Category Archives: John O’donohue

John O'donohue

The Great Wound

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“Death is the great wound in the universe and the great wound in each life. Yet, ironically, this is the very wound that can lead to new spiritual growth. Thinking of your death…. you begin to refine your sensibility and become aware of the treasures that are hidden in the invisible side of your life…. These treasures are yours; no one else can ever take them from you.”    (John O’Donohue Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, HarperCollins, USA, 1997)

These two years of pandemic have schooled us in the great wound of death, first generally as numbers of those dying were being reported, then more particularly as people we knew suffered losses among their families and friends, as we ourselves heard of friends with COVID.

Some recovered, some did not.

In a culture that would rather push away thoughts of death, we found ourselves during COVID often deprived even of the minimized rituals of wakes, of funerals. Over these two years, when a death of someone we loved touched us closely either from COVID or from any other cause, we found ourselves left on our own, without knowing how to grieve.

The death of a beloved friend in recent days overturned what I thought I understood of grief and loss, of hope and love. Seeking a way to integrate this new experience, I opened Anam Cara. I share with you what I found in John O’Donohue’s writings on “the great wound.”

Imagine if you could talk to a baby in the womb and explain its unity with the mother. How this cord of belonging gives if life. If you could then tell the baby that this was about to end. It was going to be expelled from the womb, pushed through a very narrow passage, finally to be dropped out into vacant, open light. The cord that held it to this mother-womb was going to be cut, and it was going to be on its own forever more. If the baby could talk back, it would fear that it was going to die. For the baby within the womb, being born would seem like death.

 O’Donohue adds that the difficulty for us regarding death is that, like the baby in the womb, we only experience one side of the great happening. “…death is about rebirth. The soul is now free in a new world where there is no more separation or shadow or tears.”

Separation. Shadow. Tears. Yes. Yet O’Donohue writes compellingly of “the mystical wonder of our lives.”

It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here…. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free. 

And yet, there is a lonely side to our embodiment. When you live in a body you are separate from every other object and person ….At death this physical separation is broken. The soul is released from its particular and exclusive location in this body. The soul then comes into a free and fluent universe of spiritual belonging,

Set free by death from the bonds of space and time, “the soul is free; distance and separation hinder it no more.”

And here is the place where my reading of Anam Cara began to awaken me to a new kind of hope:

The dead are our nearest neighbours; they are all around us. Meister Eckhart was once asked, Where does the soul of a person go when a person dies? He said, no place. Where else would the soul be going? Where else is the eternal world? It can be nowhere other than here.

O’Donohue reflects further: This suggests that the dead are here with us, in the air that we are moving through all the time. The only difference between us and the dead is that they are now in an invisible form. You cannot see them with the human eye. But you can sense the presence of those you love who have died. With the refinement of your soul, you can sense them. You feel that they are near.

Writing in the 1990’s with the opening up of Quantum Science, O’Donohue was looking ahead to future possibilities:

One of the exciting developments that may happen in evolution and in human consciousness in the next several hundred years is a whole new relationship with the invisible, eternal world. We do not need to grieve for the dead….They are now in a place where there is no more shadow, darkness, loneliness, isolation, or pain. They are home. They are with God from whom they came. They have returned to the nest of their identity within the great circle of God….the largest embrace in the universe, which holds visible and invisible, temporal and eternal, as one.

Catherine Doherty, John O'donohue, Julian of Norwich

Sophia and the Rhythm of Your Heart

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Statue of the Madonna of Combermere

In conversation with friends, in listening to commentary from radio hosts, in online messages from a few wise teachers, I notice a recurring theme in these February days: fatigue. Not the welcome weariness that follows a time of satisfying work; this is something deeper, more subtle, more pervasive: a weariness of heart.

No need to seek its causes. These are evident in our daily news broadcasts: we are weary of COVID, weary of our valiant efforts to contain it, weary of the angry voices, the blaring horns, the disruptive actions of those who refuse to wait for the right time to lift mandates meant to hasten the end of the pandemic.

Where might we find ways to counter this soul-deep weariness?

Yesterday, driving to the nearby town of Arnprior, I crossed a bridge that spans a wide expanse of the Madawaska River just before it joins the Ottawa River.  All at once, inexplicably, I felt a sense of joy rise in my heart. I had been thinking, as I often do, of a woman I met only once several decades ago on the shores of this same river some sixty kilometres upstream. My brief meeting with Catherine Doherty had a profound effect on my life.

Catherine Doherty, Founder of Madonna House

A White Russian, a Baroness, who escaped the Russian Revolution, Catherine came to Canada, travelled to the US to work for a time with Dorothy Day in Harlem before returning to Canada with her second husband, an Irish-American journalist named Eddie Doherty. They obtained a piece of wooded land on the Madawaska River where they formed a lay community of vowed men and women, the first of its kind, at the request of, with the blessing of Pope Pius XII. Catherine and Eddy dedicated their lives to the Madonna, naming their Community in Her honour.

