with the Inquisition – Sor Maria fared much better than Sor Juana, who was finally denied all writing materials in an attempt to stop her from writing.
All in all, a fascinating woman from 17th century Spain – but that doesn’t really answer the question about what has maintained our interest for so long. Laia first read about her in 1991 in an article by a young Spanish journalist, Javier Sierra. He described losing his way in a snow storm, ending up in Agreda, and learning about Sor Maria. Her story inspired his international best seller, “The Lady in Blue”. Last summer, Gov. Richardson read the book and was so taken with the story that he suggested creating a “hermaniemento” between Agreda and the state of New Mexico… and the signing took place on Dec. 2. Even though most of the participants in the ceremony (which included a delegation from Agreda, now a “big” town of 2,400) don’t believe that Maria really bilocated to New Mexico, they uniformly agreed that the legend/myth still had enough power to engender a profound expression of friendship between Spain and New Mexico.
Seems like no story about mystic nuns is complete without an incorruptible body… and lady blue delivers. I was sceptical about her incorruptible at first… but two years ago, Laia and I went to Agreda. In the church is a small glass coffin. Inside is her body – her face covered by a wax mask made for her when she almost died in her early 20’s, her body in the typical funerary clothes of a Franciscan nun. The only visible part of her body is her right wrist – the skin is dark, like tanned leather. We talked with the woman who is the caretaker, and she told us that 10 years ago they had taken all the clothes off the body and that the skin was still soft. Curious. This woman didn’t seem at all like someone who was trying to make LB seem other than what she was – a beloved nun who had lived and died in the 17th century. She also said that a local physician examined the body at that time and wrote in his report that the body was in exactly the same state as it had been the last time a physician had examined it 50 years before. Even more curious. No visible signs of decay in the 342 years since her death.
So that’s my nutshell summary of Sor Maria’s life – if you want to see more, come to the Soiree on April 19th or the performance at UNM (Albuquerque) on April 24th.
Much credit for much of our understanding about Sor Maria go to Clark Colhan's marvelous book, "The Visions of Sor Maria de Agreda", University of Arizona Press. |
Album by Ron Dans and Laia Obregon-Dans. 1 - 20 of 20 Total. |
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