'My soul doth magnify the Lord'Luke 1:46
A little while ago I had a lightning-bolt-out-of-the-sky moment of inspiration, that upon the path earmarked by 'Gnothi Seauton' (know thyself), that there might be a need, for some other people maybe, but definitely for myself, for some prayers grounded by a conception of Spiritual Motherhood for Priests.
The idea comes from a booklet kindly lent to myself by a Catholic priest - a copy is online here.
There are some beautiful stories in the booklet telling of both everyday people and of saints, and of the kinds of wisdom, and givingness, and simply love, that are humbly extended towards the men who have represented Christ in the priesthood, over the centuries. The booklet also paves the way for lay people to step into expanded leadership roles within the Church, distributing the Eucharist where priests cannot go or be, and acting as the firmament for the expression of the Divine as is suited to a particular place at a particular time.
When I started litmus paper testing the idea of these prayers amongst the wisdom of those I love and cherish, the response was, well, mostly lukewarm, with lashings of fiery anger (you're NOT a mother) to downright cold (why would I pray for them?)
I'm still sitting with the responses, but an edge on my drive to start unpacking the idea was found in tonight's Mass, The Feast for the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. If you've never encountered the Divine Feminine in a Catholic context can I gently urge if not usher you to attend this service next year. It's astounding.
And while Fr Duncan shared his private moment stories about pretending to be pregnant (a pillow in the front of the cassock, I kid you not) and would have us believe that he brandished umbrellas with fiesty nuns in the old days, there was a line in his homily that has stuck in my head - 'He, who was too great to be contained within the Universe, He, who is our peace and our salvation, He, She held him in her womb. She, indeed, is greater than all the Universe, Mary, Queen of Heaven'.
Sancta Maria est Janua coeli. Through Mary we must go in order to understand our Divinity, from Mary comes the human incarnation of our Divinity, she is the portal, she is the keyholder, she is Janus, looking forward and backward. (in the Novus Ordo, the Solemnity of Mary is held on January 1, see here.)
So, when She says in the scripture 'My soul doth magnify the Lord', there is something in me that holds very very still, for a moment, and listens. This speaks directly to me.
I've been railing against a model of spirituality that says that I have to break from my egoic ways of being, and stop trying to make the world move my way, and asserting my petty needs, and to get a bit of second-person perspective on the way to being more firmly grounded in the will of God, or the non-dual ever-present nothingness, whatever.
I rail because I sense that some of us (at least, me) never heard our own egoic voice first. There are some of us, for whom being overcome by the Holy Spirit, Mary's fiat, is about the most natural symbol of connectedness to Oneness that could ever have been downloaded into our grey matter. It's less about detaching from my egoic needs, and more about detaching from your egoic needs, just long enough to assert my own groundedness in my own presence, to hear that still small voice that is perhaps the acknowledgment of shared-trinity space (you, me and the Be-loved between us).
It's about stopping being driven, just for a sec, by such facts as Dan needs me to go and pick him up from the station, and I still haven't called Jules back and it's been a whole week now, oh, Andrea needs some time so we can go over the work that she's done, it sure is great work, and Laurence needs his shoelace tied...again....oh, hang on it's dinner time, and I still haven't had lunch yet, but has everyone else? Oh good, we're okay then.
Do you see where I'm going with this? (think: pathological communion). There's so much that is written about how to detach from all of my egoic attachments and truly become the Ruler That I Really Am, but very little about how I can compassionately stop, for a second looking at everyone else's needs, assert my own, but still stay firmly connected, because this very notion of connectedness is what grounds who I am. I don't want it reduced to co-dependence, I don't need to be told that I have attachment issues, and I'm not going to look at you with eyes of deep love if you tell me that leaving my needs to be determined by everyone elses needs is a cop out. My needs are intimately intertwined with everyone that I am blessed to call my closest. On a good day, this stretches to the whole of humanity. All sentient beings. Yep, all.
'My soul doth magnify the Lord' says to me that Mary is absolutely animated by the Divinity that she encounters in that attachment, that connection to another, and it is the highest experience of exaltation that she could dare subject her atoms to. She's absolutely enriched by His greatness, and is not diminished, but is absolutely affirmed, in that moment.
Oh yeah. I can relate to that.
I'm not afraid to make you into my momentary God.
What are you afraid of?
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