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!

The Mermaid of Haarlem

The Lowlands in 1430 brought a year of terrible storms. The gales were so strong that parts of the dykes which protected West Friesland were breached, and the North Sea broke through and flooded the farmlands. But these storms were not all that were brought to the country. Among the many fish left stranded on the farmlands was (if we believe the wondering accounts written at the time) a mermaid.

A group of women gathering the stranded fish for an easy meal apparently discovered the unfortunate creature floundering in the shallow waters. Astonished (as well they might be), they somehow managed to carry the marvel to dry land, where she was eventually transported to the city of Edam, and from Edam to the city of Haarlem.

The Mermaid of Haarlem, as she became known, was provided with good Christian clothes with which to suitably cover her heathen nakedness, and seems to have settled down to this new life away from her watery home. She also seems to have adapted her diet to one of cooked meat, and was taught to spin yarn, and to pray and to make the sign of the crucifix. In short: the mermaid was provided with the essentials for a life in the Christian community in which she now found herself.

But these outward trappings of her surroundings do not seem to have erased her essential nature. Apparently she always retained a longing for her watery home, and every attempt to teach her even the essentials of human language resulted only in stubborn silence. How many years she spent as a half-reluctant member of her adopted community is not recorded, although we are told that on her death she was given a full Christian burial. Ah: if only we knew of her burial place! Would an exhumation reveal a marvel, or merely a prosaic disappointment?

Almost six centuries is a long time: long enough for us to wish that the story of the Haarlem Mermaid might just be true: long enough for us to hope that the story perhaps has a grain of substance. We seem to need mermaids and other fantastic creatures, but what perhaps touches us about her story is the notion of exile.

Let us suppose (because it is what we would like to believe) that the story is true. Did the mermaid truly have some sense of Christian reverence when she crossed herself, or was she merely mimicking the actions of those around her? And how strangely alien and awkward the wearing of clothes must at first have seemed to her. And what apparently was her resistance to human speech might have been more to do with her inability to speak at all, for who knows the ways in which mermaids communicate with each other when swimming in their watery home?

What we recognize in the mermaid’s story is the wish, however misplaced, to want to change someone to be like ourselves. We resist that ‘otherness’ which makes someone special, which makes them the unique individual that they truly are. We want someone to share our own beliefs, because that is a way of confirming to ourselves that the things in which we believe must be ‘right’. We misguidedly imagine that we can ‘improve’ someone by persuading them to believe what we believe, and to think as we think.

But is such persuasion a form of conversion, or a form of possession? We might excuse the actions of her captors towards the mermaid as belonging to the attitudes of 15th-century Catholic Europe, but such attitudes persist. Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses who come knocking on your door are in their intention no different from the goodwives of Haarlem who taught the mermaid how to make the sign of the cross. 

‘To thine own self be true’. But the mermaid was a unique being among many foreign souls, and social pressures can be hard to resist. Perhaps we can begin by recognizing and respecting each individual in her or his own right, whatever beliefs she or he might hold – whether human or mermaid.

Painting: Oceanid by Annie Louisa Swynnerton

The Spirit Descends

This, more than any other,

is the moment.

I raise my arms to the skies,

I raise my soul to the mystery
of all that is, and is to come,

and I wait.

I wait in expectation,

my hands open, ready to receive,

my heart open, ready to be filled,

my soul open, ready to be blessed

with the spirit on this, my Pentecost.

O marvelous fire
I beseech you,
fill my hands with gratitude,
fill my heart with your love,
fill my soul with your blessings,
with your sweet burning,
with your flame
which lights but does not sear,
with your incandescent grace.

O sweet mystery

you are my hands filled with gratitude,

you are my heart filled with love,

you are my soul filled with blessings,

you are all my pain, not vanquished,

but made sweet.

You are the arc of heaven

which bends with grace above me,

you are this great ocean

which I stand before

in wondering silence,

You are all that I am:

You are me.

Sacred Friend

There we sat on the beach, our hands with the playful fingers, always ready to let the sand run through them, now quietly resting on the same sand - while he was talking, and I was listening. At first he was searching for words, and somewhat reluctant to release them, to let them free in the air where they could either rise up to the light or fall silent on the sand. They fell, his words, in good earth they fell. Those words, coming from the depth of his soul.

