I am not a Catholic. In fact, I was raised in the charismatic, protestant church in Scotland. A faith tradition which taught us that, “praying to saints” (especially Mary) was idolatry. 

This morning however, just after my husband read me the news about the escalating situation of war in Israel, Gaza, and Iran, I found myself praying with, and even to, Mary the mother of Jesus. 

For some years now, beginning in a time of deep grief, God has been “turning up” for me … with me … in me … beside me … as my Mother. The tender, loving, yet incredibly fierce and creative Life Force, which birthed our universe and our existence. An Eternal Womb in which I’m always held. This has been a wonderful “widening out” in my understanding of God and has brought great healing to my deepest wounds; in a way which only incredible intimacy can. 

But, unlike many others – who are also currently discovering the Divine Feminine Presence of God – I’ve honestly never given much thought to Mary of Nazareth, the earthly mother of Jesus. 

That was, until recently, when I spent some extended time in Mexico and found myself entranced – and frankly enchanted – by the incredibly abundant images, literally everywhere (murals, graffitied walls, bumper stickers, tattoos) of Our Lady of Guadalupe. 

For those of us without much knowledge of Catholic faith traditions, Our Lady of Guadalupe is a “Marian” apparition. That is, an appearance of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who came to an indigenous man, San Juan Diego (Cuauhtlatoatzin – Talking Eagle – was his indigenous name) in Mexico, 1531. 

The story tells us that after several divine meetings between the two: San Juan and Guadalupe. Meetings which took place over a period of several days. Meetings in which she beckoned, encouraged and instructed him; Guadalupe’s image was miraculously imprinted on this ordinary man’s cloak. This miraculous “painting” is still with us today and is available to view at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in modern day Mexico City.

Here’s the thing … I, as a good protestant girl, wasn’t raised to be intoxicated by the smells and bells of Catholic “superstition”.  I was taught, not to use saints as intermediaries, but to address the Divine directly and on my own behalf. In the faith tradition of my childhood, we weren’t permitted to pray to an image, nor worship idols … but, suddenly here I was, surrounded by endless, almost omnipresent, images of this Mexican-indigenous “Mary” and I found myself enamored by her. 

I snapped photos of her on every walk and at every stop sign, until my phone and Instagram account were full. I found myself sketching her over and over in my journals; researching the meanings hidden in the symbols of her dress, her pose and her face. What could this alluring … comforting … almost protecting image possibly mean!? Why did it strike me so much? How had it inspired such incredible devotion in the people of Mexico? 

As I began to allow myself to surrender to the call, I found that in drawing her … piece by piece … again and again … I was sketching out a map of God.

Much like my ancestors – the ancient Celts – with their “three leafed” Celtic knot describing the mystery of the Trinity, I discovered that the people of Mexico had also been given a symbol to aid them in their understanding of the Infinite. This map came to them through an image of Mary … a poor, brown, pregnant, unwed, teenage, praying girl.   

Of course, my firmly western, pragmatic, protestant brain could hardly handle this kind of mystery! Mary was a human girl … like me. Not God. Not the Divine one. Not even the Holy Spirit, who I had come to know, so tenderly, as Mother. I wrestled with the “either – or” of the whole situation and rubbed my eyes again and again in frustration at this new vision of oneness that God was so kindly showing me about Herself and her saints; her dearly loved ones. 

During the last couple years this oneness has sunk into my heart, where my brain couldn’t receive it. I have begun to let go and trust. Christ is the Vine and I am one of the branches. I cannot find the line where God ends and I begin, so why should I feel such a desperate need to draw that line anywhere else? 

This morning, as we listened to the news coming out of the Middle East: that war may escalate and more  mothers will be torn from their children, more husbands may lose their wives, more babies may be blown up, orphaned  and abandoned, I found the words of the Hail Mary prayer … a prayer which I learned accidentally, growing up  surrounded by Catholic neighbors in a nation which was fiercely divided by religion … I found the words of Hail Mary, tumbling through my mind and out my mouth. 

