Upload for Editor's Choice (HSS) - Queen of Heaven - Christianity

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Dear Jagbir,

 

Jagbir, could you please upload this material for 'Editor's Choice' at HSS.

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violet

 

 

 

Upload for HSS (Holy Spirit/Shekinah)

 

Queen of Heaven - Christianity

 

Hail! Queen of Heaven,

Hail! Lady of the Angels;

Salutation to Thee, root and portal,

Whence the Light of the world has arisen.

 

Although Mary is appealed to as Queen of Heaven, she seems to stand, as

intercessor between earth and heaven, for the connecting principle of life, for

the soul - for the feminine principle of relationship that connects all things

to each other, for the supreme values of the heart. She is the grail of

compassion and healing. She is the guardian of the sacredness of all life. When

the Virgin Mary appears in visions, as at Fatima and Medjugorje, it is to

children that she speaks. She speaks as if she were the voice of the Holy

Spirit, offering wisdom and warning, and the children who see her and hear her

voice, knowing nothing of what they ought or ought not to believe, respond

instinctively from the soul, implicitly trusting what she is saying to them. In

these messages, she does not ask for belief but for radical and total

transformation.

 

The full dimensions of the Virgin Mary are more easily understood if we look

beyond her to the luminous image of the Shekinah. In the Shekinah we are one

life, one radiance. So many numinous images that belonged to the Shekinah in the

Old Testament were transferred to Mary; reflection on Mary as intercessor

between God and humanity reveals the veiled form of the Shekinah as the feminine

face of God, the divine presence within all created life. Perhaps we may

recognize her in Mary's mother, St. Anne. The painters of the Renaissance show

Mary's womb penetrated by a ray of light from God in the way that the ray or

point of light from the source penetrated the " sea of glory " of the Shekinah's

womb.

 

Mary's name is derived from the Latin 'mare' - the sea - one of the most ancient

images of the waters of life, the great sea of being. Mary gradually reveals

herself to be the Prima Materia, the Root and Portal of Life, the Womb of

Creation, the Fountain, and the Rose Garden - images that also belonged to the

Shekinah. Like the Shekinah, she is the secret, hidden ground of the soul,

addressed as such by many Christian mystics, the conduit to the Divine. Many of

the images evoked in the great Orthodox Akathist hymn to Mary address her as

this ineffable ground; the height unattainable by human thought; the depth

invisible even to the eyes of angels; the womb of divine incarnation; the field

of the immortal crop; the planter of our life; the haven; the fount of love; the

inexhaustible treasure. Mary is the rose, the lily, and the Tree of Life from

which the faithful are fed - an image that evokes not only the Shekinah as the

image of the hidden wisdom that is the Tree of Life but also the goddesses Nut,

Hathor, and Isis giving the food and drink of eternal life to the souls of the

dead.

 

Wherever the association is made between love and divinity, between beauty and

harmony and divinity, between nourishment and divinity, or between compassion

and divinity, there stands the image of the Divine Feminine. All of these

images, read as describing the unfathomable ground of being that is also the

unfathomable ground of the human soul, bring Mary closer to us as the root and

foundation of our own lives. She feels closer to us than the transcendent God

who has been drawn more in the imagery of a remote father and stern judge than a

loving mother. The Virgin Mary is the compassionate, accessible face of the

Divine Feminine.

 

(The Divine Feminine - Andrew Harvey & Anne Baring - Conari Press - Berkeley,

CA)