They painted before me a man who made himself a mirror and did not shun his reflection. He looked at every incompleteness, every flaw and imperfection, and fought the fight of his life, like Jacob wrestling with his angel. It wore him down time and again, and his heart broke manyfold, but he did not flinch. He observed himself, he studied his inner and outer being. Gradually his reflection began to change form until one day it disappeared and even the mirror dissolved like a base metal in an alchemic process. 

Born again, he looked at the man that he had become - a man who had won, not only the battle, but also had ended the war against himself. The battle he had won was the victory over his small self - the victory over judgement and dualism. He had gained compassion, and more. No longer unaware, he had gained bliss. Pure bliss.

My silence was not mute. My silence spoke, while his words reached my open hands, and my heart. 

Painting by Hendrik Mesdag

Golden Apples

Far to the west, so far that it almost balances on the rim at the edge of the world, lies an island. Being an enchanted place, this particular island is the home of beings not encountered in our own everyday world, but if we are fortunate we may perhaps visit it in our dreams. Were we to do so, we would encounter three beautiful nymphs known as the Hesperides, who are the daughters of the sunset. For when at day’s end the golden sun slips beneath the world to begin its journey through the starry realms of night, the nymphs are the last beings to bid it farewell until the following dawn.

On this enchanted isle grows the sacred tree of Hera, the consort of great Zeus. This remarkable tree, which was grown from the fruit that was a wedding gift from Gaia, the earth goddess, bears apples of pure gold whose possession will grant precious immortality to anyone who owns them. It is the task of the Hesperides to guard these apples well, and to keep a watchful eye on the three nymphs and to make sure that they are fulfilling their task, a huge and terrible serpent twines its glinting coils around the tree’s trunk.

In this idyllic scene we recognize all the elements of enchantment: a sunset island set apart from the world, three beautiful nymphs, a fearsome guardian serpent, and a tree which bears miraculous fruit. It echoes other such scenes familiar to us from other stories and other places: Idun, goddess of spring and rebirth, who, in the Islandic Edda, took care of the golden apples, the poisoned apple in the story of Snow White, and the tree and the serpent that dwells in the Garden of Eden. And like the Eden story in the Book of Genesis, we are aware that in order for things to happen, in order for the story to progress further, the walls of enchantment have to be breached.

On the island of the Hesperides that disruptive influence arrives in the form of the goddess Eris, whose very name means ‘Discord’. Exactly how this troublesome goddess managed what she did is unclear. Perhaps she tricked the guardian serpent, or perhaps she caused some quarrel to break out between the three peaceable nymphs. The result is the same: Eris leaves the enchanted island with one of the apples in her possession. Being the devious goddess that she is, Eris has little interest in keeping the apple for herself. She is, after all, already immortal. No, her plan for the precious apple is much more insidious. The goddess writes on the apple the three beguiling words: “To the fairest”, and tosses it into the midst of a feast of the gods on Olympus. 

The goddesses Hera, Aphrodite and Athena naturally all claim that the apple is intended for them, and the mortal, Prince Paris, is brought in to settle the dispute. Beautiful Aphrodite sways the outcome in her favour with a simple but irresistible bribe: she promises Paris the hand of the fairest of mortals, Helen, who would become known as Helen of Troy, if the prince will decide in her favour. With such a prize on offer, the outcome is never in doubt. Paris claims what the goddess of love has granted, kidnaps Helen – and the terrible and tragic seed which leads to the drawn-out and deadly Trojan War is sown.

One small act carried out with mischievous intent can set in motion a whole chain of events whose outcome cannot be foreseen – not even by the individual who set those events in motion. Neither gods nor mortals can control those events, which, like ripples which disturb the surface of a still pond, continue to spread beyond the cause that started them. The three Hesperides must mourn the loss of the precious fruit entrusted to them. But perhaps the apple of Discord did grant a certain measure of immortality. So many centuries later, we still know the names and can relate the stories of those who feature in these ancient tales. And we can trace the events in our own lives which might reflect them, and each in our own way work, like the Hesperides, to come to terms with what has been taken from us. 

Painting: The Garden of the Hesperides, by Frederic, Lord Leighton.

The Mystic Heart

Many of the posts which you may read here are about mystics. We tend for convenience to label these mystics according to when they lived. There are the mystics of the Ancient World, such as Pythagoras, and Pythia, the Delphic oracle, who was believed to be possessed by the god Apollo when she uttered her mysterious pronouncements. There are the mystics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Hildegard von Bingen, Hadewijch of Brabant, Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich are four such mystics whose remarkable visions and insights seem at times to penetrate to the very heart of greater mysteries. And there are the contemporary mystics of our own times, such as Kahlil Gibran, Etty Hillesum and Rabindranath Tagore, whose writings offer profound insights into the human condition, and so touch us all.