As a young journalist I drove the two hour journey from Ottawa to Madonna House to interview Catherine for the newspaper of the Ottawa Archdiocese. Catherine was a widow by then, still grieving the loss of her great love, Eddie, and nearing the end of her life. Confident that I’d prepared carefully for the interview with three intelligent (in my own estimation!) questions about living the Gospel “in changing times”, I was not prepared for the fire of her presence.

 Catherine barked: “The Gospel doesn’t change. ‘Go sell what you have and give the money to the poor and come follow Me’” After that she refused to answer any other questions. As I was leaving, Catherine  looked at me steadily: “You’re living in your head. One day it will fall into your heart, and then the walls will come tumbling down! Then I’d like to interview you !”

One day it happened, just as Catherine had predicted, though by then it was too late to return to Madonna House to be interviewed by her.

Today I still feel the lifting of the heart from that moment yesterday. Was it the memory or was it the River itself connecting me with Catherine’s spirit. I’ve come to know her through the experience of portraying her in A Woman in Love with a script written by Cynthia Donnelly a member of the Madonna House Community. 

At sunset I was driving home with the Madawaska River flowing by on the left side of highway. Where the river expands to form Calabogie Lake I glanced at the sky to see the tenderest shades of pink filling the clouds that hovered above the frozen snow-covered water.  For the second time that day I felt joy filling me like wind in my sails.

In James Janda’s play Julian, that great fourteenth century mystic, Julian of Norwich, speaks these words:  “We have suffered in the midst of beauty.”

Sunset over Glastonbury Tor

I’ll close these thoughts with words of John O’Donohue that might have been written for us today:

FOR ONE WHO IS EXHAUSTED, A BLESSING

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight.

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laboursome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken in the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time

Catherine, Julian and John. Three mystics and three sources of beauty: river, sky, snowclad earth. That may be all we need to see us through to the other side of the pandemic.

Advent, Christmas Rebirth, Jean Houston, John O'donohue, Journey to Greece, Meeting Mary on Paros Island

Becoming Wild Inside

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On the Greek island of Paros, we come upon a magnificent Church, built by Constantine to fufill a promise made by his mother Helena. 

The Church of Panagia Ekatontapyliani (Our Lady of a Hundred Doors) is the oldest remaining Byzantine church in Greece

In 326, St. Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine the Great, sailed for the Holy Land to find the True Cross. Stopping on Paros, she had a vision of success and vowed to build a church there. She founded it but died before it was built. Her son built the church in 328 as a wooden-roof basilica.

Two centuries later, Justinian the Great, who ruled the Byzantine Empire from 527 to 565, had the church splendidly rebuilt with a dome. The emperor appointed Isidorus, one of the two architects of Constantinople’s famed Hagia Sophia, to design it.

Inside we come upon two large, luminous icons of Mary. Affixed to the lower frame of the icons we see images made of gold and silver in shapes depicting eyes, legs, arms….. Our guide, Calliope, tells us that these are offerings given in thanksgiving for a healing. Kapi reminds us that we saw something similar in the Museum: plaster representations of an arm or a leg that was healed, offered in thanksgiving to the healer god Asclepius.

 The dogmas change; the traditions go on, our guide Kapi comments, revealing yet another way in which Greek spirituality is part of a continuum from ancient days. Where once the Greeks sought healing from Asclepius, they now turn to Mary in their need.

On this beautiful island in the Aegean, the mystery of Mary of Nazareth confronts us. A woman wrapped in silence, the one who waits in the shadow for the great birthing, who “ponders in her heart” the wonders that follow upon the coming of her child.

 As we prepare to celebrate the Birth of Jesus, the One whose coming brings Light at the darkest time of the year, Mary is a companion, a guide, a friend who walks with us in the darkness.

 Mary has left us no written word. The little we know of her from the Gospels is sketchy at best, her appearances brief, her words cryptic. Yet her influence on Christian spirituality is staggering in its power.

Who is this woman, and how has she risen from a quiet life in the outposts of the Roman Empire to become, as the Church proclaims her, “Queen of Heaven and Earth”?

 When we first meet Mary in the Gospels, she is being offered an invitation.

Here is how the Irish poet John O’Donohue imagines the scene:

Cast from afar before the stones were born

And rain had rinsed the darkness for colour,

The words have waited for the hunger in her

To become the silence where they could form.

The day’s last light frames her by the window,

A young woman with distance in her gaze,

She could never imagine the surprise

That is hovering over her life now.

The sentence awakens like a raven,

Fluttering and dark, opening her heart

To nest the voice that first whispered the earth

From dream into wind, stone, sky and ocean.

She offers to mother the shadow’s child;

Her untouched life becoming wild inside.

Where does our story touch Mary’s? Where are the meeting points? What are the words waiting for the hunger in us “to become the silence where they could form”? This might be a question to ask in our daily contemplative time… when our hearts open, will they also become a nest for a new birthing of the Holy?

 From Jean Houston, we have learned that there’s no time left for us to refuse any call that smacks of greatness. The urgent needs of our time require a “yes” to the conception, followed by the birthing, of newness. Here are Jean’s words, reflecting upon the call of Mary, the call of each of us:

 Just think of the promise, the potential, the divinity in you, which you have probably disowned over and over again because it wasn’t logical, because it didn’t jibe, because it was terribly inconvenient (it always is), because it didn’t fit conventional reality, because… because… because….

