Flowering, immaculate
grows the winter rose
inside of you
Your soul, in wonderment,
expresses its form
But hush..
wait just awhile
for the soft breath of the merciful divine
is flowing within you
And a light will be lit that never dims
by day it illuminates your acts
by night, your dreams
Feel how the divine love enfolds you
Rest now secure in her arms
while your angel spreads her wings
above the Rose in Blessing
| Virgin in the Basilica of Montserrat, late 12th century, in wood |
The Black Madonna Returns by Andrew Harvey - 2004
The entire world is now going through a massive crucifixion on all levels. It's going through an environmental crucifixion. Hundreds of species are vanishing every month. It's going through a personal crucifixion. There are two billion people living on less than a dollar a day. It's going through a crucifixion of all the patriarchal systems. Look at Enron and what it has shown us about Corporate America. Look at the Catholic Church's scandals of pedophilia and what it shows us about authority. Look at the growing disillusionment with politicians of all kinds. All of the systems are being exposed as illusory and fantasy-ridden, as deeply corrupt and exploitative.
There's another kind of crucifixion going on: crucifixion of purpose and hope. Everybody is totally bewildered. They know that the world is potentially on the brink of apocalypse. There's a tremendous danger that as people wake up to the horror of what is going on, they will run into political extremism or into fundamentalism of one kind or another.
So it's extremely important that the wisdom of the 'dark night of the soul' gets across, because if people understand the necessity for this crucifixion, and understand that it's preparing a resurrection and empowerment, then they will be prepared to go through it without too much fear, trusting in the logic of the divine transformation.
The Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths shared with me his experience of the dark night of the soul. He said he was sitting outside his hut one day when he felt as if a hand hit him on the right side of his being. He had suffered a massive heart attack that destroyed what he described as his patriarchal mind and gave him access to a much deeper elaboration of Oneness with all things.
He said, "It's a very strange thing, but when I thought of surrendering to the Mother I of course thought of Mary--I often say the 'Hail Mary'--but it was Mary as the Black Madonna that came into my mind. She is the mother of the earth as well as heaven, of the body as well as the soul, the mother of the subconscious, the hidden, of all those powers that the 'masculine' mind represses; the Mother of the sacred darkness. In Her the Western Christian vision of the Divine Mother and the Eastern one merge and meet; you can think of her as both Mary and Kali, both preserver and destroyer. From that time on, I have turned to Her again and again. Invoking Her strength and grace, I find, makes the 'birth' go so much faster and more cleanly."
The power that is doing this to us is coming towards us simultaneously with terrifying destruction and extreme grace and prosperity. The destruction is, in fact, a form of that extreme grace. It's quite clear that humanity is now terminally ill, and can only be transfigured by a totally shocking revelation of its shadow side. And this is what we're living through, these shadow sides exploding in every direction because we have done nothing but betray the sacred in us. We have lacerated the sacred in others. We have betrayed the sacred in an orgy of fundamentalism. We have brutalized the sacred in nature. We are now terminally destructive.
So only an almost terminal destruction that reveals to us the full extent of our responsibility in this destruction can wake us up. And that is what is happening, and it will get worse. It's bound to get worse. But it is only being done to us for our own redemption.
Those who turn to the Mother in total faith, those who turn to the Black Madonna in total admiration, those who realize the mercy behind the violence will be given extraordinary protection, strength, and revelation. They will be empowered in the core of themselves to become what everybody who has a heart and a mind must now become - a spiritual revolutionary devoting their entire life and all their resources to the preservation of the planet.
Finding the Black Madonna, in whatever form you want to find her, realizing the massive task that she's doing and turning to her for protection is now crucial to the preservation of the planet. It's extremely important that people really come to understand the feminine and turn towards it, because it's our betrayal of the feminine in ourselves and in the divine that has led to this crisis.
© Copyright Andrew Harvey 2004-All Rights Reserved
Image above: Virgin de Montserrat, late 12th century, romanesque, scultured in wood
Image below: Mare de Déu, Basilica de Montserrat
There will come a time
When the last spoken words
Will be heard by the gods
And their hearts will break
And descend in a green rain.
The accumulated anguish of the creatures
Will become a stubborn poetry
Rushing in like the swift wind
That replaces the lost songs of the dead.
