Mary, Mary, Not Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow?

This all started with a meditation and a painting, the painting you see at the beginning of this reflection. I have had a devotion to the Black Madonna, who, in the words of the late Jungian analyst and author, Marion Woodman, is an embodiment of both matter and spirit, who is not just the spirit-heavy, idealized sweetness and balance of the Renaissance Blessed Mother, but a woman who is matter with real flesh and real blood and real emotions, is sensual and sexual, and not just air-possessed spiritual. This Dark Madonna is a woman whom I could relate to, who, pun intended, could matter to me.

But what about the other Mary, the one who seems so passive and bloodless as described in Luke’s narrative? What was she like under the heavy weight of that story? The picture I made that stands at the front of this essay is of Mary taking off the cloak of the Gospel of Luke. Who was THIS Mary?

In meditation, I invited her to speak with me and the cast of a few of the many forms of Katherine that live in me and speak for the diverse and faceted parts of me. (Oh, come now, you can’t tell me that you have never experienced this in your own consciousness: just listen to what is going on in your head when it’s time to get on that exercise bike or turn down that luscious slab of chocolate cake with the butter-cream icing, yes, the one that haunts your dreams.)

At any rate, Mary agreed, and this is what followed:

Me: Mary, you have been with me all of my life in story, in ceremony, in learned prayer, but I’ve never felt YOU with me. I do not think of you; I think of your dark twin sister, the Dark Madonna, in whose deep shade I have lain, who gave me comfort in my dark times. But who are you? I’ve only heard stories about you. And why are you in my garden? You are a small brown girl, not the vision of complete balance and calm that the Renaissance painters have imaged you into being.

Mary: I love your garden!  It needs some tending, though. Where I’m from, the heart of the summers is longer and stronger. I wish I had had a hose like this to water vegetables and flowers. Come, I will help you weed.

But I am wondering: why does a part of you get angry when my name is mentioned?

Katarzyna: I’ll tell you why she is angry. She gets angry because you let yourself be used and you didn’t even question it. So this stranger angel shows up in your bedroom and tells you that you that you will be God’s mom. Sure thing, Boss, you say. So, you are pregnant and you don’t know how you got that way. I sometimes think that this whole angel thing was some sort of a screen memory under which hides something really awful. They didn’t have shrinks back then, I guess, or someone would have made you go. And if you didn’t actually have a man, you end up pregnant by some bizarre pathogenesis thingy and didn’t even get to enjoy the sex part. This is what I’ve always hated—This god is a SOB god who says, you’re going to do this job, and I’m not even going to ask you if you want to. And from what I hear, you didn’t even complain. How stupidly compliant of you!

Me:  Katarzyna, please calm down. I don’t want to drive her away with your anger. I know that you have been trying to protect me all these years, but sometimes I feel you are like that old Star Trek episode where the holographic woman left over from a long-gone civilization keeps appearing with a challenge to ANYONE who arrives. “I am for you, Captain Kirk. Phasers  charged.” Your anger shuts people up. This girl came at my invitation. We owe her respect.

Mary: I understand Katarzyna’s anger, really I do. But I need to say something about where you got all this. It’s as if you know me as a woman who was made up by Facebook or some 1950’s ad agency. I am what Luke says I said and did what I did. Stories are ruthless. You know the way people make up things about the motivations of people they don’t know. Misinformation. They were trying to create a myth to support their message and some things just slid right out—like my inner struggle. Who says I just took all this without complaint? I was scared to death and confused as hell. It was NOT a good inner scene for me. But my story is told for other purposes than the inner truth in the process. It all has to serve the architecture of a story for a bigger Truth. And that’s why I went along with it. I knew in my heart even then when I was naïve and not yet educated by the centuries of myth, that love was life. Life is love. It’s a simple equity. They are the same thing in different clothing. This is the law written in my heart. And God is this, but at times in human living, we just don’t get it, don’t give it the wonder it deserves. This God is in me, in you. And when I knew this, I had no problem bringing it into the world as my child. We all are incarnates, but we forget because we don’t see it. We are focused on other stories or shiny distractions—like those moving garden ornaments I saw on TV. I guess you need stuff like that when you have no flowers. It’s like a substitute beauty, a substitute life.

But giving birth out of wedlock in those times. Yes, that was hard. Don’t you think I struggled with that as much as you struggle with the love inside you waiting to be born? So I was a young child, pregnant, who had another young child in the garden with her which was as full of weeds in September as yours is now. We run out of steam with the work and we both need to ride the back of a sturdy story. So I ride my simple story of simple equations and the other child, the other me, rides a big galooting St. Luke Christmas story which they constructed from parts of other stories when all we really wanted to say was—Damn! it’s dark in here and we are scared and we need some light because fear lives in the dark. And danger.

You feel, and rightfully so, that there were people in your life that turned away from you when you needed them, and yes, loved them, and it was desperately dark and you drew the dark around yourself like a blanket and waited until the darkness passed. We all have versions of this story in us. But we were turned away in the Bethlehem story, not because the town was angry with us or wanted harm for us but because there was no room like your mother who was a loving mother but who had so little room for you in the chaos of all those children, and you felt left in the dark. And I know that it is hard to be angry at someone for being human and limited when you are human and limited but you do not have to hate yourself because you are the only available and safest target. I doesn’t matter what happened to you so much as what you do with it that counts, obeying the law that is written on YOUR heart.

I know that it may not be as simple as all that, but you can hate me if you need to until it is safe enough. I can wait.

Let me dip back into the BIG story, the part about my going to see my cousin. You know this…you’ve said it many times with all the intensity of one who knows that one’s words are hollow…my soul doth magnify the lord…It’s not what happened to me, but it’s what I did with it that counts. I am the one who uses my life and the whole damned story into something that you can feel and taste and see and hear and smell: love. The energy of life that you as a meditator, of which I am born, consciously sit with every day. But it is with you all the time. My life magnifies this. I am here.

So let me help you weed this garden together. And maybe when we are finished this day’s work, we can all sit down on the back deck and breathe together. Katarzyna, come on. There are no dangers here. I would say take a vacation, but I know you won’t.

Katarzyna: Maybe you can get Kate to stop trying to lure some poor guy into her procrustean bed of her logic. Isn’t she getting a bit old for that?

Me. Aren’t we all. I’ll get the tea.

We all belong.

……….And, if you’ve been kind enough to stick with me this far, look at the picture of Mary that began this essay. You can see Mary putting on the cloak of words once again, as do I.

-Kitty Yanson, 9/2021