 What could be more embarrassing than finding yourself pregnant with the Holy Spirit? It’s a very eccentric, inconvenient thing to have happen.

(Jean Houston in Godseed p. 38)

Eccentric. Inconvenient. Perhaps. But nonetheless it is our call. Mary’s story gives us the courage to say “yes” without knowing where that “yes” may lead. It is enough to know that certainly our own life will become, like Mary’s, “wild inside”.

Jean Houston, John O'donohue, Journey to Greece, Mary Mother of Jesus, Meeting Mary on Paros Island

The Greek journey: seven

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On our last morning on Paros, in the time before the ferry departed, I was walking in the town, disappointed to find that the shops were not yet open… on one narrow street I saw a small building with an open doorway.

I walked inside, found a tiny darkened chapel with lighted red lamps near Icons. On the right wall an Icon of Mary drew me.

Icon of Mary in a Chapel on Paros Island , Greece

I stood spellbound. I felt invited to rededicate my life to the Sacred Feminine…..I recited Rilke’s poem that seems to be spoken by Her:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

Go to the limits of your longing

Embody me

Flare up like flame

And make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose Me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give Me your hand.

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

Still, I could not go. I kept gazing at the Icon. Then I saw the Child in Mary’s arms.

Suddenly the “Sealskin, Soulskin” story in C.P. Estes’ book Women Who Run with the Wolves came to me.

I recalled the teaching that when a woman has found her soul, it is her spirit (her son) that she sends to do her work in the world.

I recalled the words that the Sealwoman spoke to her son as she placed him on the shore in the moonlight, “Only touch what I have touched and I shall breathe into your lungs a wind for the singing of your songs.”

I felt that the Sacred Feminine was promising me the same, as well as inviting me to send my spirit – my work — into the world.  

In the five years since that encounter, my understanding about what my work is has grown and deepened within the small circle that encompasses my life. The Year 2020 has called me beyond that space.

With you, I have come to see the expanded reality where so much more is being asked of us. Now, fifteen years after I first heard Jean Houston describe the calling of our time, I understand this is not about some future urgency. It’s now.

Here are Jean’s words: 

Throughout history and all over the world, people have felt a yearning to be more, a longing to push the membrane of the possible. Never so much more as those living today. People feel called to a life of new being. Much of the urgency that you may have felt these last years, moving between stress and distress, the sense of living in an outmoded condition, the exhilaration before what is not yet, the dread of leaving the womb of the old era – comes from the birth pangs of a human and social evolution that is upon us.

Birth is a journey. Second birth is as great a journey. In the womb of new becoming it means laying down new pathways in the body and in the senses to take in the news of this remarkable world. It means extending the field of your psychology so that there is more of you to do so much of this. It demands that you choose a richer, juicier story, even a new myth, by which to comprehend your life and that you begin to live out of it. And, most important of all, it asks that you be sourced and re-sourced in God, spirit, the cosmic mind, the quantum field, – the love that moves the sun and all of the stars. (Jean Houston)

For this new story, this new myth, we may look to Mary, Mother of Jesus, as an Archetype. Mary will guide us into this entirely new time. Mary, called from a quiet life in a small village to become the mother of a child who would change history by rebirthing all we understand of Love.

That is our calling: to birth, to rebirth life on our planet, to be willing, as Mary was willing, to endure the birth pangs of a human and social evolution that is upon us.

Once more, I turn to John O’Donohue to guide our entry into Mary’s experience. Here is his poem, “Nativity”:

No man reaches where the moon touches a woman.

Even the moon leaves her when she opens

Deeper into the ripple in her womb

That encircles dark to become flesh and bone.

Someone is coming ashore inside her.

A face deciphers itself from water

And she curves around the gathering wave,

Opening to offer the life it craves.

In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers,

She falls and heaves, holding a tide of tears.

A red wire of pain feeds through every vein

Until night unweaves and the child reaches dawn.

Outside each other now, she sees him first.

Flesh of her flesh, her dreamt son safe on earth.

John O’Donohue (from Connemara Blues Doubleday, Great Britain, 2000)

Isis and Osiris, Jean Houston, John O'donohue, The Easter Mystery

Sophia and the Paschal Mystery

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Through scragged bush the moon discovers his face,

Dazed inside the sound of Gethsemane,

Subsiding under the weight of silence

That entombs the cry of his terrified prayer.

What light could endure the dark he entered?

The void that turns the mind into a ruin

Haunted by the tattered screeching of birds

Who nest deep in hunger that mocks all care.

Still he somehow stands in that nothingness;

Raising the chalice of kindness to bless.

(John O’Donohue “The Agony in the Garden”)

We are now in the sacred weeks when Christians re-enter the life-death-life mystery that leads to the Celebration of Easter.

This year, as COVID 19 makes its silent way through the countries of earth, we are entering a planetary passion play.

