Visiting Statue

A statue of Our Lady of Fatima is being brought around to San Francisco churches this month.  It comes to our church this week.  The statue is on a kind of pilgrimage, if you will.  I have never been very good about visiting statues.  I don't really relate.  I am supposed to be reverential, devotional and pious.  I just feel like I am in the presence of a stranger who is passing through.  Sort of like a relative I will see only for this brief moment.  Other people, of course, get all worked up and pray for miracles.  I am more comfortable with images that are here all the time, such as a permanent statue or picture or stained glass window.  I get used to it being around.  I warm up to it.  It takes time for statues and me to relate.  I guess I am not very good with strangers.  Intimacy is not immediate for me.  There has always been something phony about jumping onto the latest religious thing.