I didn’t go to Ephesus looking for anything sacred.
I grew up in the Dalmatian hinterland of Croatia, not far from the Bosnian border, in a culture where Marian devotion was everywhere — pilgrimages to Medjugorje, prayers to the Mother of God, icons in nearly every home. The Feast of the Assumption is even a national holiday. Faith traveled with us whether we asked for it or not. But my trip to Turkey wasn’t a pilgrimage. I was teaching anthropology aboard Semester at Sea, a program that carries university students around the world by ship. Turkey was one port among many. My husband and I were traveling with our 2-year-old son, and my brother-in-law who had flown in to meet us along the way. We were young parents then, moving through ruins and heat and long afternoons, grateful simply to be together in a season when everything still felt newly possible.
The ancient ruins of Ephesus, dating back to Hellenic times, revealed centuries of thriving life, learning, and culture. It was there that our tour guide mentioned a small stone house on a hillside nearby — believed by many to be where Mary spent her final years after fleeing Jerusalem with the apostle John. I went along out of curiosity, expecting history — nothing more.
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The house was modest. Stone walls. Quiet air. Nothing theatrical. And yet, the moment I stepped inside, something in my body gave way.
I hadn’t expected to feel anything. I was simply a visitor. But my knees bent before my mind could decide. I remember the cool of the floor, the weight of my son’s small hand holding my leg. And then the tears came — not as grief, but as a release, like a breath my body had been holding for years and finally let go.
My son was our miracle after years of loss — five miscarriages that had taught me to love cautiously, to guard joy even when my heart dared to hope. Motherhood, when it finally arrived, felt fragile, provisional, as if happiness might still be taken away at any moment. In that small house in Ephesus, something shifted.
Growing up, I had seen Mary countless times in icons — always holding her child close to her heart. In those images, there was tenderness mixed with foreknowledge, love already shadowed by what lay ahead. Standing there, I realized I had already lived the fear those icons seemed to carry: the knowledge that loving deeply does not protect us from loss. And in that moment, it felt as if my suffering from the past and hers from the future touched the same place in the present.
READ: How My Struggle With Infertility Deepened My Relationship with Mary
For the first time since becoming a mother, I felt gratitude without fear attached to it.
In my culture, you learn early not to hold joy too tightly, to cup it in open hands, the way you might carry water, knowing it can spill. Even with my son beside me, I had been doing that: holding thankfulness at a careful distance, as if feeling it fully might invite loss. But in that small house, something cracked open. I breathed into the gratitude instead of around it. Standing where Mary had lived out her final years, it felt like a full circle — an affirmation that there was much to be grateful for, and that I was allowed, finally, to touch it.
In Croatian culture, devotion to Mary is everywhere, yet women themselves often occupy far less honored ground. We revere the Mother of God while struggling to honor mothers in real life. Men carry her statue through the streets in procession, while their wives walk behind. Women cook the feasts for saints’ days, yet eat last. I had absorbed that contradiction without ever naming it. Standing there, I realized how deeply I needed a different image of holiness: not perfection, not endurance alone, but a quiet courage that makes room for vulnerability. Not the serene Madonna of my village, whose open heart had shown the wound but whose face remained composed. I needed a holiness that didn’t hide the grief behind the symbol.
I thought of how Mary must have fled her own homeland, how exile followed her even after her son’s life would change the world. I thought of how often faith is portrayed as certainty, when in truth, it is usually carried by people who are afraid and faithful at the same time. I had seen it back home during the war, people making their way to Mass during air raids, kneeling while the bombs fell, refusing to let fear have the last word. And I had lived it myself. I could have walked away from faith after everything my body had been through. I didn’t. There is a strength in us that refuses to give up on us.
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When I stood up, my knees were dusty. My son tugged at my hand, ready to go. Outside, the sun was bright. Leaves of fig trees rustled. Life went on. But something in me had settled.
Later, my brother-in-law told me he would never forget that moment — the way I knelt, the way the tears came without warning. He said he thought something life-changing must have happened in that room.
In a way, it had.
For years, I carried gratitude cautiously, as if joy might provoke loss. In that small house in Ephesus, gratitude learned to kneel — and then to stand again, steadier than before.
