When I was a kid, Mary was everywhere. With the first or middle tag, each of my four sisters was named after her. As was the practice of Benedictines, each of my black-habited teachers at St. Mary of Celle School took her name: Sister Mary Fortunata, Sister Mary Armella, Sister Stephen Marie, Sister Mary Aquinas and Sister Mary Colettine.
We prayed to her with rosaries. Her statue stood on our stereo cabinet in the living room. We carried her image on holy cards.
With every May — named originally outside Christianity to honor, Maia, Greek goddess of fertility — came celebrations of the Blessed Mother. She was, and still is in the Church’s eyes, revered as the Mother of God and the Queen of Heaven.
Over the years, my own sense, along with the evolving sensibilities of many other men, shifted, with respect, to the “feminine.” Guided by Jungian psychology, a man’s interior, in addition to deep masculine archetypes, was understood to possess “feminine” traits: intuition, creativity, and an expanded emotional range. A man’s soul, “anima,” is feminine, and a woman’s soul is masculine, according to Jung. As I gradually paid more attention to this anima, she provided new meaning to my masculine self, reshaping what I wanted out of life, and how I understood the Divine.
In April of 1990, at age 37, engaged with the earth as a gardener and hiker and anticipating the onset of spring, I composed a couple of prayers that applied this new understanding of my inner self to my outer sense of the holy. Following the same rhythm and structure of the traditional “Our Father,” I wrote:
Our mother of all the earth
Sacred be your soil.
Your meadows burst,
Your wind alerts,
Our hands and feet to toil.
Give up to us this day our seeds,
And forgive us our neglectfulness,
As we forgive the negligence of others.
And lead us not into the night when your loam would reject what we sow.
For from your bosom spring the forests.
From your breast pour the rivers.
From your tongue leap the calls of wild things
And into your hands our leaves will fall … forever.
Amen
In the same vein, I wrote the feminine into a prayer that moved with a similar rhythm as that of the traditional Apostles’ Creed.
I believe in God, the Father, the Mother,
The almighty, the merciful,
The maker of Earth and the rest of the heavens …
Now at 70, I experience the world turning green with the outer spring once again. Deep into May once more, where is the Holy Mother in my journey now? Where is anima? How does her perspective inform my outer aging “he”?
Attributing divinity to Mary would still counter Church doctrine. But there is movement among some believers — based in part on feminine terms that were used by early Christians to describe the Holy Spirit — toward recognizing the third person of the trinity as She.
Whatever the case, in my inner church, fed and sustained by, but different from, the outer Church, there is a voice praying as I did through the above verses, and others that I’ve composed over the years. That voice speaks to a God who is masculine, feminine … and more.
When I was a kid, Mary was beautiful and revered, in her femininity a magnificent “other.” Boys were boys, men were men, girls were girls, and women were women. Priests were men, and in Catholicism, they still are. Nuns were women, and still are. Dads were in charge. Moms were second-in-command, at least in a formal sense.
But now, as I walk through Austin Gardens, May’s energy pulsates colorfully in and around the trees and along the pathways. My soul tells the older man I am, traversing this lovely public park, that Mary is alive in this place; a Mother’s energy percolates from the soil upward through the shells of the seeds and the softening roots that had lain dormant through the winter.
In a different and more profound sense than I had experienced as a boy, She is everywhere: below, above and within me.