Fr. Andrew Greeley spends half of each year in Tucson and wrote several years ago that when converts to Catholicism in his parish church there complete their studies and become Catholic, they immediately ask the parish priest when they will get their rosaries.

“Oh, that,” the priest would have to say. He, like nearly all parish priests today, would then have to explain that the rosary was largely phased out of modern Catholic lives after Vatican II (1962-65), as it was considered too medieval and too Marian to be important in the new, streamlined Catholicism. [Historical note: Lots of very good and hugely important changes came out of Vatican II, but those are a different matter from the decisions that were made about Mary, which constituted only a small portion of the great council’s reforms.]

It’s odd how little is known outside of Catholicism about the radical minimizing of the full spiritual presence of the Virgin Mary during the past forty years. In the modernized Catholicism, Mary’s historical dimension is still present, but pretty much everything else got lopped off.

The exception in the United States, of course, is in ethnic parishes, who have pretty much ignored the dethroning and demoting of Mary, as have large parts of the rest of the Catholic world. So now the American Catholic Church houses both the dominant position (strongly favoring solely the historical, more rational version of Mary the village woman) and the minority position (favoring also her cosmological, symbolic, and mystical dimensions). Seems to me that a both/and solution is the way home.

Some people balk at any notion of prayer.  It goes against our sense of mastery as humans.  It is even more difficult for some in the new age to reconcile time-honored rituals that have both an impersonal and personal dimension.  For one thing, linking the personal with the impersonal and the divine with the profane confounds us.  Indeed for some, the question is, why link at all; or, aren’t we always linked? 

The traditional form of daily worship in Islam, the salat, likewise has been thought of within a wide spectrum of questions.  Why pray five times a day? Some ask.  Why all those movements? Asks others.  Why does it have to be in Arabic? Why have women not been leaders of salat in mixed congregations?  All are valid concerns in the pluralist contexts of today.

The answers I give expand from the silly to the sublime, the serious to the sadistic.  One of my favorite questions, especially from students, How can any one find the time?  My answers have evolved.  One of them is: it takes less time to prayer the obligatory prayer than it does to smoke a cigarette.  I guess it is a question of motivation…

The main motivation for the formal ritual is the embodied experience of the human/divine relationship.  Like other “sacred” times, places, persons, events, the salar is non-ordinary, as a mode of communication with, to and at some level for that which is Non-ordinary.  The postures reflect the very human aspect of its performance.

First, are the intentions: whether an elaborate formula or a simple stop in the endless rush to and fro of daily life, often motivated by something other than our most inward serenity and its intimate connection with all that is created and the Creator. 

Then the performer must stand, if able.  This is the ultimate representation of our moral agency (in Arabic khilafah).  According to the Qur’an the purpose of all human life is khilafah on the earth.  We are created as agents of the divine IN context: on the earth.  There is no notion of a fall from grace.

Then the performer bows from the waist. This is the position from which one unit of salat gets it name: the position is ruku’ and the unit is called a rakah.  Daily prayers go from two to four rakahs throughout the day and evening.

When the performer prostrates it symbolizes an utmost expression of surrender, only to be repeated twice per unit, before resuming the stand or full posture of agency.  The prostration is perhaps the most significant of all the postures because it is so contrary to the notion of free will and human empowerment.  Indeed it is the position most reflective of surrender. 

The definition of Islam is “engaged surrender”.  It fulfills the whole spectrum of agency which is the consciousness: engaged in a continual state of surrender .  There is something greater than ourselves, yet only in as much as it is also intimate to ourselves. 

The thing about the most important ritual in Islamic practice is it symbolic representation and embodied reflection of this, through out the day. 

Why pray five times a day?  The goal is to achieve prayer never ending. It acts as reminder, such that before, after and during we are mindful and remember that we are not alone.

At the end of next week I will be joining 17 other women on a Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. For many of us the most significant part of the journey is our descent four levels down, five hundred feet down, into the dark center of the Skoteino cave. The cave has a wide mouth and a large naturally-lit first level with high ceilings. There are no lights or paths inside the cave and the way down is steep. We grasp for handholds, slide on our bottoms, squeeze through narrow openings, take care not to slip and fall. Our culture has taught us to fear the dark. Many of us have also not learned to trust our bodies to carry and guide us into places that demand both physical and mental strength. Yet as we make our way down to the final round dark room of the cave, we learn that our bodies can be trusted. We push ourselves farther, seeking the darkness we had feared.

