U/L (HSS): Mary stands at the heart of Christian mystical experience

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Mary stands at the heart of Christian mystical experience

 

Whereas, in Christian belief, the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God as incarnated

in Christ, the older goddesses were the Mother of Life. They were the divine

ground manifest as the life of the whole creation. The Black Virgin reflects the

same total vision. But although the cult of the Black Virgin is intrinsically

linked to the cult of Mary as the Seat of Wisdom, there is a contradiction

implicit in these two images. In Christian culture, the fear of instinct and the

belief in original sin have progressively split off nature from spirit. Because

of this the image of Mary lacks the deeper dimension of instinct that belongs to

the older goddeses. Instinct is placed " beyond the pale " , associated with the

sin of Eve. Mary's own Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth of her son

place her outside nature. She is below heaven and above nature. This is,

perhaps, Christianity's greatest problem: how to include nature and everything

pertaining to it in the realm of the Divine, how to recognize the immanence as

well as the transcendence of the Divine. The idea that wisdom, once intrinsic to

the goddess as the Mother of Life, comes from within nature, and is intrinsic to

the life process itself, which is itself within the totality of God, is not

easily experienced in relation to Mary except perhaps when we stand in the

presence of those masterpieces created by medieval craftsmen and respond to the

profound mystery they communicate.

 

Mary stands at the heart of Christian mystical experience, as did Demeter in

Greece and Isis in Egypt, and the Shekinah in the Jewish mystical tradition. She

is the mystery sought or stumbled upon in rapture by those who have opened their

hearts to the transforming power of her love. Some of the greatest of the

Christian mystics, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Meister Eckhart, St. Thomas

Aquinas, St. John of the Cross, have all penetrated to this secret heart of the

Christian vision. And they have experienced Mary as the mystical core of their

being in the image of their own soul awakening to the hidden revelation it

carries. As Angelus Silesius wrote, " I must become Mary and give birth to God. "

Meister Eckhart spoke often of the greatest Christian mystery - the birthing of

Christ within the soul.

 

The image of the sacred marriage, implicit in the beautiful portrayals of the

Coronation of the Virgin Mary by her Son, Christ, reunites the long estranged

aspects of the godhead. They sit side by side, united by the same starry robe,

each glorifying the other. The image given is of a marriage between the Virgin

Mary and Christ who, by his gesture of crowning her, welcomes her as Queen of

Heaven and his bride. In these glorified beings, woman and man are shown as the

mystery they are and as the enlightened beings they could become. In earlier

cultures, such an image would have signified the sacred marriage between sun and

moon or between heaven and earth, goddess and god. This sacred marriage is

between the two aspects of the Divine, the Queen and King of Heaven. The exiled

Shekinah is reunited with her spouse in the bridal chamber at the radiant heart

of life. The evolutionary journey of the soul has been completed. She has

returned home to be welcomed into the divine ground.

 

The Divine Feminine

Andrew Harvey & Anne Baring - Conari Press

Berkeley, CA

ISBN 1-57324-035-4 (hardcover)

Pgs. 108, 111-12