These broken shards of sacred language
And persistence, these fragments
That defended what was threatened
What was going extinct, will become
Like the scatter of stars,
A delicate light sufficient
To illuminate the dark we have imposed.
Those who had no words
Will be given words like amaryllis
And sunflower, porcupine and flamingo,
Endangered words for their salvation
Like manatee and rhinoceros,
Or river and corn.
In other words, they will be given
Their own bodies to declare to each other
So it will be impossible to distinguish
Meaning from their particular lives.
Each will contribute only the single word
Of one’s body and soul,
So when one speaks a sentence
One will always have to speak
Of more than oneself.
To speak at any length
Whether in the eloquence of wolf howl
Or arpeggios of bird song, or
The chastened whispers of a new
Human speech will be to invoke
All that is living in one’s cogitations,
And so it will be
After the last words are finally spoken
That the first words will,
Once again,
Conjure Creation.
*
Deena Metzger - The Last Word part 3
from published Essay's & Poetry
Rattle 2004
Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita, a Realised Master - born in 1836 - devoted his entire life to Kali - his Divine Mother, at first as a young priest in her service in the Kali temple in Dakshineswar, but shortly after his inauguration, things changed. He himself changed, for as soon as he sat before Kali's statue, something inside him changed. As if he were surrounded by a wall of fire which protected him from un-spiritual influences, and he felt the mystical Kundalini rise up through the different chakras along his spine. The glow on his face and the intense atmosphere in the temple impressed everyone who saw him worship the Goddess. He was her child. He cried for her...he cried so long for her...to manifest Herself to him.....and gradually he found himself captured in a web of her all penetrating presence.
For most people she no doubt is the Goddess of Destruction, for him she was the compassionate, loving-all Divine Mother. In her he saw the seed of immortality. She was Shakti, the Power, undivided from the Absolute. But in all her divinity she seemed to reel under the influence of wine. To Ramakrishna that made sense: who else, he said, would create this mysterious, crazy world unless under the influence of divine drunkeness but the Goddess of destruction? To Ramakrishna she was the ultimate, highest symbol of all powers in nature, and the final divine form of Woman.
Swami Vivekanda was one of his disciples, and was sent to America to become a missionary, spreading the teachings of his Guru: the Ramakrishna Vedanta. Vedanta - a universal philosophy - teaches the presence of the divine in all mankind; the nature of man and of the whole universe simply is Divine. And the purpose of human life is to manifest this Divine nature.
Painting of Ramakrishna by © David Bergen
This is one of the strangest Black Madonnas. She wears a kind of turban, except that it is open on the top, revealing the Virgin's black hair. Brigitte Romankiewicz makes an association to the Buddhist world, where the top of the head is referred to as 'the gate of divine realization' - a gate you would want to leave open if you were the mystical bride of God.
Indeed, this Madonna, who is obviously meant to look oriental, seems Buddhist in some ways. As opposed to most Romanesque Madonnas who look sternly ahead, both she and her son wear the peaceful little smile of a Buddha.
Contemplate the hands! The Mother's hands are focused on Jesus without grasping him. They are open and empty, except full of love. The Son's left hand mirrors the same unusual posture, as if he were touching empty space.
Perhaps their open, empty, yet aware hands are drawing awareness to the completely transcendent face of God, which Buddhists call 'emptiness'. Even the wall behind them is completely empty, just the bare, gray stone. Not a single piece of decoration, neither on the wall nor on the statue itself, none of the usual robes or jewelry, no legends or miracle stories either. To the modern eye this Mother and child are truly Zen!
We don't know what each peasant, monk, or alchemist might have seen in this Lady. What we do know is that she called her devotees to honor the 'other', the ones that look, dress, and behave differently. And she did this in the middle of eight centuries of conflict as well as cultural exchange between European Christians and North-African and Near-Eastern Muslims.
Even today she seems to say: "Don't label your dark neighbors as strangers and enemies, for I am their mother as well as yours! Don't close your heart to people who look like me!"
- Ella Rozett
The Black Virgin of Meymac - The Egyptian;
In the old Benedictine abbey called Saint-André Saint-Léger de Meymac (now the parish church), Corrèze department, Limousin region, 12th century, 48 cm, painted wood.
