Written two weeks ago, March 13th, 2023 

This morning, determined to sit outside in my back porch prayer spot, I pulled on layers of warmth.  My winter coat, my hat, a blanket for my lap, wool socks and boots.  It’s March 13th, but the cold has come back, even as my daffodils show their sunshiny faces and the crocuses lift their fragile heads.  

My frozen hands fingered my rosary beads while my gaze rested on the new buds pushing through the branches of the tree just outside my fence, and a fierce prayer rose up in me.  

I have been struggling lately, with negative thinking.  Doubt and fear that fill me and send my mind into spirals without solutions.  

Please, God my Mother… I asked.  Please take away these doubts and fears that fill me.  Help me to trust in resurrection.  Help me to trust myself.  Please… let me listen to the life-giving voices of love and liberation and let go of the voices of doubt and fear.  

Let me listen to the life-giving voices of love and liberation.  Help me let go of everything else.  

This felt like an amazing prayer and I was a little high on my use of spiritual alliteration, ha!  Woah, yes, that’s it!  Life -giving voices of love and liberation– that’s ALL I want to be about!  My self satisfied ego was doing a little party dance in my head– I really nailed it this time!

Then I kept praying through the Glorious mysteries of the rosary– Resurrection, Ascension, onto the Descent of the Holy Spirit, Sophia.  I love these side by side mysteries, this paradox of Christian life– we are invited into Jesus’ ascension, then deeply aware of the descent of the Holy Spirit (who I call Sophia).  The above and below.  Heaven AND earth.  

It hit me with a force– ooooohhhh.  Oh.  I imagined the moment of Pentecost where this mystery takes place.  I saw and felt the winds of the Holy Spirit moving into every crack and corner and crevice of that upper room where the disciples hid in fear and doubt.  And likewise, I felt Her move into all the corners of my “upper room”, my mind.  And all of a sudden I felt something very different from that initial prayer that had felt so powerful.  I had said to Her– take it all away.  With your help My Mother the forces of evil can be banished!  Instead she did as she does, as she so often does, sending me to my knees in humility and gratitude.  She said / I felt, “no my sweet.  I don’t want to banish a thing.  Nothing within you is exiled.  Yes, I see the fear.  I see the doubt, and that’s where I’m going to be.  Right there, with you.”  The force of Emmanuel, God-with-us, filled me.  

So often, we think we can control it, we want to control it, and for the GOOD.  With God’s power, with that holy help, I can do it!  I can be better, reach for perfection, banish all the imperfect parts of myself.  If I just TRY hard enough and TRUST in God enough, I can eliminate all fear and doubt.  But really it’s like covering it over with a blanket and pretending it’s not there.  God, in all Her grace and glory, snuggles in under the blanket with our fear.  With our doubt.  With our ugly.  With all the stuff we’d rather not admit we have going on, that we just want to get rid of, that we’d rather “purify in prayer” and pretend like it’s not there.  

But God our Mother, in all her softness and endless compassion, the Goddess of true unconditional love, says, bring me that too.  Let me love that too.  Can you soften right there?  Can you open right there?  Let me in.  Let me love every part.  

More and more these days, my embrace of God our Mother, of Goddess and the many forms and faces of the Divine Feminine, has helped me truly embrace the heart of Jesus, our brother IN the Mother.  In so many ways, His heart makes most sense nestled in the heart of his Mother, Mary and his Great Mother, Goddess of all Life.  He was a highly unusual human and an even more unusual man for his times.  His love is HER love– unconditional, all-inclusive, ever softening, ever healing, ever calling home.  There are no exceptions to His love and nothing is exiled.  His love, in Hers, is a love that transforms, not even by holding “accountable” or expecting something once the love is given, but just and only by pouring on more love.  She is drenching us with love.  She is calling every part home.  

Image: “Divine Mother’s Embrace”