We can name all these names, and we collectively call them mystics, but is it possible to find some defining thread of meaning and experience that would allow us actually to say what a mystic is? Perhaps if this were possible, it might bring us a step closer , not just to understanding them, but to experience in some way the things which they experienced, to share with them these remarkable insights which go deeper than our own everyday experiences.

One thing is very clear, even from this brief list of names: mysticism is gender-blind. Both men and women were and are regarded as mystics of equal stature. Even in a church whose hierarchy was and is essentially male-dominated, the mystics of the Middle Ages often were women who moved in a man’s world, and still made their mark on history. I think of Hildegard, who in contemporary accounts was described as being small and slight of stature, but who nevertheless negotiated her way through a world dominated by the bishops who were her superiors to gain respect and recognition for her visions and insights.

But if gender is irrelevant to mystic experience, what qualities tie such mystics together? What line binds Pythia to Hildegard, so remote in time from each other? What links the Lebanese Gibran to the Bengali Tagore, who might have been separated by their different cultures, but who nevertheless were each other’s contemporaries? We might say the obvious, and name their devotion to their beliefs. All mystics were on a quest, and this quest took the form of a need, even a passionate desire, to have a contact in some form with a deeper aspect of their faith. For a mystic, doctrine was not enough. A mystic desired something more, something beyond the borders that others had erected around their particular faith. A mystic was – and is – seeking a direct experience of the Divine.

Such a path cannot be trodden by careful route planning, by wondering what we are going to do next, by thinking carefully about the thoughts that might or might not guide us. Such thoughts are only distractions. A mystic does not walk a path. A mystic is the path, and total trust and surrender are the companions along the way. Every movement is a movement made in love, and every gesture is a gesture of love, of love for the inexpressible Divine. 

When Julian of Norwich said that ‘all shall be well’, I do not believe that it was an expression of hope. I feel that she made the statement out of total certainty. She knew with every fibre of her being that it would be so, even though the end of her journey was not yet in sight. 

Photo: sculpture Teresa of Avila by Fr. Lawrence Lew

Who was Mary Magdalene?

Who was Mary Magdalene? Church tradition tells us that she was the ‘repentant sinner’ who in Luke’s gospel washed the feet of Jesus with her tears, before drying them with her long hair and anointing them with precious ointment from an alabaster jar. This is the way in which Mary has been portrayed countless times in art, but this idea of her is based upon a mistaken assumption by Pope Gregory I in the 6th-century, who seems to have confused Mary, the sister of Martha, with Mary Magdalene – a confusion of names which has turned into a traditional portrayal of Mary Magdalene as ‘the woman with the alabaster jar’.

How is it possible, then, that what seems to be such an obvious misunderstanding about these passages in scripture could last for fourteen long centuries? A story which endures for so long tends to point to greater truths. Can we reach beyond this early pope’s misunderstanding to discover why this image of Mary has had such a powerful hold on the human imagination?

Some three centuries before the pope made his erroneous assumption, a manuscript was written that would lay undiscovered in the Egyptian sands before being rediscovered many centuries later in an ancient rubbish dump near the town of Oxyrhynchus – a valuable archaeological site which has also yielded some of the poetry of Sappho. The manuscript is now known as the Gospel of Mary. It offers us a very different picture of Mary Magdalene from the Mary of church tradition: a Mary who is the most loved of Jesus’ disciples, who is the closest to him, and to whom he entrusts the inner mysteries of his teachings. In this rediscovered gospel Mary offers these teachings to the other disciples: instructions about the visions of the mind, the perceptions of the spirit, and the ascent of the soul. 

Intriguingly, we are told that Mary addressed these teachings to her ‘brothers and sisters’, making it clear that other female disciples were present, and were therefore also among this inner circle of followers. Mary tells these things to the disciples after Jesus’ last post-resurrection appearance. The other disciples are feeling alone, afraid and demoralized, but it is Mary who rallies them, who urges them to keep their courage, and who assures them that they are not alone. In this text Mary emerges as a woman of deep spiritual insight, personal courage and dignity. Is there any way in which we might square this very different Mary of the gospel which bears her name with the Mary who holds the ‘alabaster jar’ of church tradition?

