Virgin a Day - #1

(Image and bold text from Sandra's site)

BLACK MADONNA 

The image of the Black Madonna, who is said to have miraculous powers, can be traced back through the ages to Africa, Asia and the Middle East in the form of Isis, Tara, Sara-Kali and other dark Goddesses. They represented the fertile Earth as well as the great void. As Sara-Kali, she is worshipped by the gypsies and is said to have accompanied Mary Magdalen, two elderly Marys, Martha and Lazarus on a boat without oars or sails that landed at Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, France in 43 CE. The icon of Czestochowa (Poland) was brought from Jerusalem in 1384; it was slashed in the cheek by marauders in 1430 and is said to have bled.

Today is the first day of Rebecca's Virgin a Day, an homage to the ultimate Mother Love. I can honestly say that I never understood that from my own experience with my mother and was not going to participate in this meme as I didn't think I had anything to offer.  However, upon thinking about it, I changed my  mind.

I've loved the Black Madonna for years.  When I moved to California at age 20, I saw an image of La Virgen de Guadalupe and was startled by it.  It was so different from the images of Mary that I had seen in the Roman Catholic church, the religion that my mother embraced.  Mary always seemed so young, so child-like, so naive and I wondered how a girl like that could be expected to be a mother. She hadn't grown up, she had little life experience, she was obedient and silent. I never heard about her gospels, I never heard anything about her except in her "role" as mother of god.  It seemed preposterous and she wasn't real to me.

And Mary was always portrayed as white.  When I saw La Virgen, her darkness made her real to me and it made me start to think about Mary's portrayal around our Earth.  When I discovered the Black Madonna images, they really resonated with me.  Had I been raised in the Greek Catholic church, as my mother had been, I might have hung around the church a lot longer because I love Greek iconography.  It's rich, it's warm, it's inviting, it speaks to me without words.  But, that didn't happen and I left the church after having made my confirmation at age 11.  I've never gone back except for a wedding or a funeral.

The more I delved into mythology, feminism, Goddess spirituality, the more I realized how patriarchal cultures and their religions kept deliberately silent about the true nature of Mary, the Mother.  It wasn't just the catholic church that silenced Her, it was any patriarchal religion.  If She were shown at all, She was always a secondary, mute figure.

But - and this took me years to finally "get" - even Her silence is more powerful than the institutions which try to repress Her.  For it is, indeed, Her silence where we can commune with Her and learn Truth.

And compassion.

And kindness.

And fierceness.

And protection.

And Beauty.

And humor.

And wonder.

And the Power of expressing those gifts while being Female.

She allows me my own experience of Her without dogma and that freedom is utterly exhilarating.

Actually, I believe it is Her expectation that we have our own experience of Her and VALUE it.  Cherish it.  Return to it whenever we want.  That, to me, is Unconditional Love, the ultimate Mother Love.

Edited to include the following from Matthew Fox's essay on the Black Madonna.  Since he has 12 reasons, I will include each one for the Virgin a Day.

1. The Black Madonna is Dark and calls us to the darkness.. Darkness is something we need to get used to again—the “Enlightenment” has deceived us into being afraid of the dark and distant from it. Light switches are illusory. They feed the notion that we can “master nature” (Descartes’ false promise) and overcome all darkness with a flick of our finger. 

Meister Eckhart observes that “the ground of the soul is dark.”[3] Thus to avoid the darkness is to live superficially, cut off from one’s ground, one’s depth. The Black Madonna invites us into the dark and therefore into our depths. This is what the mystics call the “inside” of things, the essence of things. This is where Divinity lies. It is where the true self lies. It is where illusions are broken apart and the truth lies. Andrew Harvey puts it this way: “The Black Madonna is the transcendent Kali-Mother, the black womb of light out of which all of the worlds are always arising and into which they fall, the presence behind all things, the darkness of love and the loving unknowing into which the child of the Mother goes when his or her illumination is perfect.” [4] She calls us to that darkness which is mystery itself. She encourages us to be at home there, in the presence of deep, black, unsolveable mystery. She is, in Harvey’s words, “the blackness of divine mystery, that mystery celebrated by the great Aphophatic mystics, such as Dionysisus Areopagite, who see the divine as forever unknowable, mysterious, beyond all our concepts, hidden from all our senses in a light so dazzling it registers on them as darkness.” [5] Eckhart calls God’s darkness a “superessential darkness, a mystery behind mystery, a mystery within mystery that no light has penetrated.”[6] 

To honor darkness is to honor the experience of people of color. [7] Its opposite is racism. The Black Madonna invites us to get over racial stereotypes and racial fears and projections and to go for the dark.