We know at a depth never before imagined that this mystery is at the heart of the universe, at the heart of life on our planet, in the deep heart of our own lives.

From its birth out of the womb of a dying star, through its daily cycle of day/dusk/ night/dawn, its yearly cycle of summer/autumn/ winter/spring, the earth teaches us to live within the paschal mystery.

Ancient peoples understood this. They wove their understanding of life/death/life into their mythologies: the Egyptian story of Osiris, whose severed body was put together piece by piece by his wife Isis, then reawakened allowing her to conceive their son Horus.

The Sumerians tell of the great queen Inanna who descended to the underworld to visit her sister Ereshkigal. There she was stripped of her royal robes and insignia, murdered by her sister, who then hung her lifeless body on a hook. Three days later, Inanna was restored to life, all her honour returned to her.

Demeter calls forth her daughter Persephone from the kingdom of the dead; Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysius return to life after being destroyed.

The people of Jesus’ time would have known these and other great myths of the Ancient Near East. Jean Houston tells us in Godseed (Quest Books, 1992): “In the Greco-Roman world, these acts of resurrection were celebrated in the Mystery Religions. These ecstatic forms of piety involved dramatic, highly-ritualized inward journeys of anguish, grief, loss, resurrection, redemption, joy and ecstasy.

The Mystery Religions provided alienated individuals lost in the nameless masses of the Roman Empire with an intimate environment and community of the saved, in which they counted as real persons and found a deeper identity.

Identifying with the God-man or the Goddess-woman of the mystery cult, the initiate died to the old self and was resurrected to personal transfiguration and eternal life.” (125-6)

What was so stunningly different in the Jesus story was that the mystery of life-death-life was incarnated in a historical person. The Resurrection of Jesus is at the heart of the Christian faith. As Paul wrote, “If Christ be not risen then our faith is in vain.”

In our lifetime, the explosion of new science shows us the life/death/mystery at the heart of the universe.

Like exploding stars, our lives are continuously being rebirthed into a deeper more joyous existence.

By allowing the death within ourselves of old habits, old mindsets and narrow ideas of who or what we may be, we open ourselves to the possibility of new life being birthed within us.

As Jesus told his friends, “You will do what I do. You will do even greater things”.

“Resurrection is about being pulsed into new patterns appropriate to our new time and place,” Jean Houston writes in Godseed.

For this to happen, we need to open in our deep core to “the Heart of existence and the Love that knows no limits. It is to allow for the Glory of Love to have its way with us, to encounter and surrender to That which is forever seeking us, and from this to conceive the Godseed”.

“The need for resurrection has increased in our time,” Jean continues. “We are living at the very edge of history, at a time when the whole planet is heading toward a global passion play, a planetary crucifixion.”

Yet “the longing with which we yearn for God is the same longing with which God yearns for us….the strength of that mutual longing can give us the evolutionary passion to roll away the stone, the stumbling blocks that keep us sealed away and dead to the renewal of life”. (Godseed pp.129-130)

The yearly miracle of spring awakens within us the confidence and joy that this same rebirth is ours to accept and to live.

The timing of the COVID 19 crisis  just as spring is about to begin in the Northern Hemisphere offers hope that we too may green our lives, our times, our planet:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age (Dylan Thomas)

Something to ponder in the presence of Sophia/ Wisdom:

Where in my life do I most experience the need for a rebirth?

What old habits and beliefs would I have to let die in order for this new life to be born?

What attitudes, behaviours, surprising newness have I noticed within and around me since the COVID 19 crisis arrived?  

How does knowing that the longing with which (I) yearn for God is the same longing with which God yearns for (me) make my life more joyful?

What would a resurrected life look like, feel like, for me? for those with whom my life is woven? for our planet?

May Sophia, the feminine presence of Sacred Wisdom, gently guide us as we, like Jesus, “stand in that nothingness … raising the chalice of kindness to bless” through this health crisis, through the death of what no longer serves us, personally and as a planet, into the joy of the rebirth for which our hearts yearn.

Archetypes as Companions for our Lives, Jean Houston, John O'donohue, Mary Mother of Jesus

Sophia and Mary of Nazareth

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I write this on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 2020 at a time when each of us is being called into a new planet-wide reality, invited to give our love, our trust, our assistance, our presence, (our respectful absence!) in a crisis unlike any we have experienced.

In this moment, we, like Mary of Nazareth, may feel astonished.

May we respond with the courage Mary showed to a request beyond anything she might have imagined.

Today, I travel back in time to my first encounter with Mary. I remember a day when I was perhaps eleven years old. Each afternoon, walking home from school, I passed our parish church. On this day, I was drawn to go inside.

I remember glancing at the marble statue of Mary, standing to the left side of the altar.

Her stone pale white face was shuttered, her eyes downcast. The statue radiated coldness. Though I did not understand what her title of “Virgin” signified, I associated the word with an absence of what I longed for most in my life: warmth, caring, love.

I turned my gaze away from the statue, noticed a small booklet on the bench where I was sitting. It contained the Scripture readings for the Sundays of each month, with reflections. On the inside front cover, someone had written of Mary, creatively presenting ideas in the form of a letter as though it had been written by her.I have now no memory of the letter’s content. Perhaps I did not even read it. I was transfixed by the words at the end, “Your Loving Mother Mary.”

