I love how Anne Lamott describes her devotion to Mary in “Plan B“:

“You’re not supposed to love Mary so much, if you’re not Catholic, but I do. I wear a picture of her inside a gold oval frame, on a thin gold chain. Her arms outstretched in blessing look as if she has pulled the orange lining out of her blue robes to show everyone that there’s nothing hidden inside, no tricks up her sleeves. Golden light pours forth from the pocket linings as if, were she to put her hands back in her pockets, the light would be plugged up from inside.

“I wear Mary for two reasons: Because she helps me remember the song “Let It Be.” And because I used to pray to her as if she were my mother when I was coming down off cocaine. I’d lie in bed beside whatever cute coked-out boyfriend I had at the time, who’d be snoring and muttering while I ground my teeth in the dark.

“When I used to lie in the dark grinding my teeth, utterly whipped, surrender came, and then the miracle, motherly kindness toward my own screwed-up self…. Knowing this–that I could call on a woman who had been loved for so long, stretching backward and forward through millennia–could trump my self-loathing, and I would hail Mary even as I imagined hitting the man next to me over the head with my tennis racket.”