Mary, that most Middle Eastern of mamas. She who knows the terror of occupation, the constant threat of murder. She, who watched her dearest child be ripped from her life by political mob violence. 

Mary, this Mary, who still dared to call herself “blessed” in spite of it all. Mary, who trusted in the resurrection long enough to see the crucifixion through. 

I found myself praying to Mary, with Mary, through Mary and with the Holy Spirit which binds us both together as children of God … praying for the mothers who are caught in this awful war. 

“Hail Mary”   

Mary … my heart salutes you, my heart salutes your heart … and through your heart I acknowledge and  listen … to God, who is our Deepest Mother. 

“full of grace” 

Through you I see the grace that is ours 

You who said, “let it be” 

You who opened yourself wide, in deep trust 

who gave your “yes” to God

Your yes to pain, your yes to joy, your yes to life and your yes to death … even the death of your own son 

“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus” 

This part of the prayer makes me choke with tears, 

because you are a human woman, a mother, a fruitful womb 

just like me, just like our sisters 

a woman who lived under the fierce violence of Occupation 

an Occupation which killed children and tore babies from their mothers 

You, like so many, had to flee to save your child’s life, 

to save him from a deadly force, breathing out violence against you, 

threatening to take his life – his tiny, precious life – away. 

We look at the horror unfolding in your homeland, and we wonder, “How could anyone slaughter children?” Oh Mary 

Oh dear Mother-God 

You know the fear and terror the mothers of Gaza and Israel face 

And yet still, 

still you called yourself, “Blessed”! 

You, whose very name, Miriam, means “sea of bitter tears”. 

You, whose son was murdered by mob-violence 

by an absurd system, calling itself just! 

You who knew agony as deep as the sea 

You named yourself, “Blessed”. 

You even foretold that we would call you “Blessed”. 

By doing this, you teach us 

To call ourselves 

To call all mothers … 

To call all children, fruit of our wombs 

“Blessed” 

“Holy Mary, Mother of God” 

You, who carried God in your womb 

who, like all of us, carried the Divine within you 

who, like all mothers, grew and bore, loved and raised, a child of the Creator. 

“Pray for us, now and at the hour of our death” 

Pray for us …now and in all our deaths 

our daily deaths and losses 

our minute-to-minute worsening griefs 

too deep for words 

pray for us. 

Holy Spirit pray for us … within us … around us … over us. 

Your hand is always on our eyes – to light the way 

Your hand is always on our hearts – to still the storm of panic   

Your hand is always at our backs – to catch us as we fall 

You, Spirit, Mother of all mothers, hold us, carry our wounds. 

shed our tears and grieve our deepest grief   

Pray for us Mother, 

As we pray with and for the mothers, the sisters, the daughters, in Israel and Gaza, who are all your children. They are all us

We are all them 

within your holy love 

Amen. 

Let it be. 

In closing, please allow me to share with you why I feel it is such an incredible gift for me, as someone raised protestant, to feel invited by the Spirit to meditate on the words of the “Hail Mary” prayer.  

The place in which I was raised, the west of Scotland, was incredibly divided for generations – politically,  socially and religiously – between Catholic and Protestant. As you likely know, Northern Ireland, just thirty miles across  the sea from us, experienced decades of life-wrecking violence. After generations of hatred and loss – peace,  reconciliation, understanding – these things just seemed impossible. Yet in recent decades they have miraculously arrived.  

This Easter Sunday, just a few weeks ago, my parents sent me pictures of their Easter gathering in Scotland.  Starting at the local Catholic church, members from various denominations walked together from church to church,  singing, sharing and celebrating the resurrection together.  

It’s not just that it’s easier, or more pleasant, or a better life for all, when we have peace – but to feel actively  encouraged by the Spirit to engage in and understand one another’s prayers, surely this can bring us one step closer to  seeing an answer to Jesus’ own prayer for the human race: that we might one day, be one, and find ourselves empowered  to truly love one another.  

This must be our prayer too, not just for Israel and Palestine, but for the whole world. 

