You have no idea how difficult it is to find an image of Mary, mother of Jesus, as an irresistibly strong and beautiful woman. Her head is mostly covered and she is looking very pure and holy. That image wouldn’t necessarily do for Catholic priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. According to him, G_d was on fire for Mary.
I’m in a serious Teilhardian phase. I want to be him when I grow up. I keep coming across stuff he wrote that others have unconsciously picked up on and integrated into their own thinking. But I hadn’t read much on his devotion to Mary, mother of Jesus, and Mother of G_d. I’m more of a Protestant than I thought. I never really grocked the whole devotion to Mary thing. Teilhard loved his own mom, and he loved Mary a lot, which makes sense. The RC’s intuitively got that traditional theology was missing the sacred feminine. Mary emerged subversively through the patriarchal structure to fill the void, much like Sophia, divine wisdom, infiltrated traditional Jewish theology (along with Shekinah). You gotta love how truth will not be denied.
But his take on Mary really blew my socks off. Check this out:
“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…(the mother goddess of fertility in the Greek Pantheon).
Mary is portrayed as the epitome of Beauty, (and its fertile nature), achieved after 13.7 billion years of evolution. She is Beauty incarnate, so hot that G_d cannot resist, ahem…union with her. (In the language of the birth narrative, “The Spirit overshadowed her…”) Mary’s feminine beauty draws G_d to her. But before we get there, let’s take a look at a Roman poet’s take on the power of feminine beauty.
In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius writes about the goddess Venus:
“In me is seen that side of beings by which they are joined as one, in me the fragrance that makes them hasten together and leads them, freely and passionately, along their road to unity…
I am the beauty running through the world, to make it associate in ordered groups; the ideal held up before the world to make it ascend.
I am the essential Feminine.
Every monad (individual), be it ever so humble…obeys in its movement an embryo of love for me.
When a man loves a woman he thinks at first that his love is given simply to an individual like himself whom he envelops in his power and freely associates with himself.
Soon, however, he is astonished by the violence of the forces unleashed in him at my approach.
He thought it was simply a partner who stood by his side: and now he sees that in me he meets the great hidden force, the mysterious latency, that has come to him in this form in order to lead him captive…
He who takes me, gives himself to me, and is himself taken by the universe…
The true union, however is the union that simplifies, and to simplify is to spiritualize.
The true fertility is the fertility that brings beings together in the engendering of Spirit.”
Teilhard sees in Mary the personification of the alluring cosmic power of Beauty, G_d, in short, couldn’t resist Mary’s radiance, and in an act of divine passion for Beauty, G_d was drawn into union. This is how the universe does it. As Teilhard puts it:
“Everything in the universe is made by union and generation—by the coming together 
of elements that seek out one another, melt together two by two, and are born again in a third”.
That “third”, according to the Christmas myth was Jesus of Nazareth, the manifestation and fruit of the union of G_d and Mary, matter achieving its goal in an incarnation of Love between G_d and Mary.
Jesus—fruit of the irresistible passion between G_d and Beauty, personified in Mary. Ya gotta love it. But surely this divine allurement to beauty needs to be generalized to the whole universe—the cosmos as G_d’s incarnated body. The Formless One falling in love with the beauty of diverse form.
I’ll end with Teilhard’s own poetry using Mary’s voice.
“Long before I drew you, I drew G_d towards me…Only love has the power to move Being. If God, then, was able to emerge out of G_dself, G_d had first to lay a pathway of desire before G_d’s feet..spreading before G_d’s divinity a sweet savour of beauty. Now do you understand the secret of the emotion that possesses you when I draw near?” Yep, I get it.
We liberal Protestants need to move beyond the interpretation of the virgin birth as somehow reflecting the biblical writer’s discomfort with human sexuality. It’s not about disgust over human sexuality, but rather, the biological urge to procreate is transcended, but included, in the spiritual desire for union and to give birth to the next iteration of the human species). In any case, we now know that “virgin” is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for “young woman” in Isaiah.
Wouldn’t you love to hear a Christmas Eve sermon focusing on G_d’s passion for the archetype of beauty, manifest in Mary, and how the consummation of their passion resulted in a birth that changed the world? Silent Night, Holy Night indeed…
Go tell it on the Mountain Bruce!! Get out your Mac cam or your Flip video cam and preach away. Preach it brother! A video on your blog would be most welcome…I’d love to see you lit up from the inside as you tell an enhanced love story…informed through the evolutionary lens.
Amen and love to you!
donna
Ok, that’s next. Thanks for the encouragement, my lovely sister.
I love you Bruce!!!
Thank you for sharing that beautiful prose and your take on it.
I feel glowing with the Divine Feminine!
Merry Christmas indeed!!
Sincerely,
Yvonne
Nice to be loved, Yvonne! Hope the glow carries you right through the Advent/Christmas season.