 In that instant, my life shifted. A loving presence entered into my existence and has never left me.

As Jean Houston has written, “Whenever they move into our awareness, both personally and collectively, archetypes and the old and new stories that they bring with them announce a time of change and deepening.”

To grasp the true significance of Mary as Archetype, come with me now to the tiny sanctuary dedicated to Isis on the Island of Philae in the Nile River.

Crowded into a space never meant for a group as large as ours, stand here with the other travellers on this spiritual journey to Egypt, led by Jean Houston. Listen now to the words Jean is reading from the writings of Apuleius, a second century Roman, not a Christian. In the story, a hapless magician named Lucius has cried out to the goddess for help. Isis responds.

The way the Sacred One identifies herself to Lucius may startle you:  I, the natural mother of all life, the mistress of the elements, the first child of time, the supreme divinity…. I, whose single godhead is venerated all over the earth under manifold forms, varying rites, and changing names…

 Behold, I am come to you in your calamity. I am come with solace and aid. Away then with tears. Cease to moan. Send sorrow packing.

Soon through my providence shall the sun of your salvation rise. Hearken therefore with care unto what I bid.

Eternal religion has dedicated to me the day which will be born from the womb of this present darkness.

After the reading, listen as someone suggests that we call out all the names by which we have known the Sacred Feminine.

Listen as voice after voice calls out wonderful names. Many of these names are familiar to you, titles you may have learned as a child. We knew them as part of a litany, composed in honour of Mary. Yet many of these titles were given thousands of years earlier to Isis:

Mystical Rose. Tower of Ivory.  Gate of Heaven. My own voice calls out: Star of the Sea. Jean’s voice, strong, certain, proclaims: Mary in all her forms.

The human heart longs for a divine mothering presence. Ancient cultures honoured a feminine divine who over millennia was called by many names: Isis in Egypt; Inanna in Sumeria; Ishtar in Babylon; Athena, Hera and Demeter in Greece; Anu or Danu among the ancient Celts; Durga, Kali and Lakshmi in India; for the Kabbalists, Shekinah; for the gnostics, Sophia or Divine Wisdom.

In the early centuries of Christianity, Mary of Nazareth became an Archetype of a Loving Mother. How that came about is a luminous story.

Christianity had no “Mother God” to put in the place of the Goddesses whose worship it was determined to eradicate. In his book The Virgin, Geoffrey Ashe writes of his theory that Mary’s gradual ascension in Christianity was not an initiative of Church Leadership, but rather a response to the hunger of the early Christians for a sacred feminine presence.

Mary became for Christianity a portal for that sacred presence. Or, put another way, a sacred presence responded to the cries of her people when they called her “Mary”, just as that presence had responded over the millennia to other names cried out in love or sorrow or desperate need.

And yet, and still, before any of that happened, Mary, a young woman living in Nazareth, a town despised in Israel, was already a luminous presence who made a choice to say “yes” to a call that held mystery, uncertainty, unimaginable risk, a call to mother a child with a love that would ask of her everything.

When we first meet Mary in the Gospels, she is being offered that invitation.

Here is how Irish poet John O’Donohue imagines the scene:

Cast from afar before the stones were born

And rain had rinsed the darkness for colour,

The words have waited for the hunger in her

To become the silence where they could form.

The day’s last light frames her by the window,

A young woman with distance in her gaze,

She could never imagine the surprise

That is hovering over her life now.

 

The sentence awakens like a raven,

Fluttering and dark, opening her heart

To nest the voice that first whispered the earth

From dream into wind, stone, sky and ocean.

 

She offers to mother the shadow’s child;

Her untouched life becoming wild inside.

Where does our story touch Mary’s? Where are the meeting points? What are the words waiting for the hunger in us “to become the silence where they could form”? When our hearts open, will they also become a nest for a new birthing of the Holy?

The urgent needs of our time require a “yes” to the conception, followed by the birthing, of new life.

Mary’s story gives us the courage to say “yes” without knowing where that “yes” may lead. It is enough to know that certainly our own life will become, like Mary’s, “wild inside”. Mary comes as Archetype to each one of us who carries the Holy within us, seeking a place of birth.

We walk the dark road, with Mary, in trust. We walk companioned by one who knows our struggles to maintain our trust in the face of inner doubts and outer calamity.

We walk with one who loves us and encourages us, prepares us, to welcome “the day which will be born from the womb of this present darkness.”

 

Advent, Christmas Rebirth, John O'donohue, Mary Mother of Jesus, Teilhard de Chardin

Nativity

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 Reflection for December 24, 2019

 On this Christmas eve, only a mystic or a poet might find words to offer us. Tonight we have such a gift from both John O’donohue and from Teilhard de Chardin

John O’donohue opens to our imagination Mary’s experience on this sacred night:  “Nativity”

No man reaches where the moon touches a woman.

Even the moon leaves her when she opens

Deeper into the ripple in her womb

That encircles dark to become flesh and bone.

Someone is coming ashore inside her.

A face deciphers itself from water

And she curves around the gathering wave,

Opening to offer the life it craves.

In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers,

She falls and heaves, holding a tide of tears.

A red wire of pain feeds through every vein

Until night unweaves and the child reaches dawn.

Outside each other now, she sees him first.

Flesh of her flesh, her dreamt son safe on earth.

John O’Donohue, Connemara Blues Doubleday, Great Britain, 2000

 Gazing into the mind, heart, and mystical, poetic soul of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, I wonder how he would mark the celebration of Christmas. As a brilliant scientist, creative thinker, man of faith, Teilhard brings into harmony recent discoveries about an evolving universe. His faith in the Christic presence is at the heart of it all.

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Christmas for Teilhard is a celebration of the eruption of divine love into space-time.

But how would Teilhard himself speak about the mystery of Incarnation? Let’s bend space-time imaginally to place ourselves in a small Jesuit Chapel somewhere in France, just after the Second World War. Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin walks to the pulpit to give the Christmas homily.  At first, his words sound like an overture to the symphony we have come to hear.

 

I shall allow … (a) picture to emerge — at first in apparent opposition to the dreams of the Earth, but in reality to complete and correct them — that of the inexpressible Cosmos of matter and of the new life, the Body of Christ, real and mystical, unity and multiplicity, monad and Pleiad. And, like a man who surrenders himself to a succession of different melodies, I shall let the song of my life drift now here, now there — sink down to the depths, rise to the heights above us, turn back to the ether from which all things came, reach out to the more-than-man, and culminate in the incarnate God-man.” (1)

 

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The Incarnation is a making new, a restoration, of all the universe’s forces and powers; Christ is the Instrument, the Centre, the End, of the whole of animate and material creation; through Him, everything is created, sanctified and vivified. This is the constant and general teaching of St. John and St. Paul (that most “cosmic” of sacred writers), and it has passed into the most solemn formulas of the Liturgy: and yet we repeat it, and generations to come will go on repeating it, without ever being able to grasp or appreciate its profound and mysterious significance, bound up as it is with understanding of the universe.

 

With the origin of all things, there began an advent of recollection and work in the course of which the forces of determinism, obediently and lovingly, lent themselves and directed themselves in the preparation of a Fruit that exceeded all hope and yet was awaited. The world’s energies and substances – so harmoniously adapted and controlled that the supreme Transcendent would seem to germinate entirely from their immanence—concentrated and were purified in the stock of Jesse; from their accumulated and distilled treasures, they produced the glittering gem of matter, the Pearl of the Cosmos, and the link with the incarnate personal Absolute—the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen and Mother of all things, the true Demeter… and when the day of the Virgin came to pass, then the final purpose of the universe, deep-rooted and gratuitous, was suddenly made clear: since the days when the first breath of individualization passed over the expanse of the Supreme Centre here below so that in it could be seen the ripple of the smile of the original monads, all things were moving towards the Child born of Woman.

 

And since Christ was born and ceased to grow, and died, everything has continued in motion because he has not yet attained the fullness of his form. He has not gathered about him the last folds of the garment of flesh and love woven for him by his faithful. The Mystical Christ has not reached the peak of his growth…and it is in the continuation of this engendering that there lies the ultimate driving force behind all created activity…Christ is the term of even the natural evolution of living beings. (2)   

 

 We leave the little chapel, our hearts ablaze. Now we truly have something to celebrate at Christmas.  Now too we have a task: co-creating, and through our own embodied lives bringing divine love more fully into every aspect of life on our planet. This could take some time. At the very least, it could take the rest of our lives!

 

(1)– Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War, pp. 15-16

(2)Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Future of Man translated from “L’Avenir de l’Homme (1959) by Norman Denny p.; William Collins Pub. London and Harper & Row Pub. New York, 1964

Advent, John O'donohue, Mary Mother of Jesus

Mirroring Each Other’s Secret

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Mary set out at that time and went as quickly as she could to a town in the hill country of Judah. She went into Zechariah’s house and greeted Elizabeth. Now as soon as Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. She gave a loud cry and said, “Of all women you are the most blessed, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. Why should I be honoured with a visit from the mother of my Lord? For the moment your greeting reached my ears, the child in my womb leapt for joy. Yes, blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.” (Gospel of Luke: 1: 39-45)

Visitation

This moment in Mary’s story is so familiar that we may miss its deeper meaning. As a child, I was taught that it was about Mary being so unselfish that her first act following the angel’s visit was to rush over to assist Elizabeth who was six months pregnant.

I see it differently now. Now I know that when annunciation happens, when life is upturned with an unexpected invitation to birth newness, our hearts, like Mary’s, long for the presence of someone with whom to share the joy. Each of us experiences in those moments the absolute requirement of being with someone who knows mystery in the depths of her own being, as Elizabeth does.

Would not each one of us set out at that time and (go) as quickly as (we) could to the embrace of a friend whose gaze mirrors our wonder and delight?