When we reach the center, we extinguish our headlamps and candles, sit together silently in the dark. On my first journeys into this cave, I was eager to find the answers to all of my questions about the meaning of life, the meaning of my life. I asked eagerly and sometimes sensed answers. Now I prefer simply to sit with my eyes open, allowing the silence and the dark to penetrate my skin and bones. I have no more questions--or at least none that can be answered.

There is something primordially Female about a cave—the narrow passageways, the moisture, the water, the color red (from iron deposits), the warm and welcoming dark, the transformations of mind and body that come to those who are willing to let go of fear and expectation and to enter into secret places of Her body.

Having entered into this cave and others many times, I do not understand how archaeologists can doubt (though still they do) that caves were and are known to be the womb of our Mother, the Earth. Only through long training not to see, not to feel, can we deny this knowledge that comes to us through our bodies, our bodies which are made from this earth.

For me the mystery is simply this:

From this it follows that all that inhabit the earth are our relatives and that we should tread lightly so as to do as little harm as possible to other living things.

Once we were one, my body swelled to offer him the inner space he would claim. Fetal cells live on for decades in a mother’s body. Gestation of the boy baby is for some women the most perfect male-female union they will ever experience. From that perspective, every birth is a fall from grace. I became a mother for the first time 28 years ago on Mother’s Day. Since that day I have come to understand that beings who have known each other intimately must be especially respectful of boundaries.

 For all of us there is an immense relief at being fully seen for who we are. But the mother-son relationship is daunting terrain for self-revelation. Mother and son limit their explorations into one another’s deepest selves. For the least courageous, mutual recognition is relegated to a single, sanitized day. Thwarted longing for complicity turns to bathos on a Hallmark card.

A son’s incapacity to integrate Mom in all of her aspects has contributed to centuries of woman repression. The mere glimpse of the fullness of Mom is in Jung’s words “terrifying and inescapable like fate.”

A more frivolous by-product of this overwhelm is a fascination with the imagined person of the Mother who is (so sonny can feel safe) not (really) Mother. A glimpse of the film Back to the Future reminds me of the popular take on the mother/ not mother genre. Marty is a teenager in a small American town. His father is an effectual loser, his mother is a perfect prude whom he suspects of “having grown up in a convent.” But when Marty travels back 30 years in time, he finds himself face to face with his mother as a flirtatious, lively young girl. To her, he is a new boy in town to whom she is irresistibly attracted and, to him, she is shockingly free in her advances. I catch the scene where they are sitting alone in a parked car and despite his protestations, she plants a hungry kiss on his electrified lips.

The impossible desire for closeness between mother and son finds an outlet in what I call the mother/not mother genre. This vivacious 17-year-old girl is Marty’s mother, yet she is not (yet). The scene teases and tempts when the requisite mother mask is stripped away by Marty’s fanciful encounter with her pre-mother self. Would that all of us could in some measure experience the same.

Who among us can forget Demian, Hermann Hesse’s lavishly Jungian coming of age novel in which the young Sinclair searches for “the mighty love apparition of his dreams.” Finally he finds his haunting dream image embodied in a real woman. The woman is Frau Eva, not his, but his friend Demian’s - and if there be anything in a name, all of humanity’s – mother. His love for the mother/not-my-mother comes to fill his whole life. And yet, somehow, he explains... His mother did not at all appear to be a woman who had a full grown son, so young and sweet were her face and hair, so taut and smooth her golden skin, so fresh her mouth … Love for mother flourishes in the paradoxical denial of her fleshly maternal aspects.

Mother/not mother does not always wax benign in the imaginations of man-child. I do not pretend to understand George Bataille’s ghoulish novella My Mother. This depraved, alcoholic libertine seductress comme maman will not stand for distancing or non-recognition. “I do not want your love unless you know I am repulsive and love me even as you know it,” says she as she pushes her boy over the edge. Full disclosure in the realm of mothers and sons is a risky business indeed.

On a sweeter note, there is the story Meeting Mother by the Hungarian Geza Csath. A young man yearns for the nearly forgotten mother who died giving birth to him when she was all of 20 years old, his own age in the present. His long departed mother appears to him in a dream of idyllic, if hopeless, reunion of two innocents in a sweet-scented field. But even in the dream of union with so girlish and distant a mother/ not mother, there are restraints. She refuses him a last embrace, as with graceful steps she disappears into the wood leaving him at its edge, knowing he cannot pursue her. I stood there, with my sight, following after her sorrowing, adoring – long long.

Make of it what you will. I’ll take it over a Hallmark card this birthday, Mother’s day, not Mother’s day, any day...On this happy occasion I find myself whistling the Lost Boys’ tune, the one when they decide to build a lovely little house for Wendy(not mother) and make her mom. She’ll be waiting at the door, we won’t be lonely any more… we have a mother, it’s nice to have a mother. And sometimes, it’s simply very nice to be one as well.