My dad was a pastor and my grandfather a missionary, both progressive for their time, both loving, gentle, and compassionate. But I was in my late thirties before I first discovered God as my loving Heavenly Mother. The religion I was raised with was led by men, authorized by men, taught by men, with doctrine decided on by men. The women among us received God in a kind of “trickle down” way, where we were allowed to partake of this joy as long as it had been sanctioned by the elders. And even though they were kind, wise elders, they were still all men.  

That’s extraordinary to me now, not only because I have come to know God as my most intimate Mother, but also because the whole event of this Incarnation—the birth of God into the world—was  brought about by an experience that belongs solely to us, the “weaker sex.” 

Only those who have experienced it can understand the tearing agony of contractions, the wild kicks of a whole human being that’s growing inside you, the tears and sweat, the humiliation of being spread wide while you pass a child, a placenta, the umbilical cord, and blood, and blood, and so much blood from the most intimate and vulnerable place in your body. Breasts engorged, sleepless nights, post natal confusion and depression—not to mention the shock and pain and shame (and  just general annoyance) of bleeding monthly from adolescence to middle age!  

Motherhood is an earthy, human, painful, female event, filled with soaring joy and searing pain. God came to us like this: weak and helpless. The first one to know him was a woman, and the first one to see him reborn was also a woman. But somehow we’ve erased these gritty female images from Christ’s birth, death, and rebirth story, preferring an image of Jesus as a white, clean, orderly, and business-like all American. Similarly, we prefer a Mary who is tidied up, serene, and most of all quiet. There’s no screaming and sweating, no stench of fluids in the Nativity Scenes we create.  

Once, as a young mother living in the deep south, I was breastfeeding my newborn (with a blanket covering all the naked parts) on a bench outside of a Walmart, when an older lady—who clearly felt very humiliated for me—scolded me roundly with a “Oh honey! You cannot be doing that here!”  

READ: Mary’s Virginity Matters, but Not for the Reasons You Think

To be honest I didn’t mind too much. She was only trying to protect me, teaching me what was  taught to her: that our nakedness, our femininity, our vulnerability is a shameful thing and it needs to stay hidden. It’s not proper, and it’s not okay. This is a message we women receive again and again from the cradle on up. From our periods to our libido, to our menopause: it’s all like a very  inconvenient secret that we’re supposed to pretend it isn’t there. It’s messy; no wonder people  don’t want it in their religion.  

It’s almost agonizing that many of us seem to prefer a twisted and perverse idea of masculinity in our image of God: one with guns and guts and “greatness.” Is it any wonder that the most weak and vulnerable among us, the most marginalized, flee from this poorly made image of the Creator? 

More and more as the years go by, I am convinced that God became a human because she wanted us to know that we are okay just as we are. She wanted us to accept our messy humanness with all its vulnerability.  

God became a poor, working class person; and in doing so, God declared the least of us sacred. The stable became holy ground, the unwed pregnant girl became a saint. No prosperity to bind us to the  rich one, no renown to bind us to the famous one, no power to bind us to the strong one, there is just love to bind us to Love.  

God became poor, obsolete, weak, and lived with those of us who are poor, obsolete, and weak, so we could choose to love her, Our Wonderful Heavenly Mother, freely.  

In eliminating the most female parts from the Christmas story, we’ve eliminated the most human  parts. But becoming human, being human, affirming the sacredness of humanity, was everything the incarnation was supposed to teach us in the first place! God is with us. God is one of us. Accepting and loving ourselves, wherever we are on the gender spectrum, this I believe, was the very heart of what Christ came to reveal. Blood, sweat, tears, screams and all. 

A cramped, annoying spot. Difficult to get to, because the room was more of a breakfast nook really, and our big clumsy table took up far too much space. Frustrating to clean, because the broom or mop would just clatter around table legs, barely making a notable difference to the aging, stained floor.  

This spot was always the last place I got to when sweeping the kitchen. Always the last corner to be cleaned on “house cleaning” days. It was a weary old spot that had somehow come to hold all my frustrations: all my yawning, gaping exhaustion and the hurt of losing a home. All the shame of being powerless and poor, all the unmet longing for change.  

