f e a t u r e:

Christ Consciousness, Woman Consciousness

by Suzanne Belote Shanley

Hibaku Maria: Out of the Ashes of War

Her eyes are gone, their sockets hollowed out, larger than black olives and as dark. Burnt. Her skin is singed; the eviscerated patch on her right cheek, a circle of charcoal. Her mouth, what is left of it, is unsmiling. A carved wooden outline of hair frames a once youthful face. Snatched from flames, seared, not wholly unrecognizable, she is Hibaku Maria, what remains of a wooden sculpture of Mary, the Mother of God, saved from the ashes of Nagasaki. Today she sits on the altar of Brandeis University’s Catholic chapel, 65 years after her immolation, an ancient relic from the distant past brought here by our friend, Carrie Schuchardt, founder of The House of Peace

Experiencing Hibaku Maria one week after returning from a retreat in Minnesota, dedicated in part to the theme of Women and War, speaks of war’s hellish costs. On a more personal level, Hibaku Maria’s is a mirror image of scarred face of Omar Kadar, the seven year old who has been a friend to Agape since we first met him and his father over three years ago. Omar’s face, like that of Hibaku Maria’s is irretrievably scorched by the flames of an unprovoked American attack on his family in Mosul, Iraq, in which his mother was burned alive.

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