Perhaps because I am again in the midst of teaching a permaculture course, I find myself thinking about dirt.  What is more sacred than the living soil?  That matrix of life, the complex underground ecosystem that grows our food.  Soil rich in organic matter is a whole world of microorganisms, fungi, bacteria, insects, worms, roots minerals all interacting in a web of relationships that sustains life.  

And yet how we denigrate the earth that feeds us!  Anything that pertains to earth and ground--‘soiled’, ‘low’, ‘dirty’—is an insult.  “High”, “Light”, “celestial”—the unearthly and disembodied are all positive terms.

Earth is dark, and darkness is also associated with the dirty and the low.  “Enlightenment” is what we strive for in a state of “higher” consciousness.

When the body is denigrated, so are women, as our bodies are so intimately linked to those low and dirty processes that bring life into the world.   When ‘dark’ is a negative term, darker people are seen as having less value.  So these metaphors are deeply entrwined with sexism and racism.

I’ve worked in many ways to change their usage in my own writing and teaching.  I like to talk about ‘Deep Self’ instead of ‘High Self’’ “negative magic’ or ‘destructive power” instead of ‘Dark Powers.”   Many of the Goddess myths that speak of spiritual growth and transformation are journies of descent: Inanna’s journey into the World Below: Persphone’s sojourn in the Underworld.,  poets and musicians carried down into faery mounds.

I invite you all to join me in descending to the depths, getting low down and dirty, and nurturing our darker powers of growth and fertility.  Maybe then we could learn to appreciate the soil, and those who get their hands dirty by working with it.  If we love the earth, we can learn to love and grow and heal her soil, and when we do, we may also heal our culture and ourselves. 

Is she not singular in the entire religious imagination? Is there another human who begins as a simple village girl, experiences a direct encounter with divine presence (albeit through a delivery service, Michael), agrees to grow divine presence from her very body, cues her son that it’s time to perform his first miracle, witnesses at the foot of the cross the divine sacrifice, and then is embraced and honored by his followers, such that her spiritual presence is felt in cathedrals and roadside shrines, in grottoes and the old pagan springs, and, most significantly, in the hearts of millions over more than a thousand years? The Virgin Mary is a human who grows into her cosmological dimensions, the human possibility writ large.

Of course, her biblical story is situated in the far older religions of the Eastern Mediterranean basin: in a hidden place (a cave-like stable) she bears a special son parthenogenetically at the winter solstice who becomes a great leader; he dies and is reborn around the time of the Vernal Equinox, living on in a spiritual sphere. It is a plot line that would have been familiar to the residents of that part of the world. It may be “the greatest story ever told,” as Christians sometimes say. It is certainly situated in the oldest story: that of the sacred cosmological female.

One of the requirements in Islam is the five-times daily prayer.  It is something often misunderstood by non-Muslims.  For one thing, it is not personal supplication or invocation that comes to mind with the English word prayer;  It is a highly formalized ritual performance with certain prerequisites and conditions.  This does not mean thqt personal supplication is unimportant in Islam and Muslims invoke the sacred on behalf of their pesonal and immediqte circumstances like any one else and at any or all times that we are so moved, including before, after and during this formal ritual.

The word for prayer in Arabic is salat, and refers to a specific actions and words of devotion.  Because of its enduring formula and consistency, no matter where we are in the world, we can enjoy this performance in common with others and within every circumstance that we might find ourselves.  

The Qur'an speaks of the whole world as a masjid place of prostration.  In one sense this means we are always connected with the divine through the earth.  In another sense, this is a unique and yet repetitive act of reminder that we are responsible for our consciousness and the actions that follow, no matter where we are and no matter what time the sun rises, reaches it zenith, declines, sets and the stars come out.  The prayer times are synchronized with the positions of the sun.  The direction of the prayer towards a sacred shrine in the heart of Arabia is flooded at all hours of the day and night by some one, some where turning their faces towards it and observing this act of devotion.  

In Europe, I find the rising sun, but unlike in North America where I must turn east (more or less), here, I turn towards the south.  In Southeast Asia, I turn west.  But sometime each day I unite with this cosmic flow of devotion from all around the planet.  My favorite prayer is the one about one hour and a half before sunrise, fajr.  I leave my place of repose and adopt a new one: in remembrance of the holy, as it lives in me, I in It and with all else: both sacred and profane.  When I travel, my rhythm is only restored, when my body is synchronized with this particular beginning for each day.  When the sun arrives, it is as though I have already found my place in the universe and from there all else follow

(more to come...) 

Greek Easter fell on the last Sunday of April this year.  Though I did not attend the services, nearly every one else in my village did.  Once again I was prompted to think about survivals of pre-Christian intuitions about life and death within Greek Christianity.  This time I reflected on spring cleaning.

Greek Easter officially begins when the mid-winter carnival concludes on “Clean Monday” (note the reference to cleansing and cleanliness) and the Lenten fast begins.  In Greek practice, the fast begins with the prohibition of meat, but during its 40 days other food items including fish, milk products, and even olive oil are proscribed.  The fast is broken on Easter Saturday night with a soup made from the paschal lamb’s head and entrails followed by the Easter feast of lamb or goat grilled on the spit or as is more traditional in my village, stuffed with rice, raisins, pine nuts, and parsley and baked in the oven.  The Easter fast can be thought of as a kind of “spring cleansing” in which the toxins produced by winter feasting and lolling around are removed from the body. 

In our village the housewives practice the custom of spring cleaning the home.  They turn over mattresses, wash tablecloths and doilies, seek out every speck of dust, paint the walls if cleaning won’t do the trick, and whitewash the steps in front of their homes. 

Customs like these are as old as agriculture and the domestication of animals that ushered in settled life.  The Easter fast is connected to the life cycles of sheep and goats.  The abstention from meat-eating allows the lambs and goatlings born in early February to grow and thrive while their mothers eat the plentiful grass produced by winter rains.  By Easter-time their black and white bodies are a familiar sight among the spring flowers.  Yet as the days get warmer and the rain less frequent, the ground begins to dry out, the grasses die, and the land can no longer support all of the growing lambs.  Because they do not produce milk, the young males are the first to be sacrificed: the “paschal lamb”-- a term applied to the death of Jesus--was originally applied to the real lambs that are eaten at the spring feast.  Their death allows their mothers’ milk to be used to make cheese and yoghurt.  Their sacrifice also ensures that the land will not be overgrazed and that the cycles of birth and death can continue among their kind.

The spring cleaning of the house is based in the agricultural custom of cleaning out the granaries and all of the pots and jars used to store grain in preparation for the new harvest.  It is necessary to “begin afresh” to ensure that the old grain will not rot or ferment, thus contaminating the new.  It is good to have a clean house too as “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” and as we now know cleanliness is the ground of health.  Spring is a good time to clean as the warmer days allow windows and doors to be opened, and the return of the light makes possible a thorough inspection for dirt.

In Greek Orthodox tradition Holy Week is a dramatic affair with services held every evening.  On Thursday night a cross is erected in the church and the icon of the dying Jesus is literally “hung on the cross.”  The women of the village are solemn and many of them are actually weeping.  They spend the night preparing the coffin of for Jesus whose icon continues to hang on the cross, elaborately decorating the coffin and the table upon which it rests with wildflowers from the fields (now augmented by commercial flowers).  The next morning the icon of Jesus is removed from the cross and tenderly laid to rest in the “bed” prepared by the women.  Friday night the “epitaphio,” the coffin containing the icon and the table on which it rests, are carried through the streets before being returned to the church where Jesus is symbolically buried.  Many of my friends have told me that for them, Friday night is the most important part of the Easter rituals.  The resurrection of Jesus on Saturday night does not inspire, they say, the same depth of feeling.

The emotions run high during Easter week and by Thursday night it almost seems as if each of the women has lost her own beloved son.  This public display of emotion can seem excessive, and since I do not believe in the myth being reenacted, I have often found it so.  This year something prompted me to connect the women’s emotions to Aristotle’s famous insight that watching the performance of a Greek tragedy enabled the ancient Athenians to “purge pity and fear.”  Oh, I sighed, as the light dawned:  in reenacting the story of Jesus’s death, the Greek women are “purging” their own “pity and fear.”  The Easter pageant allows them to express any feelings of loss and disappointment they have suppressed or blocked from running their course.  Thus they not only cleanse their bodies by fasting, and clean their homes with hours of elbow grease, they also purge their souls of emotions that could impede them from entering fully into the renewal of spring.

I like to make these kinds of connections between Christian rituals and rituals of the pre-Christian past, because it helps me to understand that we who worship the Goddess in the twenty-first century can learn to adapt the rituals we have inherited from Christianity, Judaism, and the other religions that have shaped our individual and collective pasts.

During my twenty-two years of expatriate life, I was unaware of many stateside phenomena. Along with the emergence of Wal-Mart, Oprah and HMO’s I had missed the publication of Gloria Steinem’s Revolution From Within: A Book of Self Esteem.