In the middle of the black water, growing in stately solitude, was a lily – a lily from which an intensely brilliant light seemed to pour. A lily so dazzling, so perfect, so supernaturally pure, that the only sensation that possessed the soul at the sight was the desire to sink on one's knees and adore it. It was larger than any lily Corona had ever seen, but of the same shape and kind as those she had in her own garden at home. Yet before this one her heart seemed to feel an extraordinary peace, an extraordinary longing for better things, a wonderful happiness that spread through body and soul, giving her the sensation that she was a spirit from a better world, with no desire but to let her heart melt in infinite gladness in a song of praise. She knelt down at the water's edge, hid her face in her hands, and cried, cried tears that seemed to wash away all the evil in human nature, all the suffering and pain, all the struggles, all the partings and disappointments. And all her own grief seemed to melt away, relieving her overburdened heart of its suffering. And as her tears touched the marble floor, they turned into pure pearls – pearls like those the wise woman wore round her neck; they rolled one by one into the black water, each forming little circles of light on the dark surface; and the circles spread, widened, rippling away in silver, little waves.
But soon she dried her tears, for she knew that to get to the flower she must descend into those dark depths, and once more the horror of death seemed to cross her soul.
⚜⚜⚜
Excerpt from "The Lily of Life" Marie of Romania (Marie Alexandra Victoria; 29 October 1875 – 18 July 1938), also known as Marie of Edinburgh, was the last Queen of Romania as the wife of King Ferdinand I.
Illustration by Helen Stratton, 1867-1961.
The bishop stands watching as the two workmen cement the stones into position. Row upon row the stones rise from the cold floor of the vast church interior. But the bishop’s gaze is not so much directed towards the activity of the workmen as it is upon the woman who is gradually being lost to view behind the rising wall of stones.
The woman is dressed in a loose garment of coarsely-woven cloth, and is seated on a simple wooden stool with her hands resting calmly in her lap. Her eyes do not meet the bishop’s gaze, but instead are directed towards the flagstones on the floor, as if she already is lost to the world beyond her increasingly limited view. The workmen work on until only the far wall of stones is dimly seen in the darkness beyond, and then… nothing. The bishop affixes his seal to the masonry. At the still-young age of thirty Sister Bertken has begun her life of voluntary confinement, walled-up in a cell less than four meters square. For her it is the beginning of a life of prayer and meditation that she will follow for the rest of her days.
A small aperture in the stones which aligns with the church altar has been left so that Sister Bertken may follow the services, and another opening at the rear of the cell allows for the necessary food to be passed through to her. She is allowed neither meat nor dairy products, and her food is of the simplest fare. Her bed is a palette on the floor. She wears no shoes, and is allowed only the comparative luxury of a pelt of fur in winter to stave off the freezing cold from the flagstones beneath her naked feet.
We are in the Buur Church in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands of the 15th-century, and Sister Bertken, born Berta Jacobsdochter, is not the only recluse to have herself walled up alive in such a way. It seems that such recluses strove to emulate the examples of the recluses of former centuries who chose to live in the solitary vastness of the desert. In northern Europe there are no desert wildernesses, so solitude was sought in the hearts of the cities – and what more profound solitude is there than a small dark cell with no way out?
Sister Bertken began her voluntary seclusion in 1457, and remained within the sealed walls of her small cell until her death in 1514: a near-incomprehensible fifty-seven years of voluntary incarceration until her death at the age of eighty-seven. Apparently the local parishioners would come to her cell to seek advice, and she was always ready with a kindly word.
There is a tradition that Sister Bertken was buried beneath the floor of her cell. Perhaps this seems fitting, for even in death, how after so many decades of confinement could she return to the outside world, even for her own burial? But all traces of her cell in the church have now long disappeared, and its precise location remains unknown. The time-worn flagstones keep their secrets well; as does the mystery that we call faith.
To say that Sister Bertken’s actions were driven by simple faith is to presume that we know what ‘faith’ actually is. We think that we can discern faith by the outward actions of someone, and we call such a thing an ‘act of faith’. The term is so familiar that we tend to take it for granted that we understand it. But we do not. Not really. When it comes to such an extreme example as Sister Bertken we have arrived at the threshold of the heart’s unknown secrets, and are left to wonder.
Ick voelde in mij een vonkelkijn
Het roert so dic dat herte mijn
Daer wil ick wel op waken
Die min vermach des altemael
Een vuur daeraf te maken.
*
I felt a tiny spark within
It reached into this heart of mine
And I will guard its light
The spark that love will kindle
To a fire burning bright.
