Virgin a Day - #5

(Image and bolded text from here)

In the crypt one finds  Notre Dame Sous Terre (Our Lady Underground).  She is a replica of an old Black Madonna, destroyed during the French Revolution.  But this destroyed statue was itself an 11th or 12th century replica of an earlier reference to a small black Goddess of pagan, Druidic origin. What has happened to this staute is not known.

One can only visit the crypt with a guided tour.  So the freedom to sit with Notre Dame Sous Terre, to feel Her power in Her presence, is not possible.

"Tales from the Crypt"  (cue Toccata and Fugue)

What stories, what knowledge would this meditating Dame have for us, pass on to us, reveal to us?  Would we listen?  Take Her seriously?  Fear Her because She is Underground, in deep silence and in even deeper darkness, with the only source of light emanating from Her?

Would we have the courage to plumb the same depths of our psyches to remember Her?

Or would we keep Her locked away in the underground crypt with some unknown guide hurrying us past Her - nothing to see here, move along, move along.  Or worse, quoting the dominant dogma about Her, with the expectation that we believe it - even if that isn't our experience of Her.

In spite of the thousands of years of viewing Her through the prism of patriarchy, there are many cracks that continue to appear in that lens.  Our inner and outer eyes and ears see and hear Her as She reveals Herself to us - no running commentary from other sources, only Her.

I am reminded of the ending of the Charge of the Star Goddess:

And you who seek to know Me, know that your

Seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless 

You know the Mystery: 

For if that which you seek, you find not within yourself,

You will never find it without.

For behold, I have been with you from the beginning,

And I am that which is attained at the end of desire.

~From The Spiral Dance, by Starhawk~

Please visit Rebecca, who is hosting Virgin a Day for these first 12 days of December.

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From Matthew Fox's essay on The Black Madonna:

5. The Black Madonna calls us to our depths, to living spiritually and radically on this planet and not superficially and unthinkingly and oblivious to the grace that has begotten us in so many ways. The depths to which we are called include the depths of awe, wonder and delight—joy itself is a depth experience we need to re-entertain in the name of the Black Madonna. She calls us to enter into the depths of our pain, suffering and shared grief—not to run from it or cover it up with a myriad of addictions ranging from shopping to drugs and alcohol and sport and superficial religion. She calls us to the depths of our creativity and to entertain the images that are born in and through us. And she calls us to the depths of transformation, of social, economic, gender, racial and eco justice and the struggle that must be maintained to carry on solidarity with the oppressed of any kind.

She calls us to the depths of our psyche which, as Meister Eckhart says, are “dark” and to the depths of the earth, which are surely dark and to the depths of the sky that have also been rediscovered for all their darkness. Black holes abound in space as well as in the mysterious breadth of our souls. We need to explore them. They too are fecund. They have much to teach us.