In the little New England village where I now have a home there is an unassuming antique store that sells $1.00 second hand books. This outdoor stand is my ouiji board: I close my eyes and allow my hand to be guided to the right book for me. This is how I discovered Steinem’s “Revolution.” I hear that this book - which marks a break with Steinem’s activist past and encourages turning inward - did not meet with a favorable reception when it appeared in 1992.

As I look through it, I am astonished to come across Steinem’s own transformative experience using Ericksonian hypnosis, a favorite technique in which I am trained. In the book, Steinem explains that the social revolutionary must be nourished by an internal revolution of consciousness, if political action is to be sustained by integrity and wisdom. She and I are certainly on the same page.

Just this past weekend, I spent two days of a hypnosis intensive revisiting Self Relations: In a safe space, participants guide and are guided through inner journeys which revisit the Self’s past wounds, clarify present desires and discover creative resources. In this weekend’s training we had a look at two diagrams posted side by side, each containing a circle representing Self.

On the left side is the vulnerable child Self, she who has inevitably been bombarded by critical, undermining messages, against which, we all agree, children are born defenseless. These negative voices are dubbed “alien thought viruses” to emphasize both their external and self-propagating nature. The unwanted by-products of their invasion are a sense of inadequacy, disconnection and dis-ease.

On the right side of the blackboard, we see the grown-up Self and the good news is that she can now choose to substitute “sponsoring thoughts” for the debilitating viruses of childhood. When Steinem talks about restoring self-esteem, she is underscoring this very healing process. The result is a return to core states such as inner peace, love, general OKness, and oneness with all being.

To get from here to there we enjoy a hypnotic journey through time and inner space. Steinem writes of her own hypnotic journey and it is the very one I embark upon this weekend. After induction into a light trance state we invite the grown-up, sponsoring Self to travel back in time and visit the child Self. Adult Self now offers that little girl whatever resources or insights she needed and lacked in the past. The intention is to help her heal the dis-ease inflicted by the alien viruses. As Steinem puts it, “Somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, rebellious, creative, daydreaming, unique child – a true self who is waiting.”

We journey into the multi-layers of our own unconscious, to the core of all spiritual representation. We see how inextricably intertwined pain has been with intimacy, how the longing for love and radical vulnerability weave a single strand. Women have their own gender-based version of this encoding. A woman’s internal reality is early on invaded by alien images of a masculine God; the stain of Female ungodliness is not easy to dissolve.

During my journey, there is a fleeting moment of utter disbelieve in the Aliens. In a flash, all that we are and always have been shines unsullied.  I see Yahweh and his emissaries reduced to ranting egoists. This is a rewrite of internal programming on the most profound level.
(During this journey, I spontaneously shudder for some of the young women I know who’ve actually reversed their mothers’ journeys. While we struggled to free ourselves from alien patriarchy, some of our grown daughters have embraced it, but this is the subject of a separate blog.)
I share Steinem’s experience and knowing. We Are What We Are and always have been. We can manifest blessing from the scabs of a curse. Revolution from within the woman wellspring detonates deepest tremors and shatters barriers, both real and imagined.

                                    All things rising, all things sizing
                                    Mary sees, sympathizing
                                             With the world of good,
                                             Nature’s motherhood.

Those are probably the best known lines from the poem “The May Magnificat” by the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote it in the 1880s. He begins by wondering why the Virgin Mary is traditionally associated with the month of May. He concludes that spring’s grand fecundity – its “universal bliss” and “this ecstasy all through mother earth” – remind Mary, “the mighty mother,” of her own miraculous fecundity, her birthing of Christ. Even more, Hopkins adds, the glory of spring reminds Mary to exult in “God who was her salvation.”

Lovely. Really lovely. Of course, there are also other reasons why Mary is associated with May. I’ll just quote myself here, from Missing Mary (2004):

                       Previously, the Greeks had celebrated the goddess Artemis,
                       and the Romans the goddess Flora, in May, followed by centuries
                       of [early] medieval honoring of the pagan Queen of May.

Well, wouldn’t you know! Mary and May are yet another incidence of the Christian church’s occupation of a previously pagan site or event or association with a time of year.

The earliest record of Mary’s being associated with the month of May occurs in the thirteenth century, in Spain. Three books by Jesuits made the case in 1725, 1758, and 1785; the last was reprinted 150 times in the 19th century and several times in the 20th century. After that, it was Mary, the Queen of May all the way. Processions with her statue crowned by a wreath of flowers were elaborated into beautiful rituals in many Catholic cultures.

Whether May reminds you of the Goddess or Mary or both, it’s a glorious banquet for the senses. Again Hopkins:
                          Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
                          Grass and greenworld all together

Enjoy!