Of course, myself and I, had never had a conscious conversation about this “spot.” It just sat there, being a corner: disliked, cramped, awkward, and annoying to clean.  

One day, while going about my daily mom-tasks, picking up clothes and washing dishes, absent-mindedly wondering if  something new and good would ever come along, I said out loud (as one sometimes does), 

“Where are you, God?”  

And almost before the thought had gathered itself to become a sentence—almost before it had left my tongue, almost before it was even a question—I knew the answer.  

God was in that spot.  

God was in the most mundane, powerless, painful place. God was here with me, waiting and longing, hoping and aching, experiencing every inch of my humanness with me, dying and crying for change.  

This is the poem I wrote about this “spot” that day:

READ: Roots of Justice

“Between the Wall and the Table”  

Between the wall and the table  

In the last place I sweep  

In the last piece of dirt  

I found you  

And round by the sink  

At my sentry stand  

With suds on my fingers  

Old food on my hands  

Not doing what I love  

Just doing what I should  

There, I found you  

Then, out on the prairie  

Where it’s lovely and wild  

Where no word, or breath, or sigh could

express it Where every color is singing

and shouting  And every bird’s whistle

crushes my heart  The whole Earth

inhales  

And releases again  

And the wind cries ‘low’  

As she sweeps across the valley  

The birds gladly ride it  

To the mountains high  

Where my peering eyes follow  

And I’m blessed, and I’m blessed  

Gulping down love  

Famished babe at the breast  

There, I found you 

In every song that I ever sang  

Ripped clean from my lungs  

Red flesh from my breast  

A ragged sharp edge  

Like the beat of a heart  

Or a butterfly’s wing  

This wild thing  

Comes soaring or whispering  

Out of my soul  

That single note  

Now it rises  

Up in the tower room, when I was a child 

I’d sing the whole hymnal just to cry out your name  

There, and there, and there  

I found you 

In my father’s benediction  

In my mother’s tears  

In the bread and the wine  

Your body for mine  

In my lover’s skin  

In the lush green grass of my children’s laughter  

In my best friend’s mind  

Understanding mine  

There, and there, and there  

I found you  

Between the wall and the table  

In the last place I sweep  

In the last piece of dirt  

I found you

The ancient Scots, my ancestors, believed that in the liminal space of nature, on the night

when one season ends and another begins, the Spirits can be more vividly seen, more clearly

heard; they enter in.  

It’s in the liminal space, when there is both light and dark, both sunshine and rain, that we are

able to see that which is always there. Always there, but normally invisible to the naked eye:

the rainbow of colors from which all light is made.  

It’s in the middle-space of both dying and rising that reality widens out and we see

everything, from one end of the  horizon to the other:  

A God who chooses to be weak with us. A God whose strength is love.  

A God you can be angry at, while you are held, deep in the womb of Her love.  

The Great Love that spans over all and can’t be manipulated or owned, only freely given and freely received.

Having been raised in a progressive christian family, I knew that forgiveness was a key element in the healing  process. I even knew that I was allowed to be angry with God.  

And so, after all that loss, I set my face forward, determined to do a good job and walk the path that life had  mapped out for me. For two and half years, I worked the formulas of forgiveness: I wrote letters of  acceptance, prayed prayers of submission, and made every effort to love those who had let me down.  

Then one night, in the middle of my righteous toil, I had a startling dream in which God told me I was to go on a “Journey of Forgiveness.”

“Seriously, God?!” I asked upon waking. “A journey of forgiveness? What do you think I’ve been doing all this time? Who could I possibly have left to forgive?!” 

“Me.” God gently responded. “And yourself.”  

What my spiritual upbringing could never have prepared me for was the ferocious honesty that God would  require of me in this new and unknown level of recovery—this “anger” stage of grief. How God would dig my fury and my honest hurt out of me. How she would require me to confess my resentments. How she would sit lovingly through every season of my aching disappointment and never stop listening to my heart until it was fully poured out; fully healed.  

