Magnificat

My soul magnifies God. 

What shall I do 

with this quiet joy? 

It calls forth the expanse 

of my soul, calls 

it forth to go singing 

through the world... 

Calls it forth 

to rock the cradles of death gently 
and without fear. 

To collect the rain 

in my spread hands 

and spill it like laughter. 

Calls it forth 

to bear into this world. 

A place where light will glisten 

the edge of every wing 

and blade of grass.

Shine along every hair on every head, 

gleam among the turnings of every wave.

Glorify the turning open of each life, 

each human hand.

*

Christina Hutchins, Maginificat - My soul magnifies God. 

Luke 1:46

Painting Annunciation - detail, by Fra Filippino Lippi

Magnificat

MAGNIFICAT 

What shall I do

with this quiet joy?

It calls forth the expanse

of my soul, calls

it forth to go singing

through the world...

to rock the cradles of death

gently and without fear.. 

to collect the rain

in my spread hands

 and spill it

like laughter...

Calls it forth

to bear into this world

a place

where light will glisten the edge

 of every wing

and blade of grass and

Shine 

along every hair on every head..

Gleam 

among the turnings of every wave.

Glorify

the turning open of each life,

each human hand.

from "Magnificat" by Christina Hutchin

My soul magnifies God.

Luke 1:46

*

The Visitation of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth is closely connected to the canticle 

of the Magnificat that she sang on that occasion.

*

Painting "The Visit" by Dorothy Webster Hawksley, (1884-1970)

Ave Maria

Ave Maria

Ave Maria, ave, ave!

Who has not sung this greeting

and entreated with heart’s weakened breath

for miracles fleeting?

Inexhaustible Well of Life

Mother Immaculate, Perfect One.

Did you your own misgivings feel

as mother to the Son?

Why do I not feel compelled

to worship you in childlike trust?

Perhaps because my own life’s course

treads a different and less certain dust?

Perhaps because the mother who was mine

kept distance in her own remote belief

as in unnourished solitude

I stood in silent grief?

Or perhaps because, a mother now myself,

I cannot work the miracles I need

to save my children from their pains 

and the rough desires of others’ greed?

Do I seek my own immaculate self?

Is that what binds me to you?

That you, in spite of everything,

allow me to draw near you?

Or is it that I wonder

at your own unquestioning belief

to bear your greatest miracle,

and in turn to bear your greatest grief?

Is this why others sing your name?

That in the arms of Grace

in sweet submission you agreed

to bear that blessed Face?

Oh Sweet Surrender, oh Sweet Awe

who teaches me the way

to live and also to let go of life:

Ave Maria, ave, ave!

Advent: Silent Wonder

Today is the beginning of Advent: the first of the four Sundays leading towards the Nativity. The word Advent means ‘the coming’, and, if we open ourselves to the spirit of Advent, these four weeks contain a heightened sense of anticipation, of expectancy, of hope, of waiting, and trusting in new life not yet fully known. 

Here in northern Europe the winter is advancing, and for me the winter is a time of silence. Nature grows more silent in winter. There are no leaves on the bare limbs of the trees to give us the breeze’s summery rustle, and many animals are less active. Even the birds do not sing their dawn chorus in the winter darkness – and when the snow lies thick upon the ground all seems to fall still in the muffled white silence.

Silence also is for me a part of Advent. It is this silence which lifts Advent beyond being a time of the Christian liturgical year into being a time which touches upon mysteries which are more universal: those mysteries of the heart which touch us all. When the spirit of Advent is combined with the spirit of silence we are in a state of waiting in silence. And when that waiting is a waiting with a sense of deep and joyful anticipation for what is to come, we create a space in which love can grow, in which trust may flourish. 

Love, hope, trust, silence, waiting in joy for what is to come, are all doors. Combining these doors together into one opens the door to the approach of wonder. But what is this wonder? To trust in love for what is to come, to allow our inner silence to grow in this time of waiting, allowing the loving-kindness that is the essence of the divine love to grow in us, is the true spirit of Advent: the spirit of anticipation, of silent wonder.

Detail Painting Madonna by Fra Filippo Lippi

The two Mary's

People who share the same name can at times seem mysteriously connected to each other. And when we encounter these ‘twinned’ names in secret traditions, we can take it as a signal that something more is intended than mere coincidence. We know the Christ by the name of Jesus, but to his contemporaries his name was Yeshua – which in Hebrew is the same name as Joshua, who inherited the leadership from Moses. And the two women of the Gospels who so obviously share a name are Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Mary, the Magdalene. But surely these two women could not be more contrasting, more unlike each other? For the one is blessed by the Divine as an immaculate virgin, and the other is cast by the Church as a common prostitute – a redeemed whore.

Neither of these epithets are actually accurate (although why they are not is perhaps a post for my blog for another time!). For the last two millennia Mary Magdalene has perhaps been the most wronged woman in all of human history. If we now see the Magdalene in her rightful form, not as the whore, which is how the Church has chosen to portray her, but as the most enlightened of all the disciples and even as the equal partner of Jesus, then we restore her at last to her rightful place. And when this restoration has found place, then the two Mary's can stand beside each other. When this happens then they can in the eyes of esoteric philosophy and the secret teachings bring about the supreme event. For then the two Mary's can become one. The virgin and the whore unite in one being to become the virgin whore.

But the virgin whore has already existed, for this is one of the titles given to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. Ishtar, who invites us to overcome these contradictory koans of her titles and so enter the greater mysteries. But Ishtar is herself a continuous goddess who changes forms and names according to the culture in which she finds herself. So she has been both Ishtar and Isis and Astarte and Asherah, and she will become anew another incarnation in our own age with the uniting of the two Mary's. Thus the virgin-whore both survives and endures and speaks to us throughout history. As I mention in my previous post (Star of the Sea), the goddess is more powerful than any one doctrine. In describing the Magdalene as a whore (which the Gospels never actually do), the Church has perhaps been unknowingly fulfilling the true purpose of the goddess.

And perhaps all that it takes to unite the two Mary’s is our own awakening awareness of these traditions, and to realize that what had seemed to us to be two separate and individual women are in fact merely two aspects of the one goddess. 

Painting: Mary Magdalene by Carlo Dolci

Star of the Sea

Stella Maris – Star of the Sea. This mystical title given to the Virgin Mary portrays her as standing like a beacon miraculously among the waves on the curling sea foam, and is believed to date as far back as the 9th-century. But to discover the true origins of this image we need to broaden the search – and our own horizons – towards more ancient seas, and to remember that the Goddess has many faces.   

The Goddess endures. She is more powerful than any attempts to confine her to any one doctrine, and she changes both her form and her name as she adapts to circumstances. She has been elevated to become the principal icon of the Catholic Church, for the Church is itself the unwitting servant of the Goddess. To see her in another form we need look no further than that familiar icon, not of religion, but of art: Botticelli’s famous Birth of Venus. Emerging gracefully from the sea foam, Venus is herself the Roman version of the Ancient Greek Aphrodite, who is always associated with the sea which gave her birth. 

So our quest after the Star has already brought us to Ancient Greece. Can we journey back even further? The Babylonian goddess Ishtar is also linked to a star – or at least, what the Ancients thought of as a star, but which we know to be a planet, a ‘wandering star’. Ishtar was absorbed into Greek culture as Astarte, who in turn became Aphrodite/Venus. The morning and the evening star are both the planet Venus, and the ancients saw Ishtar as being graced with both a five-pointed and an eight-pointed star. The five-pointed star is now familiar to us as the pentagram, but where does the eight-pointed star come from? The Babylonians observed the heavens meticulously, and they must have noted that the planet Venus seems to follow a path through the heavens that traces out a five-pointed pathway – over exactly an eight-year period. So Ishtar has her star. But what of the sea?  

The old Testament’s Book of Jeremiah mentions a goddess described as the Queen of Heaven – the goddess Asherah, who in ancient times was known as the ‘Lady of the sea’, or ‘She who treads on the sea’. Asherah was the consort of Yahweh, in the time before Judaism became monotheistic in its beliefs, and although the attempts to obliterate the goddess from scripture were largely successful, we can still catch glimpses of her in Jeremiah’s phrase – and also in the opening words of Genesis, which in the original Hebrew literally read: “In the beginning the gods created the heavens and the earth.” 

At the beginnings of civilization Mesopotamian clay tablets record the appearance of a brightly-shining light in the heavens – what we now know to be a supernova, an exploding star. Apparently this light was so bright that it was visible during the hours of daylight. And it made its sudden and dramatic appearance low down on the eastern horizon, which is where it stayed. To the dwellers overlooking what is now the Persian Gulf it would have appeared as if this star was emerging from the sea, and these ancient cultures do feature deities which came out of the sea. Even in Ancient Egypt, the title given to Horus, the child of Isis and Osiris, was ‘Horus-on-the-Horizon’. This spectacular heavenly event apparently had a great impact on human awareness, and much in the way of culture and learning began at that time, almost as if this stellar appearance had triggered something in the human imagination.

Stella Maris – Star of the Sea. This icon of both the church, of art, and of human culture takes us right back to the very dawn of civilization, and continues to surface in whatever form the Goddess finds appropriate to communicate with us. And what of Mary? Her true  origins are in her very name, for Mary is derived from ‘Mare’, meaning ‘The Sea’.