Hey, Bruce. Thanks again! I’m doing some work on St Mary MacKillop and have been stumbling over her “Queen of Heaven’, ‘Immaculate Mother’ conceptualisation. Your post as usual brings together the mythic and the evolutionary/integral. Perhaps there’s a small element of this that I can incorporate into the Christmas Eve Service I’m taking in a conservative (traditional) and aging congregation. Have been thinking that we (as Protestants) talk blithely of the ‘humanity’ of Jesus but somehow don’t find a place for ‘family’ in that humanity.
Sincere wishes for a joyful Christmas to you and to all your readers/followers.
Di
Ok, if you do, send me your reflection, Di!
Well done, Bruce.
Life and the Universe are a sensual explosion. Not sure how we (men) managed to reduce it to a boring, mechanistic, and ethereal dead space! Go Mary!
Well put Don.
How did humans make it so boring? Easy – ego – we had to control it – we had to catch it and pin it splayed butterfly-fashion on a board so we could move it at will. That’s why mystics are silenced – conformity is king.
Thanks Hilary,
We have a lot of evolutionary freight that keeps us playing it pretty safe. This awakening from ignorance seems very slow at times, doesn’t it. Compassion arises in me.
You know Bruce the more i think of this the more i hear the idea that one must lose one’s life to find it – ……..
Oh Bruce, you are so funny. You don’t have to grow up to be Teilhard you have already transcended Teilhard (IMO:-)
Beautiful post.
You know that quote you put out there by Ilia Delio, ‘The church is the place where Christ amortizes Christians through community and a sacramental life……” what do you think it means? “Christ ‘pays off the debt’……” I don’t quite get it. (Can you tell I had to google definition of amortizes:-)
That’s funny. Teilhard, as far as I know, wasn’t an economist, and as a Jesuit never had to worry about the amortization period of a mortgage. It’s strange that I never even thought about the word this way. Shows you how lost I am in this stuff!
He meant amor – as in love – bringing love to realization in the universe. The love-itization of the universe.
But I love your riff “Christ paying off the debt”. A whole new take on atonement.
Riff totally unintended but yes, that is such a good fit.. Given that Teilhard was French, you could really go to town with using that word and atonement if you keep breaking it up in French. Such as ‘a’ (as in ‘not’?, I think) and mort (as in death, that I am certain). So atonement is not about the death of Christ but about the love of Christ. Amortize, my word of the week. The opposite of death is love, which is essentially true because it is what keeps us alive. nice, amortize…….good word.
Shut up, open the door and call me “Mary”!
Wisdom is making more of me…
it is in the darkest, darkest night
that we see a piercing light
and hear the voice of Wisdom singing
She Who Is
Sophia
Burning, hidden Heart
Alluring, stunning, mighty Consolation
Three-wingéd creature and Spirit of Fire
You come down now, Love,
and in the fullness of time
with and thro’ and in us
Breath-in and breath-out
and stillpoint-in-between
Inspiration: our life-breath and saving
Exhalation: our healing and wholeness
and
Pregnant Pause …
resting unperturbed
singing silently with Joy!
And with all passed,
all might proclaim and pray:
Come, happen upon us, O Wisdom!
See, Christ stands before you
and peace is in His mind;
And Sophia, Love, is ever now
and ever making more!
Ecce Fiat
Amen
Amen, sister poet. Great to hear from you Gabrielle, and thank you for sharing your gift with us.
I love your passion and the connections you make. But can’t get beyond the fact that this reflection is soooo heterosexually masculine. Heterosexual women and gay men might not find it as inspiring!
For me your insight in “Advance of Love” — that the Virgin Mary idea is more about new life emerging without benefit of patriarchy! That is something we can all resonate with!
Thanks Meg,
Interesting point. I’d be comfortable with G_d as feminine divine, drawn to Joseph’s beauty, but wasn’t given that raw material to work with. I’m curious, what would you do with it?
Good response. I’ll play with it.
Blessings and thank you or all you do!
After much thought I realize I simply wouldn’t go there. Nothing in the story that we are given lures me where you and brother Teillard so ecstatically went. I am not attracted to Mary in the story. I am Mary. I am the pregnant one. I am the one dealing with the real consequences of whatever it is that has happened to me to cause this pregnancy….overcoming the shame that my society lays upon me…grateful for Joseph’s kindness…knowing that my life has changed forever…filled with wonder and foreboding at this strange overshadowing…
Thanks for sharing this, and for knowing yourself so well, Meg
Anandamayi Ma
The Universal Mother Goddess came to me in the night
I held out my hands
“No don’t come close, I’m dirty”
She overflowed and embraced me
Loving me like she would a child
Her form and her face
The most beautiful woman I know
By the touch of Her grace
There will be no more fear
My eyes opening and shutting
She enter and the whole universe
Followed as her shadow
She is the only One
And She is every thing.
Thanks Bjorn, beautiful