Spirituality

June 1, 2016
When I was a little girl I'd lay in bed, stare up at the frilly pink canopy, and have silent conversations with Mary and Jesus, but mostly Mary.  Mary was a familiar presence that was right there in my room or back yard whenever I decided to talk to her.  I imagined she looked exactly like the statues in most of my friends' front yards, but more soft and motherly and less like the lady on the raisins box. What I remember most is that a feeling of complete joy and security would wash over me whenever I "talked" to Mary. It was different than how I felt most of the time and I called it in my mind my "special feeling".  That sounds like a term you would use to describe lust to an 8 year old, but it was bliss.  It was the deepest, purest happiness imaginable.


Is it possible to utilize my inherited religion, with all its symbols, deities, wisdom, rituals, and text, to have spiritual experiences even if I no longer believe in a literal sense the way I used to?  Can I talk to Mary even if I doubt she was a virgin?  Can I call up JC and imagine his sweet, glowing face looking down on me and pray?  Just to feel good?  What would Joseph Campbell say?
I know, I know, I CAN.  I'm ALLOWED, but does it work?  I'm                                                             going to try it and find out.

June 2, 2016
Scientists are learning that prayer changes the brain in interesting ways, as I found out from this episode of Talk of the Nation http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104310443  I'm not surprised, but how do I pray if I don't really believe in Mary like I used to?  I'm trying to find a way to believe.  Maybe Mary is one aspect of a collective female energy that is throughout the universe.  Even its femaleness is only one human experience of it, or one aspect of it.  If it is a particular wave, maybe it resonates with matter in a unique way.
I Googled how to pray.  There were over 36 million results, most are philosophical in nature.  I'm looking for what do I actually do?  Because I was raised Catholic, I do still know many prayers, but that never got me where I want to go.  It was when I was communing with Mary and Jesus and occasionally God.  I wonder if it is too personal to ask people what is going on in their mind when they pray?  Maybe I need to just start with meditation.  No expectations, just be and breathe.  See what happens.

June 9, 2016
I couldn't sleep and so I thought I'd try talking to Mary.  It felt fake so I said a few "Our Fathers" and analyzed the prayer, then said a few "Hail Mary"s and fell asleep remembering how as a child I used to picture a fruit bowl filled with grapes when I recited the "fruit of thy womb"part of the prayer.

June 10, 2016

Hail Mary, Revisited

Hail Mary, the mother,  

Queen of Life,

Filter of God,

full of Grace,

The Word and The Breath

The Potential of Mankind the Lord,

is with thee.

A stake, a spine

A spiraling river

Blessed art thou

among

humanity

And blessed is the fruit

of thy womb

Jesus,

The Christ,

Wisdom,

Son

of the sea.

Holy Mary, mother of god,

Pray for our sinning egos

And deliver us to

Heaven

Vault us skyward,

wings snapping open

On your breath

Now

And at the hour of our death

Amen.

June 12, 2016

Pondering Mary's Virginity

      

I was pondering Mary while on a walk the other day.  The fact that she is a virgin is bothersome.  Why must she be portrayed so?  The recorders, translators, and interpreters of the Bible, I thought,  made Mary a virgin because they feared and loathed women.  Or, perhaps throughout time, men have feared their own desire for women, and so to make Jesus’s birth immaculate, or clean, was an expression self-loathing.  Of course, there are also  translations of texts omitted from the cannon that use a word meaning "betrothed" in the place of "virgin".  Therefore, I thought, Mary’s virginity could also be a misinterpretation.  I turned my thoughts instead to ferns.

Ferns have been on the planet for a very long time. They do not reproduce sexually, but instead by spores. I’m surprised they are not sacred.  This was an inspiring thought.  What if Mary’s virginity was not written out of misogyny, but because virginity has a symbolic and sacred meaning for us?  What if she is like a fern or a flower which contains all the potency to reproduce on her own?  My heartbeat accelerated with the happiness of possibility.

What else could virginity symbolize?  Unbroken, purity.  I was reminded of the term, “hermetically sealed”, and for the first time noticed the word “hermit”, as in a wise man, in the word “hermetically”.  This may be a clue, I thought.  I looked forward to later in the day when I could research word origins for hermit.

I learned that even before the name of the Greek god Hermes, from which the term “hermit’ arises,  came piles of rocks, called herma.  These evolved into stone columns, usually square with a male human head carved on top and genitals in the center of the front face of the pillar. These piles of rocks, and later pillars were for protection and placed at cross roads and throughout a town.  Then the Greeks bestowed this name to their god of protection, Hermes.  A hermit is a wise man, a chaste keeper of wisdom and knowledge of god. 