The woman is the vessel. She is the bearer of new life, and so is also the bearer of the most treasured and valued mystic secrets. The awe which surrounds the woman as the carrier of the miracle of life has been expressed in figurines carved from mammoth ivory many thousands of years old. To hold these mysteries is to hold a vessel, whether that vessel is expressed in the idea of the womb itself, or in the Holy Grail, or in an alabaster jar whose contents are described as the most precious and costly of all.

The Crossing: Hallelujah ~ Russian Orthodox Choir

Following his video of my poem Invocation, my husband David Bergen has now made a second video featuring my poem The Crossing, with an animated version of the beautiful painting by Abram Efimovich Arkhipov which originally inspired me to write my poem.

The poem on my blog can be read on
The Crossing

Flight and Pursuit

Desperate situations call for desperate measures. A true free spirit, the wood nymph Daphne is never happier than when she is roaming the forests. The dappled sunlight of the forest glades are more than home to her: they are her preferred company, and she vows that she would sooner keep herself chaste than exchange the familiar company of the surrounding trees for a partner in life.

All might have continued to go well for Daphne, were it not for the fateful day when the glorious god Apollo happens to catch sight of her as she dances in a sunlit glade. At once smitten by her beauty and charm, the god approaches Daphne and attempts to seduce her. Now, Apollo is used to having his way, whether with mortal or with nymph. But for the first time ever he finds his advances rejected. In a moment’s distraction Daphne seizes her chance to flee the god’s amorous advances and runs away as fast as she can, hoping that her familiarity with the forest trails might offer her an advantage in her flight.

But Daphne’s knowledge of the secret paths through her beloved forest is proving no advantage when matched against a god’s bruised ego. Wounded pride mixed with ardour for the fleeing nymph only fuels the pace of Apollo’s pursuit. At the last moment of her flight, when the god is so close behind her that she can feel his hot breath on her back, Daphne calls out in panic to her father, the river god Peneios. 

The great river stirs angrily, and white-topped waves slap its banks in a frenzy of fury as Peneios sees the plight which his daughter is in. Unable to leave his watery domain, the river god makes a last-resort move to save his daughter. Just as Apollo reaches out to seize the nymph, his all-too-eager hands grasp, not soft and yielding female flesh, but bark and branches and dark green leaves. Peneios with his powers has changed his daughter into a laurel tree: one more tree among all of its fellows in the wood nymph’s beloved forest.

A handful of laurel leaves are Apollo’s only gain. How to save face? How to restore a god’s bruised ego? By declaring a defeat to be a victory and founding a tradition. Apollo decrees that from that moment on, a crown of laurel leaves will become the worthy symbol of a victor. And the god promptly begins the tradition by weaving for himself a crown from the leaves that just moments before had been the living flesh of the beautiful nymph.

How often has it happened that reality has been turned on its head, and those who have been bettered have, through one means or another, insisted that they have in fact triumphed? Saving face in such a way is familiar enough to us from our own current news events. But in the story of Daphne and Apollo we can perceive a deeper meaning. Sometimes circumstances force us to change, and to change dramatically, and we become something other than that which we were before. It might not always be a change which we have wished for ourselves, but it has been a change made necessary for our survival, in whatever form that might take.

But Daphne’s fate also gives us reason to hope. The nymph’s essential nature was that of her own beloved forest, and her essence did not change. Instead it became absorbed into what she truly loved the most. Even in dramatic change, even undergoing apparent complete metamorphosis, our true essence survives in some form, and endures beyond even the great change at life’s end.

Apollo and Daphne by John Willam Waterhouse

The Daughter of the Air

Is it possible for a daughter to come before her mother? It is, but to find such an example we need to visit the world of myth. Today, 28th of February, Finland celebrates the day of its national epic, the Kalevala. As with Homer’s epic stories, the verses of the Kalevala originally would have been sung to an audience by a bard. Such performances not only kept these stories alive; they also helped to give their listeners a strong sense of their national identity, of being aware of who they were as a people. 

Sitting listening to their bards of long ago, the Finns would have heard the story of Ilmatar, the Daughter of the Air. No one knew who her parents were, or even if she had any. She was simply there, living alone in an airy palace of eight thousand rooms. Beyond the palace there was nothing to see except drifting mists and the shimmering curtain of the Northern Lights. But the Daughter of the Air felt that somewhere beyond her echoing palace there must be more. She was sure that if only she could just reach out of one of the windows far enough, she at last would be able to catch a glimpse of what might lie far below.