John O’Donohue puts words to Mary’s longing in this poem:

The Visitation

In the morning it takes the mind a while

To find the world again, lost after dream

Has taken the heart to the underworld

To play with the shades of lives not chosen.

She awakens a stranger to her own life,

Her breath loud in the room full of listening.

Taken without touch, her flesh feels the grief

Of belonging to what cannot be seen.

Soon she can no longer bear to be alone.

At dusk she takes the road into the hills.

An anxious moon doubles her among the stone.

A door opens, the older one’s eyes fill.

Two women locked in a story of birth.

Each mirrors the secret the other heard.

(John O’Donohue  Conamara Blues)

 

As we take this fragment of Mary’s story, seeking for a likeness between her story and ours, what do we glimpse? How does her song resonate with ours?  When have we known what it is to awaken as “a stranger to (our) own life”?

Is there not in each one of us the fragility of something so utterly unimagined, yet wholly real, appearing in a morning’s glimpse, disappearing in evening’s shadow…. that we require a mirroring presence to affirm its existence?

Each of us has been invited to provide the inner space for newness to gestate in preparation for birth. Each of us knows the need to nurture this newness in times of solitude. Yet we know also the absolute requirement of being companioned by one another if our hearts are to remain open, nourished, and (as Hildegard says) juicy!

Each of us, like Mary, is walking a wholly new path, one whose gifts, ecstatic joys, shuddering griefs, are as unknown to us as Mary’s were to her. But I believe Elizabeth would bless each one of us as she did Mary:

Yes, blessed is the one who believed that the promise made by the Lord would be fulfilled.

 

 

Dylan Thomas, Isis and Osiris, Jean Houston, John O'donohue, The Easter Mystery

Planet Earth and the Easter Mystery

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Through the cold, quiet nighttime of the grave underground,

The earth concentrated on him with complete longing

Until his sleep could recall the dark from beyond

To enfold memory lost in the requiem of mind.

The moon stirs a wave of brightening in the stone.

He rises clothed in the young colours of dawn.

John O’Donohue “Resurrection”

The Easter Mystery of life-death-life is at the heart of the universe, at the heart of life on our planet, in the deep heart of our own lives. From its birth out of the womb of a dying star, through its daily cycle of day/dusk/ night/dawn, its yearly cycle of summer/autumn/ winter/spring, the earth offers herself to us as Archetype, showing us how to live with grace  within the paschal mystery.

Ancient peoples understood this mystery. Through their careful observations they constructed buildings such as the mound in Newgrange Ireland where a tiny lintel receives the first rays of dawn only on the winter solstice.

The ancients wove their understanding of life/death/life into their mythologies: the Egyptian story of Osiris, whose severed body was put together piece by piece by his wife Isis, then reawakened; the Sumerians tell of the great queen Inanna who descended to the underworld to visit her sister Ereshkigal. There she was stripped of all her royal robes and insignia, and murdered by her sister who then hung her lifeless body on hook. Three days later, Inanna was restored to life, all her honour returned to her. Demeter calls forth her daughter Persephone from the kingdom of the dead; Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysius return to life after being destroyed.

The people of Jesus’ time would have known these and other great myths of the ancient Near East. Jean Houston tells us in Godseed (Quest Books, 1992): “In the Greco-Roman world, these acts of resurrection were celebrated in the Mystery Religions. These ecstatic forms of piety involved dramatic, highly-ritualized inward journeys of anguish, grief, loss, resurrection, redemption, joy and ecstasy. The Mystery Religions provided alienated individuals lost in the nameless masses of the Roman Empire with an intimate environment and community of the saved, in which they counted as real persons and found a deeper identity. Identifying with the God-man or the Goddess-woman of the mystery cult, the initiate died to the old self and was resurrected to personal transfiguration and eternal life.” (125-6)

What was so stunningly different in the Jesus story was that the mystery of life-death-life was incarnated in a historical person. The Resurrection of Jesus is at the heart of the Christian faith. As Paul wrote, “If Christ be not risen then our faith is in vain.”

In our lifetime, the explosion of new science shows us the life/death/mystery at the heart of the universe. Like exploding stars, our lives are continuously being rebirthed into a deeper more joyous existence.

By allowing the death within ourselves of old habits, old mindsets and narrow ideas of who or what we may be, we open ourselves to the possibility of new life being birthed within us. As Jesus told his friends, “You will do what I do. You will do even greater things”.

“Resurrection is about being pulsed into new patterns appropriate to our new time and place,” Jean Houston writes in Godseed. For this to happen, we need to open in our deep core to “the Heart of existence and the Love that knows no limits. It is to allow for the Glory of Love to have its way with us, to encounter and surrender to That which is forever seeking us, and from this to conceive the Godseed”.

“The need for resurrection has increased in our time,” Jean continues. “We are living at the very edge of history, at a time when the whole planet is heading toward a global passion play, a planetary crucifixion.” Yet “the longing with which we yearn for God is the same longing with which God yearns for us…. the strength of that mutual longing can give us the evolutionary passion to roll away the stone, the stumbling blocks that keep us sealed away and dead to the renewal of life”. (Godseed 129-130)

The yearly miracle of spring awakens within us the confidence and joy that this same rebirth is ours to accept and to live. We know our call to green our lives, our times, our planet:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age (Dylan Thomas)

Where in my life do I most experience the need for a rebirth?

