To the Divine Mother

You repair what is broken, and pick up the pieces of the castle I was building when the wind knocks it over and it all falls down. You teach me gently, Look, make a game of it. Sing like this, hold hands and spin, "Ashes to ashes!" and at the end shout "We all fall down!"  - and then laugh and do it again.

When I am wrong you chastise me, carefully differentiating between the extent of my wrong and the extent to which I am eternally loved.  And then you offer something to eat.

Without this, I am not sure I could keep living; shame over my wrongs would be too great, and on top of this I would be too hungry and scared to move.

You love me anyway, and how often have I lived just for another moment of leaning in to the soft flesh of your body as you pull me close, and smell the familiar smell of your flesh: me and not me, more myself than I can name. I breathe and breathe and breathe, wishing to hold onto each inhalation forever. But eventually I cannot take it, I have to breathe out, and there you are again.

I am too afraid to move on. Then the other night I am on Facebook and you show up in the form of a video of a mother duck leading her ducklings as they leap in complete abandonment and surrender themselves to a paradox: the only hope of safety is to follow, and the only way to do this is to give up what is known, and take instead the endless encouragement that is offered, in all of its mystery.

Today, Catholics around the world acknowledge the feast day of Fatima, the vision of your incarnation who appeared to illiterate children in a field as they grazed their sheep. You offered nothing but your unfiltered self, but proof is a man-made concept.  The children believed you, and the doubters did not, so you offered even more. So returned months later, as only the children said you would, to answer the doubters, and on the thirteenth of October, thousands witnessed the spinning of the sun, and the sky as it swayed towards the earth. This mesmerized many, although it did little to eradicate doubt. 

You keep offering, anyway: constant radiation, the “pure cosmic play” of a poet’s ecstatic cry.

In another manifestation of your wisdom, the Goddess Kali wears a garland of snow-white skills, offering by her presence a constant reminder of freedom from the limits of birth and death. 

Teillard de Chardin observed, of the depraved creatures of a broken and endlessly renewing world:

"Humanity is being taken to the point where it will have to choose between suicide and adoration."

Everywhere you look, faces that only a mother could love, and realities so dismal that the only hope capable of enduring is that of a mother waiting for her child's return, even when all practical evidence points to certain loss. How many times has it been the faith of a mother that waited long after others gave up hope?  This love is always mad when measured by the insufficient tools of common perception: all mystery, all embrace beyond words, all given. “Be not afraid,” the resurrected Christ said when he showed himself first to the women at the tomb, and it is impossible not to hear in these words an echo of what Gabriel told Mary when he announced divine conception. She died to everything she knew to give birth, and only in the otherwise senseless death of her son could it be made clear why this was necessary.

To the mother who loves what comes, no matter what comes, however ugly it may appear to the tyrant known as objective sense:

Yours is the music of a funeral, and the cry of death in the moment before birth.

Yours is the world without end, and the surrender to mystery at the center of every Amen.