Dear Friends,
The Black Madonna is the ancient feminine face of God, Christian and pre Christian, including the Earth Goddesses and the Egyptian goddess Isis. For some of us she is the tender mother Jesus our Mother, as Julian of Norwich, (her feast day was May 8th) in the Middle Ages called Jesus. She is also the Holy Mama, Mary our Mother, the Mother symbol of all the world religions, for she is everyone's merciful Mother and she loves all her children, the oppressed and the oppressors. She is our universal mother. She is talking to us this Mother's Day morning with urgency. Do you hear her? Are you dreaming of her and/or are you having synchronistic experiences or intuitions and gut feelings of God trying to embolden you to love in radical new ways? The lectionary reading today is from the Gospel of John Chapter 10:27-30 Jesus tells us that his sheep hear his voice and they follow him and that no one can snatch them away from him and no one can snatch us away from the Black Madonna for the Black Madonna and Jesus are one.
We have recently been instructed by the United Nations that we have only twelve more years to change climate change before it is too late and that over one million plants and animals are going extinct. These words from scientists are another version of her voice crying out in pain to stop hurting her and that she is sick. Please read my chapter "At the Bedside of Mother Earth" on our church website. There is nothing like a crisis to bring families together. May the sickness of our Mother Earth bring us together as a human family like never before!
She is inside you and me and all creatures and she is the earth and she is the dark of the vast cosmos. We live in her body, we live in the earth's body, and we lived before we were born in our Mother's body. I added the photo of the earth taken from outer space to this icon above many years ago and now it is the holy icon for Church for Our Common Home, a non traditional church dedicated to the earth, the divine feminine and the arts. She is the Earth who gives us our home, our food, our air, volcanos and fire, oceans and mountains and all creatures to love us and to be loved by us. When we are not in awe of God, called by many names we are a sorry group of humans.
As we give thanks today for our Mothers who we lived inside of and who gave us birth and to the earth our common home, let us also give thanks to God the Mother of all for we live inside her body.
God I am calling the Black Madonna today gave me several signs for Mother Day that I want to share with you in the hopes that you will reflect on what signs she is gifting you with today. We are working on getting our weekly worship up on live stream more reliably this month, so hopefully you will be able to join us for worship every Sunday at 5 pm (PST) on our church website and we look forward to hearing from you.
This morning I received a response to an email I sent to Margaret Starbird, the brilliant and brave woman who wrote many divinely inspired books about Mary Magdalene, the forgotten and lost bride of Jesus, Christianity and western civilization. Many of us consider Mary Magdalene to be another form of the Black Madonna. Starbirds book, Women with the Alabaster Jar was the book Dan Brown "borrowed?" to write The Da Vinci Code. Here is an interview with her on our church web site.
Last week we offered a worship about gematria and the symbolism of numbers and studied Starbirds reflections on the 153 and Mary Magdalene. Praying under the tree in front of my house last week I noticed for the first time that the number of our house church is 13014 Calle De Las Rosas or the Street of the Roses. Although this is not 153, it is a form of 135 and in music the 153 or 135 is the basic chord of vibration and making music.
Yesterday, I received a group email from Matthew Fox inviting all of us to be apart of a new project to receive daily meditations about the Divine Feminine to begin today Mother's day. To sign up go to, www.DailyMeditationsWithMatthewFox.Org
Reading the email I noticed that Alessandra Belloni has written a new book on the Black Madonna, Healing Journeys with the Black Madonna which looks like a book sharing similar experiences to many of us about the Black Madonna and one may of us will enjoy reading.
My dream yesterday was that I am sitting on my red couch where I pray in the early morning, and out the window right next to my altar to the Black Madonna, something small was flying toward me fast in the dark night sky and as it got closer and bigger I could see that it was a large black appliance of some kind I could not make out and it was being flown by a red fox in an uniform. When it landed outside the window the fox quickly walked to my front door and knocked. I called out in fear and woke up. I looked up what appliance means and it is, "a device or piece of equipment designed to perform a specific task, typically a domestic one.....or the action or process of bringing something into operation." A fox is an animal whose home or den is called an "earth" and because of its ability to "transgress boundaries and has made it one of the most successful survivors on the planet." the fox is allowed "to be everywhere at once and nowhere at all" and the fox has super hearing abilities and can hear things far and wide from the earth. "...just as the fox-guide's subterranean knowledge (that) led the North American and Siberian shamans through paths not open or visible to humans. Thus if we approach the ubiquitous, mercurial fox--like the unconscious-- on its own terms, it may guide us through the transformational spaces between oppositional states of being......between unconventional, intuitive intelligence and collective social norms, and between animal human and spirit worlds, both beneficent and demonic--in the service of wholeness."(The Book of Symbols edited by Ronnberg and Martin)
Yesterday I heard a woman I do not know share about the feminine face of God at a 12 step meeting. This is rare.
So this Mother's Day I am committed to hearing her voice and listening to heartbeat that is the earth's heartbeat, to seeing her in the dark night of dreams and visions, to loving her in every person and creature I am blessed to be alive with today. I want to hear from you and your experiences of the Black Madonna, the feminine face of God calling you into healing and catapulting you to dedicate your life to the earth crisis we have created and we care called to solve for all of her creatures here on our common home Mother Earth.
I offer you a prayer and according to my dream our prayers are an appliance or process of bringing something into action. This Mothers Day I recommit to my prayer life for God needs our prayers of thanksgiving and love and we need to be in holy relationship with God to work to heal our planet and ourselves.
Dear Holy One, you who are the Black Madonna, ancient virgin, dark earth source, holy presence, refresh our hearts, you who hold the universe also live inside us. Heal our wounds, and reawaken our spirits and push us again into the light, sustain us in mystery, push us out into life and grant us new birth. Breath in us, breath with us, let your light shine for us, with us, in us, Black Madonna, ancient virgin, holy presence. Amen
(Poem/prayer offered at Seizing an Alternative Ecology conference 2015, at the Anima Mundi track)
We will dance to the Contours "Do you Love Me? Now that I can Dance" today for our Mother's Day worship for we need the energy of love and dancing for the journey. Please join us!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EoI-6lQFIE
Please contact us if you would like to be on our prayer list.
Love and blessings,
Bonnie
"Civilization of Love" by artist Linda Miroslava Sabbath