What old habits and beliefs would I have to let die in order for this new life to be born?

How does knowing that the longing with which (I) yearn for God is the same longing with which God yearns for (me) make my life more joyful?

What would a resurrected life look like, feel like, for me? for those with whom my life is woven? for our planet?

May Sophia, the feminine presence of Sacred Wisdom, gently guide us through the death of what no longer serves us into the joy of the rebirth for which our hearts yearn.

Christmas Rebirth, Jean Houston, John O'donohue, Mary Mother of Jesus

What is our role in the Christmas Story?

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As children we may have taken part in the “Nativity Play”. Festooned with cardboard wings and glitter, we may have played the angels, or in our father’s old bathrobe, hitched up with a rope belt, taken our part as shepherds. If we were judged to be wholly lacking in dramatic gifts, we may have been cast as a palm tree. Secretly most little girls longed to play Mary, though the part usually required both an angelic expression and a cascade of golden ringlets thus disqualifying a child with red braids, freckles and a taste for mischief…

Our child’s heart quickly learned not to aspire to dreams beyond our reach.

And yet the Christmas Story continues to carry its own enchantment. Year after year we enter it, welcoming its familiar storylines, greeting its supportive cast of shining angels, stumbling shepherds, overburdened innkeepers, royal camel-driving Wise Ones, with affection.

Each year we experience something more. As with all great archetypal tales, what we bring to the listening becomes part of the story. No other story holds this power of transmutation, this gift of shape-shifting into what each of us most needs to hear… this capacity to take us beyond ordinary time into mythic time where we ourselves become part of a greater story.

As Jean Houston describes it in her book Godseed:

In the telling and the taking of the myth, you leave behind your usual time and are symbolically and psychologically projected into Great Time, into a paradoxical moment that cannot be measured because it has no duration. There is a breach in time and in the surrounding world. The inner psyche opens and a passage to the possible human is revealed. (p.33)

In this sacred experience of Great Time, we recognize that we are living the Christmas Story in our own time on this planet. We do not have to imagine the displacement, the discomfort, the life-endangering journeys resulting from the call of the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus that a census of the whole world be taken and people must travel to their own towns to be counted… Today’s emperors initiate through their inhumane policies a huge migration of people away from their home towns and countries with appalling results in human suffering.

We live in a time of immense longing for a more humane and life-enhancing world… as a young songwriter reflected: giving a Christmas meal to the hungry is a lovely gesture, but in a better world, the hungry would be fed every day….

“Christmas is about yearning for something to come into the world,” Jean Houston believes. “It’s the story of the birth of love, of hope, of a Holy Child in huge danger of being destroyed, bringing a new order of possibility into the world, needing to be protected and nurtured so it may grow into a free and luminous, numinous being.”   

In the midst of the suffering across the planet that is reported to us hourly in words and pictures, the Universe invites us to play the role to which we may once have aspired: to be a bearer of new life for a world that hungers for so much.

The Universe invites each of us to play the role of Mary (golden curls not required).

Here is how John O’Donohue imagines that invitation:

Cast from afar before the stones were born

And rain had rinsed the darkness for colour,

The words have waited for the hunger in her

To become the silence where they could form.

 The day’s last light frames her by the window,

A young woman with distance in her gaze,

She could never imagine the surprise

That is hovering over her life now.

The sentence awakens like a raven,

Fluttering and dark, opening her heart

To nest the voice that first whispered the earth

From dream into wind, stone, sky and ocean.

She offers to mother the shadow’s child;

Her untouched life becoming wild inside.

Jean Houston encourages us to take this invitation to heart:

Just think of the promise, the potential, the divinity in you,

which you have probably disowned over and over again

because it wasn’t logical, because it didn’t jibe,

because it was terribly inconvenient (it always is),

because it didn’t fit conventional reality,

because… because… because….

What could be more embarrassing than finding yourself pregnant with the Holy Spirit?

It’s a very eccentric, inconvenient thing to have happen.

What are your “becauses”?,

the reasons that you disowned your divine potential,

your divine conceptions.

(“because I felt unworthy…” “because of what people would say…” ) Godseed p. 38

This Christmas, as we listen once again to the story’s unfolding, let us see ourselves as Mary, guided by John O’Donohue’s Visualization:

The Nativity

No man reaches where the moon touches a woman.

Even the moon leaves her when she opens

Deeper into the ripple in her womb

That encircles dark to become flesh and bone.

Someone is coming ashore inside her.

A face deciphers itself from water

And she curves around the gathering wave,

Opening to offer the life it craves.

In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers,

She falls and heaves, holding a tide of tears.

A red wire of pain feeds through every vein

Until night unweaves and the child reaches dawn.

Outside each other now, she sees him first.

Flesh of her flesh, her dreamt son safe on earth.

John O’Donohue (Connemara Blues

Doubleday, Great Britain, 2000; Bantam Books, 2001)

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