It so happens that this past Sunday, I had the privilege of attending a rich seminar on the Black Madonna taught by Christena Cleveland, PhD, author of God Is a Black Woman. And on Monday night, Alessandra Belloni and I conducted a workshop on the Black Madonna as well.
Alessandra is the author of the powerful and practical book, Healing Journeys with the Black Madonna: Chants, Music, and Sacred Practices of the Great Goddess. I was honored to write a Foreword to that book when it came out a few years ago.
During her presentation, Alessandra casually remarked that the Lady of Guadalupe is the Black Madonna. Our presentation occurred on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in the Roman Catholic Liturgical Year, often considered a special Feast Day of the Black Madonna as well. Individual Feast Days also exist for individual Black Madonna traditions, such as the Feast of Our Lady of Montserrat (April 27), Our Lady of Einsiedeln (July 21) or Our Lady of Czestochowa (August 22).
Today, December 12, is the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, so beloved by many from Latin America in particular, since she appeared there to a young indigenous teenager, ten years after the Spanish conquered his area and spoke to him in his native tongue.
All these Feast Days of the Black Madonna and Our Lady of Guadalupe are celebrations of the Divine Feminine, the Great Mother, the Mother of Africa, who is the Mother of us all, and Mary as a wise Mother in that lineage. All remember the feminine in diverse forms, cultures, ethnicities, and manifestations.
Such a needed Reminder at this time in history, when authoritarianism and domination are showing their ugly heads once again: There is another way to see the world than power-over. That is the way of “God-with-us” instead of “God-over-us.” Fascism is all about God and God wanna-be’s exerting power over us. “God-with-us” is the very meaning of Emmanuel so true to the season of Christmas and Advent.
Advent, a preparation for a Great Coming that is not just about Jesus’ birthday but about the many birthdays that the Christ undergoes in all of us. I call this the “second-coming”—the birth of God in all of us—how we all give birth to the Christ, the Buddha, the Image of God. Meister Eckhart celebrates this birthing of the Christ that we bring about in all our choices, including, of course, the decisions we make to resist the allurements of patriarchal power-over in its many manifestations.
The values of the Great Mother include caring for the least and most vulnerable among us. This contrasts with the cruelty of ICE occurring in so many cities and towns in America today, and with the vile rhetoric coming from high places putting down people and whole countries (such as Somalia) that have gifted America with refugees to our shores. It contrasts with the vile put-down of the trans community as well.
Julian of Norwich underscored how compassion is the mark of motherhood, and God and of Christ are both to be understood as mothers, for the mother’s love “is surest, readiest and nearest.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in her book Untie the Strong Woman, talks movingly and down to earth about the Lady of Guadalupe. She observes that many conceive of contemplation as meditation in a far-away place of great silence and beauty, but not so Our Lady of Guadalupe.
She is famous for bearing roses and grows her strongest roses in the earthly ground where she is most needed—amongst horns honking, ambulances careening, children crying out alternatively in joy and in pain, all the people groaning and dancing and making love, the complete trochimochi, every which way, of humanity whose singing, sounds, works, and actions are part of the exact basis for the harmonious cacophony
—the music of the cosmos.
She believes she appears “in times that are not calm, and in clouds of dust that are not particularly picturesque.” She stands among the broken glass on the sidewalk, walking every street, hanging out at street corners where “maybe even God Herself ought be cautious.”*
The message is the same: Freedom, Liberation, and Equality.
*Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Untie the Strong Woman, p. 270.
Banner Image: “Lavanderia Cultural Murals, Pilsen, Chicago.” Photo by Richie Diesterheft on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
What does a Return of the Divine Feminine mean to you? And to our culture and species as you see it in our times? How do the persons and archetypes of the Black Madonna and Our Lady of Guadalupe speak to that return and remembrance?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
Stations of the Cosmic Christ
Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic—And Beyond
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
“Appendix: MAGA’s Precarious Manhood vs. Authentic Masculinity” in Trump & the MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ, pp. 99-104.
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice
Meditations with Meister Eckhart: A Centering Book
4 thoughts on “Today: The Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe”
Paradoxically, the pathetic swan song of the current decaying patriarchy also heralds the maiden speech of a rediscovered Divine Feminine. The Earth’s future depends more on ecofeminism than on the shenanigans (Henanigans?) of the current green-washers and ballroom gilders of our time. Black, the color of yin, rises in an ocean of yang . . . the wheel of civilizational seasons cannot be stopped by decree. Black Madonnas were often dug out from the soil by “ANIMA-ls” near waterholes, their fertile dwelling. Welcome, pregnant and hopeful darkness!
The Return of the Divine Feminine means to me the Eternal Birth of Christ~Sophia in our hearts and humanity on our spiritual journeys through the many sufferings and joys of daily transformative deaths and compassionate rebirths with one another, with Our Beautiful Sacred Mother Earth/Her living creatures/graceful abundance, and with the subtle spiritual physical/nonphysical beings and dimensions of Our evolving and Sacred Cosmos of LOVING DIVERSE ONENESS….
We need the return of the divine feminine now. Come quickly Lady.
The ways of Divine feminine, Holy Wisdom, our Black Madonna are transformative and subversive.
May we learn to submit to Her creative power and goodness for the world