I found Mary in the grotto, shaded from the sun, her feet covered in confessions from seekers like me.
To understand God not just as father but as mother is revolutionary for anyone who grew up in a patriarchal tradition.
When God is mother, we relate to her differently. And while we are aware that the Divine is beyond gender, our gendered metaphors are essential to our own understanding. God as mother is a nurturing, maternal presence, and for some of us, an entirely new way of being.
After I found Mary in the grotto, I prayed to God our mother for the first time, and my prayers took on a new form. I handed her the things that were the heaviest in my heart, expecting the gentle reception of a mother. It sounded something like this.
Mother Mary,
Take my desire to be beautiful for every external, patriarchal reason.
Allow me instead to enjoy my own body, my own beauty, my light. To dress in clothes that bring me joy, to celebrate my body with movement and nourishment, to love the parts that don’t conform because they are mine. Like a flower in the field, I am utterly insignificant and absolutely essential at the same time.
Take my attachment to the end result, to the achievement.
Allow me instead to enjoy the process of my own seeking and grounding. To create and speak truth and love the process more than what the process might lead to. Allow me to detach from the competitive, results-driven system that I was told held the secret to happiness, a lie perpetuated to increase production and efficiency.
Take the pressure that I feel from the inherent restraints of my season of life.
Allow me instead to enjoy this brief moment of mothering that has so many gifts to give me. To play and explore and commune through the eyes of my young children, to create space for myself and ask for help without guilt or regret. Allow me to see that this is where the gold is hidden, I won’t find it in another place or in another time.
After an hour of communing with Mother, I climbed down from the grotto with fresh knowing.
Enjoy your body. Enjoy your work. Enjoy your family.
Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.
Love, Mary in the grotto