One day, determined at last to satisfy her curiosity, she stretched herself as far as she dared from her window. Too far. Suddenly she was falling, falling. It seemed as if she would fall forever. She fell so far that when she turned to look above her, the airy palace which was all that she had known already had been lost to view beyond the Northern Lights. She fell even farther, until at last she felt a watery stirring beneath her. Suddenly a great wave seemed to rear itself up to meet her, and in the next moment she plunged into a vast ocean. 

Half-submerged in the ocean, buffeted by the huge waves, she drifted for long centuries, feeling at last the mysterious stirrings of life within her. No longer the Daughter of the Air, she had now become the Mother of the Waters, who eventually would form the land so that all creatures would have a place to flourish, both in the seas and on dry land. In time she would give birth, and her son would be the great Finnish hero Vainamöinen, whose father was the wild wind and the waves, and who himself would play his own part in further creating the world and singing new life into existence.

The daughter comes before the mother – because the daughter becomes the mother. It is the story of our generations. A young girl grows to womanhood and has children of her own. What makes this story from the Kalevala ‘mythic’ is that the daughter apparently had no mother to begin her life. She simply was. Perhaps there is a sense in which this, however mythic it might seem, could also be true.

We carry ourselves forward in time, through the passing years. In his poem ‘The Rainbow’, William Wordsworth famously declared that ‘the child is father of the man’, meaning that we as children, in our upbringing, and in the values which are instilled into us, bring these values into our own adult lives. The child is also the mother of the woman, and it is this awareness which needs to guide us in the care and upbringing of our own children. We as mothers might not always give birth to mighty heroes such as Vainamöinen, but we as parents - and as children – always have the chance to be heroes in some way if that is what is needed of us.

Painting Ilmatar by Joseph Alanen

Tiamat’s Tears

“In the beginning…” These opening words of the Old Testament have a ringing familiarity, perhaps even to those who might seldom visit a church. But the human imagination allows for many ‘beginnings’, and each culture and belief creates its own beginning appropriate to itself. So…

In the beginning there was only Tiamat. Tiamat, the mother of all which will be, out of whose celestial womb all life will flow, fills all of space. She is the primordial salt ocean, and the rising and falling of her fertile waves are but the outward signs of the momentous acts of creation which are even now taking place beneath her surface, in the dark depths of the cosmos. At first it is as if there is only a vast nothing, a void without form. Then gradually, gradually, small flashes appear. At first they are only scattered sparks, shining briefly at random. Then come more and more, until the darkness is pierced by countless stars.

But Tiamat knows that more is needed: something to complement her own salt body. From her void emerges her husband Apsu. Her husband is also of water, but his waters are sweet. His waters are freshwater. It is this mingling of saltwater and freshwater which produces the potential for all the other gods to emerge. But in the eons to come a great sacrifice will be needed if the world itself – our world – is to be created.

The gods, who are Tiamat’s own creation, rise up and rebel against Apsu. Apsu is slain, and Tiamat, in her attempts to win justice for her lost husband, is herself torn in two. Out of this rending, this great separation, dry land at last emerges. Tiamat’s defeat and sacrifice have made it possible for life on earth to begin – and so for us to exist.

This particular ‘beginning’ myth of Tiamat is from Mesopotamia. In it we recognize many key elements of such stories: the creating Great Mother, the ‘alchemical wedding’ of opposing but complementary forces, the resulting struggle, and the need for sacrifice to drive things forward if further creative goals are to be achieved. Sacrifice is of course also at the heart of the Christian story, and it is the idea of sacrifice in such stories which also contains within it the promise of redemption. And what is redemption but an act of sacrifice with a further purpose? Tiamat’s sacrifice was needed to create the separation of land and sea, and so allow life on land to flourish.

But is there perhaps a further meaning that we can draw from the myth of Tiamat? Why was Tiamat specifically the salt ocean? Men wage war, and women weep. Strife and struggle are mingled with the salt tears of those who are left to mourn, and those who are left are the wives and the mothers who remain to grieve. Our mother is the earth, whose freshwater rivers that are the remains of Apsu always flow to be reunited with his beloved ocean. And our mother is also that ocean, containing the salt tears of Tiamat who, as mothers do, knows both the pains of sacrifice and the sweetness of redemption.   

Painting by David Bergen