Marian Devotion--to Restore the Sacred Feminine

When I was a kid my mother was fond of questioning, "Is nothing sacred?"  At the time I didn't really get what she meant.  Now I want to live a sacramental life, a life rooted in the practice of Catholicism.  In Hebrew, the phrase the fear of the Lord means reverence for God, the practice of true religion.  The fear of the Lord is largely absent in our secular culture, even in some of our churches.

One element of the sacred that needs to be restored is the embracing of the holy feminine.  Christians, pagans, and members of all the great world religions are recognizing the connection between the absence of a divine feminine presence in our consciousness and how this has manifested in the destruction of "Mother Nature".  Women, and our Earth, who is characterized always in feminine terms, are raped and degraded.  The imbalances of an overly patriarchal culture are reeking the havoc of war, poverty, pollution, extreme climate change, species endangerment and extinction, environmental destruction, and a serious shortage of drinking water.  Much of our food is not safe to eat, nor our products safe to use.  These issues are the result of a lack of the sacred in everyday life in general, and in particular of a feminine image of holiness.  Also, the dignity of women and all of humanity is threatened, and the broken family is a distressingly common phenomenon.  People intuitively feel like they have been orphaned of a spiritual mother, although they may not be able to put a finger on what is missing in their lives.

As Christians, we need Mary to restore this balance.  But there are road blocks that get in the way of embracing a Marian devotion.  Some say the patriarchy took over the Church and kicked the divine feminine, once known as the Great Mother, out of religious practice.  This is absolutely true of much of Protestant Christianity.  And it is true that some comments and attitudes of the early Catholic Church fathers were misogynist, blaming all of the world's woes on Eve exclusively, and by extension, on women in general.  Well, they were flawed, human men of their times.  But they also contemplated the unique role of the Virgin Mary and grew more and more in awe of her and what God has done through her.  They elevated her place in the Church to a level of extreme veneration.  The Holy Spirit worked to reveal Mary to these men as the ever-virgin, Divine Mother, the Mother of God.  And all of the Church's Marian dogmas reflect the understanding of her human but divinized nature, by virtue of partaking of the divinity of her son.

The Catholic Church embraces a God whose nature and qualities are both masculine and feminine.  The revelation of this truth is limited by the language we use and our human understanding; however, God as Mother is revealed through the Church (Ecclesia) herself, which is always referred to as "she", the Bride of Christ and his Mystical Body.  Mary is the most eminent member of the Church and is loved and revered as spiritual Mother.

We could invoke God in ways that reflect both the paternal and maternal aspects by using inclusive titles, such as Father-Mother God, God of Motherly Wisdom, Abba Sophia, Abba Shekinah, Abba Imma, or neutral names like Creator.  There is nothing theologically wrong with any of these, and I think there is a place for their use, especially in private devotion.  But in keeping with the revelation given to us by Jesus, Sacred Scripture, and the Tradition of the Church, we can pray to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the usual way, and allow the feminine presence of God (Shekinah) to be experienced through a rich Marian devotion.  For in Mary dwells Holy Wisdom, in her face is reflected the maternal light of God.  In her arms we are comforted by our holy Mother, Queen of Heaven.  We are not making Mary an idol when we do this, or worshiping her as God.  We are rather experiencing the motherhood of God through her.  She is immanent, she is human like us, and she is all that we, both women and men, aspire to be as divinized human beings.

This blog will explore the practices of a deep Marian devotion, one that points us to Jesus, converts us to the ways of God and a holy, sacramental life, and shows us the beauty of the divine feminine, the Great Mother, She Who Is.

The Immaculate Queen

"In Greco-Roman Christianity, probably because of the dangers of Gnosticism, the biblical images of God as female were soon suppressed within the doctrine of God. God as Wisdom, Hokmah in Hebrew, or Sophia in Greek, a feminine form, was translated by Christianity into the Logos concept of Philo, which is masculine and was defined as the Son of God. The Shekinah, the theology of God’s mediating presence as female, was de-emphasized; and God’s Spirit Ruah, a feminine noun in Hebrew, took on a neuter form when translated into Greek as Pneuma. The Vulgate translated Ruah into Latin as masculine, Spiritus. God’s Spirit, Ruah, which at the beginning of creation brings forth abundant life in the waters, makes the womb of Mary fruitful. In spite of the reality of the caring, consoling, healing aspects of divine activity, the dominant patriarchal tradition has prevailed, resulting in seeing the female as the passive recipient of God’s creation; and the female is expressed in nature, church, soul, and finally Mary as the prototype of redeemed humanity. Because God as father has become an over literalized metaphor, the symbol of God as mother is eclipsed. The problem lies not in the fact that male metaphors are used for God, but that they are used exclusively and literally. Because images of God as female have been suppressed in official formulations and teaching, they came to be embodied in the figure of Mary who functioned to reveal the unfailing love of God" (from online source quoting from "The decline of the Feminine and the Cult of Mary").

