![]() Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Annie Spratt, Women farming cassava in Sierra Leone (detail), 2017, photo g raph, Sierra Leone, Unsplash, free use. Jenna Keiper, Untitled Rose, (detail), 2020, photograph, used with permission. Image credit: Toni Frisell, Nuns Clamming on Long Island (detail), 1957, photograph, New York, public domain. Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.Read Richard’s poem “It Can’t Be Carried Alone,” written in response to the suffering of the Ukrainian people.She then hands the Second Incarnation on to us, while remaining in the background the focus is always on the child.Įarth Mother presenting Spiritual Son, the two first stages of the Incarnation.įeminine Receptivity, handing on the fruit of her yes.Īdapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe(New York: Convergent, 2019, 2021), 122–124. Mary became the symbol of the First Universal Incarnation. She is invariably offering us Jesus, God incarnated into vulnerability and nakedness. The first Incarnation (creation) is symbolized by Sophia-Incarnate, a beautiful, feminine, multicolored, graceful Mary. ![]() ![]() What is the very ubiquity of this image saying on the soul level? I think it looks something like this: Try to count how many paintings in art museums, churches, and homes show a wonderfully dressed woman offering for your admiration-and hers-an often naked baby boy. Jung believed that humans produce in art the inner images the soul needs in order to see itself and to allow its own transformation. This archetype had already shown herself as Sophia or Holy Wisdom (see Proverbs 8:1–3 Wisdom 7:7–14), and again in the Book of Revelation (12:1–17) in the cosmic symbol of “a woman clothed with the sun and standing on the moon.” Neither Sophia nor the woman of Revelation is precisely Mary of Nazareth, yet in so many ways, both are-and each broadens our understanding of the Divine Feminine. (I am not saying that Mary is the first Incarnation, only that she became the natural archetype and symbol for it, particularly in art.) I believe that Mary is the major feminine archetype for the Christ Mystery. In the mythic imagination, I think Mary intuitively symbolizes the first Incarnation-or Mother Earth, if you will allow me. We are clearly dealing not just with a single woman here but a foundational symbol-or, to borrow the language of Carl Jung (1875–1961), an “archetype”-an image that constellates a whole host of meanings that cannot be communicated logically but is grounded in our collective unconscious. Why did Christianity, in both the East and West, fall head over heels in love with this seemingly ordinary woman Mary, who is a minor figure in the New Testament? We gave her names like Theotokos, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Notre Dame, La Virgen of this or that, Nuestra Señora, Our Mother of Sorrows, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and Our Lady of just about every village or shrine in Europe. ![]() Father Richard describes Mary as a feminine symbol for the divine presence:Īlthough Jesus was a man, the Christ is beyond gender, so it should be expected that the Big Tradition would have found feminine ways, consciously or unconsciously, to symbolize the full Divine Incarnation and to give God a more feminine character-as the Bible itself often does. This week, we consider the implications that the Divine Feminine has in our lives. Both Scripture and Tradition offer metaphors of God as female, having feminine qualities, or fulfilling traditionally female roles.
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