Monday, June 11, 2007

Titles of the Virgin Mary

I've been looking for a list of these...this one has 333...there have to be lots more, though. This one leaves off Our Lady of Space, a 1960s-vintage appellation...still, some of these are so interesting: "Star that Bore the Sea"..."Light Cloud of Heavenly Rain"...

"Unwatered Vineyard of Immortality's Wine" is a little klunky, though...

my mom (raised by lapsed Catholics, lapsed even further, and now back, sort of, in the fold--on her own terms, of course) is coming to see the new Temple of Doom for the first time and Goddess knows what she will make of the multitude of Marys on the walls (probably approve)...the aggregation of angels (ditto)... the gaggle of gurus (probably not say anything)...the handful of weird Hindu images, including a repro of Sarada Devi's devotional image of Kali...then again, my mom, ever eclectic, ever marching to her own fife and drum corps, gave me the image of Lakshmi, Ganesh, and Saraswati that's nailed up by the door...

it was my mom's girlhood bible, well-hid in her grown-up closet, that beckoned me to the spiritual world when I was a kid, and though my parents' fears of my becoming a "religious fanatic" have long since and in strange fashion come true, I'm also happier with me, with my mom, and with the memory of my father than I've ever been...and Mom can see it, or maybe after 43 years she's just given up on making me into a dittohead (she's actually been more and more, er, laissez-faire since my dad died years ago)... which increases harmony and mental health, as does my post- Al-Anon decision to cease and desist fretting about the error of her or anyone else's ways...for their ways might work far better for them than mine would...or might be their Higher Power's means of drawing them nearer...

Jane Flax or Patricia J. Williams or somebody once said that "the complexity of the world is a fact of great analytical importance," and it's also one that Kali seems determined to impress upon me, by immersing me in complex experiences with complex women in Her complex unfolding and giving me just enough smarts for my head to ache at how-- complex-- it All is... and I know that I honor Her complexity in part by living and letting live, by being who I am and not getting bent out of shape when others, lo and behold, want to be who they are...hard as it is, it's so much better than what I knew before... if Mary can have hundreds of titles, then Her children can have several, at least, too...and it's OK...like mother, like child...