The above quote nicely summarizes what I have been getting at regarding my concerns about the use of language that obscures the truth of the nature of God as both a paternal and maternal deity. My guess is that the de-emphasis of the feminine was indeed a reaction to the heresy of Gnosticism and also to the prevailing paganism of neighboring cultures. There is a point on which I differ with the above argument; that is, I don't agree that the Church sees the feminine as the passive recipient. The Church is quite clear that the Virgin Mary actively participated in God's plan for the salvation of humanity, a teaching from Vatican II that I have previously quoted. Still, it is true that the bridal-motherhood of God has been so hidden that the natural outlet for the need of all of humanity, both male and female, to bond with the maternal aspect of God was necessarily embodied in the extremely high veneration of the mother of Jesus. Praying to Mary for her help and intercession is, to my mind, much different from praying to other saints; for she reveals the feminine face of God, and so in a mystical way prayers to her are most certainly not only prayers to the Mother of God, but prayers to God the Mother through her. Mary is not considered to be divine, except by virtue of her deification in partaking of the divine nature of her son, as I have discussed before. Yet symbolically she is understood as the Maternal Matrix, or Cosmic Mother.

 Immaculate Queen, Woman of Revelation 12

Charlene Spretnak discusses this dimension of the Blessed Mother in Missing Mary.  In her book, Spretnak laments what she perceives as the marginalization of Mary in the wake of Vatican II, which resulted in the removal of her statues in many churches, a decline in praying the Rosary, and a reduction of Mary's full spiritual presence. (It does seem, however, that we are now in a phase of  revival of Marian devotion and the Rosary.) Spretnak referred to those Catholics who wish to have the Holy Spirit feminized and suggested instead that Marian devotion needs to be brought back with a closer look at how growing the Christ child in her womb would have changed Mary ontologically, resulting in a unique, "quasi-divine" person. Personally, I really don't like the term, quasi-divine. I agree that Mary was truly unique among all of humanity and that no doubt she was transformed by the experience of becoming pregnant with the Son of God, sharing his blood and receiving his DNA into her own body. Perhaps it could even be said that by this miracle her process of divinization was begun while she was still on earth, before being assumed into heaven. This mystery of Mary being filled with the Holy Spirit and Wisdom is infinitely profound.

 

The Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner

Spretnak discusses the efforts of the Vox Populi, a campaign for the declaration of a fifth Marian dogma, to officially grant Mary the titles of Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix, and Advocate. Pope John Paul II used the title Co-redemptrix, and I understand that he was in favor of the dogma, but the current pope, Benedict XVI, is not. Allegedly Mary has appeared to a woman in the Netherlands as the Lady of All Nations and requested that this dogma be proclaimed so that she can be fully empowered to bring true peace to the world. There is something that makes me very uncomfortable about the effort to try to force this Marian dogma. The Lady of All Nations purportedly referred to herself as "who once was Mary" to this Dutch woman, and I really don't imagine Mary changing her name in this way. New dogma cannot be proclaimed on the basis of a personal revelation. 

At any rate, Mary is a human being and symbol of the sacred feminine, but there must be acknowledged that  in God there is a divine feminine source. Many Catholic writers, Scott Hahn included, express that the Trinity is a family, composed of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who is the Love that unites them. Hahn seems to catch on to the trouble with this single-parent family image, because he goes on to say in one of his books that no family is complete without a mother, and that Jesus gave us his own mother as our spiritual mother in heaven. Still, if the Trinity represents a complete family, of whose image humanity reflects, then there must necessarily be a divine aspect that is feminine.

In my previous post I named this divine aspect Sophia, using the triquetra symbol to illustrate the divine feminine within the Trinity, a parallel dimension to the masculine persons of the Trinity, naming her Holy Wisdom (Hokmah in Hebrew), Ecclesia (Mother Church, the Bride of Christ), and Shekinah (the Presence, or glory cloud, of God). Sophia is identified in the Bible as a manifold presence who has not been completely revealed. I believe that Sophia's primary manifestation is through her indwelling of the Virgin Mary and all that Mary represents. An image of this idea may be found in the Book of Revelation, when the woman who gives birth to the divine child is given the "wings of the great eagle" to flee the ancient serpent, who is Satan. 

Woman of Revelation 12

From her immaculate conception, I believe that Mary was filled with Holy Wisdom, the Virgin Spirit of God's maternal Love, and that as such a pure soul, she is the emissary of the Holy Spirit to the world. To pray to Mary is to honor her divine motherhood and the Maternal Matrix, the feminine aspect of God found in Wisdom/Ecclesia/Shekinah and embodied in the Virgin Mary. By many names she has revealed herself to the faithful, and great signs, miracles, wonders, and healing have occurred at those sights of holy ground. Our Lady of Grace, Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadalupe. Holy Mary, our Blessed Mother. 

Our Lady of Guadalupe