Call Your Mother

Originally posted at The Way of the Rose 54-Day Novena Facebook group August 15, 2020

Novena Day 3

The Glorious Mysteries

I’m going to tell you a little about my journey with Mama Mary.

I grew up Catholic. I heard a lot about Mary over the years. I think I got my first rosary beads at 6. I loved them, but mostly because I thought they would make a pretty necklace. Anytime we said the rosary in Catholic school, I was bored out of my mind.

Over the years, the beads lost their luster. I thought Catholics were kind of missing the point, elevating Jesus’s mom to rockstar status with no doctrinal justification. At the same time, of course, the doctrine itself struck me as stale, illogical, and sterile. I guess it was inevitable that I would leave.

When I started praying the rosary, I was convinced that we need to recall the Divine Feminine to make the changes necessary to survive, let alone thrive, but I didn’t have a clue how to go about it. I loved my mother (she died about six years ago), but we weren’t that close when I was a child. As the seventh of eight kids, “Mom” for me was someone who cared, but in a hands-off kind of way.

How could I get close to the Divine Mother, who seemed many levels above my own somewhat impersonal earthly mother?

I did what she told me to do: I said the rosary. I took the timeout of quarantine to take my practice up a level and now I walk along my local creek for more than an hour a day talking to her. My Hail Mary’s expanded as I walked. The more time I spent with Mama Mary, the more I trusted her to hear what I needed to say, what I wanted my mama to know. And the more I told her, the more she approved. Not of what I said, necessarily, but of me, of my desire to heal and become whole.

I could FEEL her love flowing through me.

The more I felt it, the more I opened to it. I went right back to the beginning, the umbilical connection. I crawled back inside the womb where I felt her heartbeat. I imagined myself as a suckling infant, her milk flowing through my being, nourishing me, body and soul. That’s when I knew in a physical down-to-my-bones kind of way that Mama Mary feels about me the same way that I felt about my little newborns. She wants me to succeed. She wants me to be happy. And she really, really wants to help.

All her children. All the time. Her milk is on tap for anyone who thirsts. But the thirst is key; she will not push her way in if she is not invited. She scrupulously observes free will. Her wisdom, her power, and her grace are always available for us, but we have to ask. Otherwise, she would be like the nosy neighbor who offers “help” when none is needed or wanted, or worse, the man who pushes sexual attention on a woman who is not interested.

In Way of the Rose, you’ve probably heard the third glorious mystery, the Descent of the Holy Spirit, often reworded as the Descent of the Goddess. In my head, I reword it even further. I call it “Receiving the Mother,” because she doesn’t have to descend (she’s already here), “Mother” is so much more personal for me than “Goddess,” and “receiving” reminds me that it’s my action that’s required. She’s already done her part by making her love available 24/7.

Mama Mary is always waiting for our call.

So, call your mother. You’ll be glad you did.