So, what about this “hermetically sealed” idea?  Let us think of hermits as alchemists. Alchemists used a perfectly sealed vessel for distillation in transforming matter.  So, we’re back to virginity being about purity.  Perhaps we are best able to receive god when we are pure.

The tomb of a website, Gnostic Teachings.Org, discusses a compelling interpretation of alchemy and the symbolism of hermetically sealed vessels.  The author states that “Alchemy is about transforming ourselves.”  Alchemy is symbolic of transforming the soul, or in other words, achieving enlightenment or unity with God.  We too must remain sealed  when we work with knowing god.  

I delved into this website, which is full of links to various lectures and texts including many lectures on the Tree of Life.  It seems whenever I explore spirituality in an academic way, I am always led back to the Tree of Life.  

I learned about the Tree of Life when I was in my early 20s and have found the symbolism endlessly fruitful in stirring my imagination and mind.  In the Tree of Life, a Kabbalistic blueprint for the human experience as it relates to our soul, and the energy of the universe, Mary is associated with the sefirot Malkuth, or the physical body, where the mind and emotion sefirot meet. According to Rabbi Wolf, Malkuth is "the fertile ground in which the Sefirot are planted and the pinnacle of feminity among the Sefirot." Well, of course;  Mary is the mother. Mary is even referred to as the mother of god in the Hail Mary prayer.  But there is a direct path on the Tree of Life from Malkuth (physical body/matter) to Kether (the Crown of enlightenment), located at the top of the head, which passes through Daath (the door to the knowledge of the soul).  Is this path the hermetically sealed vessel?  Is Mary symbolic of the path?  Or at least, one of the paths to God?

Prior to this day, I had never connected the concept of the pathway from Malkuth to Kether to the concept of a hermetically sealed vessel. As I considered this pathway, I thought of Kundalini, the energy that runs up the spinal cord.  I had known that there are connections between shakras and the Tree of Life, and now I considered that the Kundalini is also the same path, so I could also therefore associate Mary with Kundalini.  In Kundalini yoga, after a series of energy-generating and cleansing movements, we tighten the muscles of the groin and anus and keep the energy flowing up the spine and out the top of the head.   

So why is Mary a virgin?  She is symbolic for our soul’s journey from base to enlightened.  (Transformation of matter and energy, back to alchemy!) This pathway is internal. Perhaps that is why it is sealed.  In the Hebrew name for god, (YodHeVavHe) the letter He means door.  Two doors in the name of god, and there are also two Marys in the Bible.  Maybe I’m getting out of line here, but could it be that Mary Magdelene  represents Malkuth, or bringing forth into physical being and the Virgin Mary represents Daath, or the door to knowledge of the soul?  Is the bottom end of the path our physical, flawed nature and the Virgin Mary is the vessel by which Mary Magdele becomes holy?  It is endlessly interesting and inspiring.  From the path from Malkuth to Kether, the energy passes through the heart first, that is compassion and love.  Mary is love.

Another concept that is associated with alchemy and magic is the phrase, “as above, so below.” I remember having a high school teacher explain the ideas of Plato in a very simple way.  He told me Plato believed that anything here on earth had a counterpart in heaven, but in the purest expression.  I think my teacher even explained it in terms of a chair, that the most chair-ist chair is in heaven.  Absolutely absurd, I thought.  Silly Plato!  Now I see this concept as it is with everything in the universe:  patterns in  micro-cosmos and macro-cosmos.  So it is we are born into physical being, we may also be born into enlightenment.  

I know the journey toward enlightenment or at least unity with my soul is potential within me and that journey can be assisted by meditation, yoga, reading, and also having spiritual experiences in sacred spaces other than nature.

Nature is my source for spiritual inspiration, but I want to utilize the symbols and myths that I inherited by being raised Catholic.  This is why I begin my journey with Mary.   Even the act of attending a mass could be symbolic.  When I enter a church am I entering a microcosm of Mary?  I think I heard this theory before, but never internalized it fully.  As my body enters a sacred space (the church=Mary)  to move my soul toward enlightenment so I also am entering into myself to assist the evolution of my soul.  (But the priest is not the crown, the top of my own head is the crown.)  With my new understanding of Mary, I might try prayer again. At least I have made my peace with Mary’s virginity.  

Some of my favorite books, which I referred to for this essay: