Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. She is many things to many people, but the basis of her story is that she appeared to a 14-year-old Aztec boy whose people were conquered by the invading and marauding and so-called Christian Spaniards in 1531.
They tore into his and other indigenous tribes in the Americas with a passion and vengeance and violence fired by imperial ambitions, racism, greed and power-over, reptilian brain energy, unrivaled but familiar when one meditates on history and how empires so often are formed.
In her powerful book—so needed at this time of patriarchal excess—Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, author of Women who Run With the Wolves, gave us another gift called Untie the Strong Woman: Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Love for the Wild Soul. In it she offers an abundance of gifts around the Lady of Guadalupe and other archetypes of the Divine Feminine.
One such gift is a poem titled “Guadalupe Is a Girl Gang Leader in Heaven.” She describes it as “a resistance prayer-poem at heart” and invites “each soul to be washed in her ferocious and tender compassion.” This clearly echoes the language used of the Divine Feminine in the Middle Ages and invoked in our recent meditations on the return of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris HERE and HERE.
Three sentences from the poem captures its mood early on.
The Virgin Mary is a girl gang leader in Heaven.
She is a Hell’s Angel and she rides a Harley.
This I know for I come from people
Who think axle grease is holy water….
I come from people who think Confession
a necessity only the moment before a head-on collision.
The poem ends with Clarissa telling us why she prays to this Lady:
And I pray to her.
I pray to her.
I pray to her. Mio Dio, Dio Mio,
Because she is the strongest woman I know.
Who can deny that we need the strong feminine in our perilous world today with democracies stumbling and fumbling and Mother Earth being raped and neglected and her pain being ignored by far too many decision-makers?
Clarissa started up a society named after this Lady, La Sociedad de Gaudalupe, a non-profit committed to La Senora’s works in the world—“to broadcast strengthening stories through many means, and to promote the importance of adult literacy amongst impoverished people in our world (including literacy for mothers especially).”
Clarissa spells out for us the deeper meanings of the familiar painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The dark green mantle signifies the “earth in perpetual springtime, the time of new life arriving.” Her mantle speaks of the “golden stars of the cosmos.” Lady Wisdom is always cosmically-oriented. As Clarissa tells us, “she is not just here or there, but everywhere. One can never live outside her domicile.”*
To be continued
*Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, Untie the Strong Woman, pp. 40, 44, 297.
See Matthew Fox, “The Feminine Face of Divinity” and “Wisdom: Another Feminine Face of the Divine,” in Fox, One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths, pp. 117-156.
And Fox, “Sacred Marriages of Masculine and Feminine,” in Fox, The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine, pp. 221-248.
And Fox, Christian Mystics: 365 Readings and Meditations.
And Fox, Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God…Including the Unnameable God, pp. 59-70.
Banner Image: “Guadalupe On Myrtle Avenue.” Photo by B.C. Lorio on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Who is the strongest woman you know? And how do you celebrate your relationship with her? What does she teach you in times of grief and challenge like ours?
Recommended Reading
One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths
Matthew Fox calls on all the world traditions for their wisdom and their inspiration in a work that is far more than a list of theological position papers but a new way to pray—to meditate in a global spiritual context on the wisdom all our traditions share. Fox chooses 18 themes that are foundational to any spirituality and demonstrates how all the world spiritual traditions offer wisdom about each.“Reading One River, Many Wells is like entering the rich silence of a masterfully directed retreat. As you read this text, you reflect, you pray, you embrace Divinity. Truly no words can fully express my respect and awe for this magnificent contribution to contemporary spirituality.” –Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit
The Hidden Spirituality of Men: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine
To awaken what Fox calls “the sacred masculine,” he unearths ten metaphors, or archetypes, ranging from the Green Man, an ancient pagan symbol of our fundamental relationship with nature, to the Spiritual Warrior….These timeless archetypes can inspire men to pursue their higher calling to connect to their deepest selves and to reinvent the world.
“Every man on this planet should read this book — not to mention every woman who wants to understand the struggles, often unconscious, that shape the men they know.” — Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
As Matthew Fox notes, when an aging Albert Einstein was asked if he had any regrets, he replied, “I wish I had read more of the mystics earlier in my life.” The 365 writings in Christian Mystics represent a wide-ranging sampling of these readings for modern-day seekers of all faiths — or no faith. The visionaries quoted range from Julian of Norwich to Martin Luther King, Jr., from Thomas Merton to Dorothee Soelle and Thomas Berry.
“Our world is in crisis, and we need road maps that can ground us in wisdom, inspire us to action, and help us gather our talents in service of compassion and justice. This revolutionary book does just that. Matthew Fox takes some of the most profound spiritual teachings of the West and translates them into practical daily mediations. Study and practice these teachings. Take what’s in this book and teach it to the youth because the new generation cannot afford to suffer the spirit and ethical illiteracy of the past.” — Adam Bucko, spiritual activist and co-founder of the Reciprocity Foundation for Homeless Youth.
Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God …Including the Unnameable God
Too often, notions of God have been used as a means to control and to promote a narrow worldview. In Naming the Unnameable, renowned theologian and author Matthew Fox ignites our imaginations by offering a colorful range of Divine Names gathered from scientists and poets and mystics past and present, inviting us to always begin where true spirituality begins: from experience.
“This book is timely, important and admirably brief; it is also open ended—there are always more names to come, and none can exhaust God’s nature.” -Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, author of Science Set Free and The Presence of the Past
6 thoughts on “Our Lady of Guadalupe Feast Day, 2024”
The Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine, the Sacred Marriage/Unio Mystica, SPIRIT are the spiritual energies of Our SOURCE~CREATOR Present within ALL ongoing and evolving physical and non-physical Creation/COSMOS, especially Our Beautiful Sacred Mother Earth/Her living creatures/Graceful abundance and our humanity as unique female and male Eternal Souls evolving in Our LOVING DIVERSE ETERNAL ONENESS in the Sacred Process of the ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT….
Thank you Matthew for bringing Our Lady of Guadalupe and Este’s book with her powerful stories into our daily meditations. I bought this book in 2011 when it was published. I highly recommend the hard cover for all the glorious illustrations including Este’s personal photos of alters. She is a master storyteller !! I keep this book close to me for comfort, hope and strength. May Our Lady of Guadalupe bless us all on this her Feast Day and always. 🙏
Who is the strongest woman I know? I can think of several women in the public eye whom I don’t personally know who appear to have incredible strength! But perhaps because of the absence of living female mentors in my life, or because I don’t know even the inner lives of my closest woman friends, or candidly because of my own inordinate ego, I am the strongest woman I know. That answer leapt to me right away. I know my inner struggles and I know how hard it has been to go on. As I think about that, I realize that I don’t know what even my closest female friends have had to deal with in their lives. How does it feel inside them? With one exception, my mentors have always been men, and that makes me sad. I think this is because sexism is still with us. Mostly, we haven’t elevated women to platforms where we have access their wisdom and their strength. Imagine a world where we heard from them as much or more than we hear from our male mentors! What incredible wisdom they could share. How different, how much more compassionate a world we would have if the voices of women, of mothers, had equal say?
Thank you Matthew for bringing Clarissa P Estes, rep of the Divine Feminine, into the conversation.
One of my favorite quotes from her is:
A woman’s issues of soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture, nor can she be bent into a more intellectually acceptable shape by those who claim to be the sole bearers of consciousness. No, that is what has already caused millions of women who began as strong and natural powers to become outsiders in their own cultures.
The “strongest woman I know” has no name, but she is well-known. She is “THAT Woman”, the “unwelcome one” who refuses to stay intimidated and silent in the face of oppression and discrimination.
SHE is the one who voices the Truth of Woman’s Soul.
I knew her, instinctively, even as a child in my world bounded by a rigidly strict, judgemental old-world Lutheran culture at home, in a society that gave women few options, all of which demanded submission and deference to all men. I knew her even though I was dutifully quiet and intimidated. I knew her — she was an unvoiced, deep part of me that KNEW TRUTH –and waited for me to see her, hear her, be her.
It took years to find her. Decades between my Truth-Revealing mystical experience and my long journey of learning — about mysticism, religions, the stifling of women’s voices and souls over millennia, the lies of patriarchy. It ran parallel to my journey of sorrow — going deaf, facing handicap discrimination (and finding the courage to fight it), and protecting, fighting for, and and standing together with other suffering females of all ages.
THAT woman — the strong one who dares to stand up and speak Truth to power — I know her now. It took me a long time to grow into her. I was told women were LESS, but within my Soul the Spirit said otherwise.
A deep Bow and Thanks for these candid and powerful responses to the question posed about the strongest woman you know. I am moved to hear your stories and your journey to find your own strength.