I didn’t know the intimate audacity that God and I would forever share after that.  Today, I wrote this “version” of Isaiah 55, for all of us who find ourselves angry at God now.  

READ: My Breast Cancer Revealed a Mothering God

Isaiah 55—a “version” for those in the third stage of Grief

Come to me all you who are angry

And you who have no tears left to spend  

Who’ve wrung out your eyes with crying  

Till they’re swollen salt-waters of grief.  

Come weep and rage.  

Come pitch a fit.  

Punch the floor and the wall.  

Come beat my chest and scream at me. 

Come to me all you who are exhausted with yourselves,

Worn out with bitterness and resentment  

Against me, against the Heavens, against the Earth, against others 

Against yourself. 

Come to me all you who feel the knife in your throat,  the tightening knot of your gut,  

Every time my name is mentioned. 

Come all you who wince in pain  

at words attached to my name.  

“God’s will  

God’s blessing  

God’s protection”  

and you who want to scream,  

“Where was it for me?!”  

Every time you see a glint of light you shut it out in fear:

Fear that I’m still Real – but unloving, uncaring, unseeing, untouched.  

Come to me all you who hate  

and can’t seem to stop.  

I still have Love for the taking. 

Why walk in circles,  

Stomping around in your minds,  

Searching for answers and reasons that never come?  

Come eat, come drink, come pour yourself out. 

I’ll listen  

and listen  

and listen  

To your stories and your tears.  

I’ll never grow tired of you,  

even though everyone else has.  

I’ll hear you till your soul can live!  

Come to me all you who are angry,  

Come give me your bitter waters  

Of pain. 

This piece is from Esther’s collection of stories, “A Journey of Forgiveness.” You can read more of her work on her personal blog.

Have you ever found yourself in utter physical darkness? Perhaps in an inner room when the lights  go out? Or in the wilderness on an overcast night? Darkness presses in upon your eyes, and no matter how  wide you stretch them, or which direction you turn, not one pinprick of illumination appears?  

But, as you wait and listen, breathless in the still, another kind of “seeing” begins to take place. Your attention, usually so firmly centered behind your eyes, seems to rush, not only to your ears and fingertips—those “natural” reception centers—but also to a deeper set of senses that now become active as your body sends out previously unknown tentacles of awareness, perception, and recognition.  

Suddenly, you find you’re not alone. The wall beside you  . . . the tree behind you . . . the sky, the  ground, your breath, they all become intensely tactile, full of pulsing energy. Stripped of physical vision,  your surroundings become almost more intimate and real. You are awake in a new way.

This phenomenon is not unlike the intimate connection of Presence that somehow seems to arrive when we feel abandoned by God—or at least ‘God’ in the way we have known God up until now. If you’re on any kind of a spiritual journey, there inevitably comes a day when all the usual “lights” go out. God seems to stop answering. You find yourself suddenly alone.  

Perhaps, like Christ, you experience abandonment of the usual supports. The social structures of  government and church fail you (perhaps there’s a pandemic and vast social/political unrest). Friends and  family, lost in their own fears, abandon you. You lose your job, a loved one dies, you experience painful poverty and provision doesn’t arrive. You fear the days, and anxiety fills your nights.  

Then, even God drops out of view. You beg for a reprieve, longing for just one prayer to be  answered—the foreclosure of your home not to go through, your marriage to survive. But the door seems locked and bolted. You search the dawn daily for new answers, but none arrive. The “lights” have all gone out, and so . . . you wait in the dark.  

And then, after a time,  a new kind of seeing begins to emerge. This time, from within. An  awareness that comes through a deeper set of senses, that have now been summoned awake. An intimate knowing, closer than breath:  

 “I am not alone. You are here with me. Perhaps, somehow you even are me.”  

Left all alone, with no outer ones to wrap their arms around us, we turn to our deepest self. Our  attention that has always been firmly concentrated on looking out, or even up, now looks within. And there,  surrounding our truest self, in our deepest heart, is God.  

