(With deep appreciation and indebtedness to Rumi, Hafiz, Julian and all the utterly besotted heretics, drunk on Divinity.)
In the deep dark places, in the sacred secret places, all things were knit together, their molecules joined, the rules of their lives set, and out into the cold wild joy of existence they were born; and loved, and set free.
“who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb?”
The hands of a Mother, gentle, guiding, letting go. I don’t know how she got lost, we knew her once, we carved crude figures, beautiful in their simplicity, trying to express what we felt deep in the heart of our souls, down in the dark of our bones. The Divine. One who created and nurtured. How easily we forget, the mess of creation, the blood and tears, the intimacy of vulnerable love.
My Mary took more into herself than seed, she took into her own being, willingly, Ancient of Days; became again Holy Womb, full of everything that ever was, or is, or will be. Pregnant with a whole creation, Mother of All, while all unknowing Her children went on around Her. She put her hand on her growing belly and felt stars kick, and galaxies turn, and time expand and contract with giddy joy.
From Her womb came Life, the brightness of a whole new creation: possible in pain, and blood, and tears. Creation has never been easy, safe, sanitary. Creation rips from the Body of the Holy new possibility, makes space that is Not so that another can Be. How has this thought become so revolutionary, so hard to grasp, so heretical?
How did the One who gave birth to everything become twisted into one who would destroy her creation out of pique, kill her own child out of anger. How broken we must have become for us to believe our own worst moments might encapsulate Holy.
If you want redemption don’t look to the striking fist, the spear thrust through Beloved flesh look to life, giving of itself, to make newness. Look for birth (of many things, not just babies) and you will find your redemption, creation, salvation in the blood spent willingly for a chance to start again soft and new and helpless. Nursed at a breast like cloud topped mountain, pouring forth life from Her very being.
But perhaps, just perhaps there is the key, the unbearable sweetness of being born of God, of having swum in Her creative waters, of having nursed beside galaxies each in our infancy on her life giving milk how terrifying that each human foot falling to earth might bear still a little of that Divine light, that each of us (and earth, foxes, oaks too) might be milk siblings, weaned from that same sweet goodness, filled with it. That our blood, the rising maple sap might share the same holy brightness.
Might not we need to tread more softly, might we not be caught up at any moment in awe as we come around the corner in the grocery store and there between the spinach and the clearance bananas is the shining face of God’s daughter; between two slabs of concrete the scraggly golden-lion face of the son she bounced on her celestial knee?
And so it is easier, safer, to wrap up Divinity in Patriarchy, to strip Holy Love of her fierce and fiery nearness, to crown God(ess) a him and let him be King so he will not be Mother, Womb, the beginning of all things; and the end, closing our eyes with the same gentle hands that calmed our colic.
Oh sweet brothers, passionate burning sisters, awe cloaked siblings, can’t you see how God came down and gave birth to us all over again, because once was not enough and She will do it again if she must because we are worth the blood, and the pain, and the tears. You are worth the blood, and the pain, and the tears; milk still shining on your beloved chin.Â