 Maker. Source. Union. One—with us. 

There is one more important thing to say about this place: the fear that it will last forever can feel excruciating. I won’t sugarcoat it: in my life this dark time lasted for about seven years. That’s a  long time. There were moments, no months, when I just wanted to end my life because I couldn’t see an end to the barren space, and I wasn’t sure I could endure it anymore.  

If you’re in that space now, please know there is life after this place. Rebirth will come. God’s  promise of resurrection is true. Don’t give up. You are close to the land of living; and Life—the Source—is  with you, always.

“I don’t think we can get free until we’re willing to tell the truth about our history. I do believe in truth and  reconciliation, I just believe that truth and reconciliation are sequential. That you can’t have the reconciliation without  the truth.” – Bryan Stevenson.  

During my twenties, when I lived in New Orleans, I had a friend who would host community gatherings at her home weekly. Just a few years older than me, with three beautiful kids and a successful career, Michelle was one of the only people I met in the South who, with compassionate honesty, could talk about race.  One evening over dinner, she shared some of her family history with our group. Born and raised in a poor, black neighborhood, her generation was the first in her family to attend college; Michelle, the first to gain her masters. She spoke with affection about her mother and grandmother and the struggles of their lives. “And my great-great grandmother,” she added in conclusion, “was a slave.”

Her last sentence hit me like a thunder clap. Just four generations previous, enslavement?! Her great-grandmother, born to two newly liberated parents in those first faltering years of freedom.  So recent, so real, so tangible, so horrific.  For a naïve girl from Scotland, raised in a spiritual commune with black family members and loved ones, the closeness of this brutality felt unbearable and barely real!

Earlier this year when George Floyd was murdered and a new chapter of racial reckoning began in  America, I, like many others, wondered what my part should be. Everyone was talking about change, but to be honest “white allyship” sounded more like a sterile tactical maneuver. It seemed to have little to do with  the love I feel for my black friends and relatives.  

READ: Love for Enemies

 Never the less, something deep within me began to itch. There was a movement awakening in my  soul that began to murmur and then to cry. The truth is, during that decade when I lived in the deep south, where racism broods as thick and oppressive as the humidity, I’d developed my own prejudices. I’d  experienced shame and disgust at white people who spat out unspeakable racial slurs without a second  thought, but I’d also allowed myself to be stunned in dread by the violence I witnessed in the low-income  neighborhood where I lived: My neighbor, being beaten by her man – her screams coming through the walls.  A teenage boy, bleeding to death in the street riddled with bullets. Men on the corner, with guns selling packets of poison. All the fruits of several centuries of excruciating oppression, in a city where human beings were once sold for money.  

Please hear me now, for I must truly confess: some of the most enlightened, spiritually attuned, and  stunningly courageous souls I’ve ever met were my neighbors in the 9th Ward of New Orleans – and yet still, I  allowed myself to judge others offhand by the color of their skin, their income level, or the way they spoke!  (Oh Lord, please have mercy!)  

 As news of rising white supremacy began to frequent our screens this past summer, I looked up and  wondered, Where are we? Where are the white folk who will gather, not to defend our grotesque, painful history, but to own it? Who among us will humbly confess the ongoing atrocity of racism here in America, and sincerely ask for forgiveness?

Again, the question came to mind, What is mine to do?

And then I realized, my job is the same as  everyone else’s – to tell the truth. To own what we can own and to ask for forgiveness. “Say you’re sorry” is  the first lesson we teach our children, and yet as a society we seem to find it nearly impossible. But, that is precisely my desire in making this piece (link below). After all my life experiences: loving my black friends and family, encountering racism in the American south that made me sick with disgust, and yet, at times, allowing that same racism to ferment, even in my own soul. Here, in this time of Racial Reckoning, what I hope to see is that long needed procession of white folk, repentance and remembrance in our hearts, a collective sowing of tears, an open-hearted, honest number … when we gather to ask for forgiveness … I want to be  there.