Unveiling the Blessed Mother
by Dr. Constant Mews

We are all born of a mother's blood, effort, and on-going love. That experience has been universal since the beginning of human history. Yet so often, perhaps for many thousands of years, we humans forget where we come from. In this small talk, which I am so honored to give at the unveiling of this wonderful image, I shall pick out and situate what we are about to see within a larger perspective. I would like to begin with the Venus figurines, those wonderfully bulbous pregnant women sculpted in stone from some 30,000 years ago. These images are among the oldest figurative images in recorded history, witness to a profound spiritual movement that we can only dimly grasp. Some scholars have suggested that these images were worshipped to promote fertility of the tribe. This might have been important to those early peoples (indeed where would we be without their fertility?), but I would like to suggest a deeper theme, that they reminded people of where they came from, and where their true values must lie. They are produced at the same time as we find weapons, instruments that have the capacity to kill, as well as to provide food for the community. At a time when animals to hunt may have become scarcer, as competition for precious resources increases, it was necessary to be reminded of where we came from. What I want to suggest is that throughout human history, what we may call the Divine or Blessed Mother, has served the purpose to correct, to turn back individuals and communities and individuals to the right direction, from a tendency to become self-absorbed with its own problems, to become more dense, if you will.

As societies developed centralized political structures in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, so as to cultivate the land, powerful masculine hierarchies developed to govern the state as well as the celestial hierarchy. In Babylon, the story of the annual destruction by Marduk, the male ruler, of Tiamat, the great serpent and life giver dwelling in the seas, symbolized the assertion of masculine power and civilization over unruly nature. This creates a situation of imbalance, spiritual as much as political. The emergence of reverence for female images of divinity can be understood, I suggest, as part of a cosmic process of correction or balancing in these more complex civilizations. In Egypt, Isis became the revered force that gives and sustains life, seeking her husband Osiris, the one who will die but will re-emerge through her son, Horus. The image of the divine mother is not simply that of a woman, but rather a spiritual manifestation serving simply to restore balance to what is imbalanced.

Yet there is always a great danger with any manifestation of a divine image, that of idolization, turning ideals into idols. The great contribution of Hebrew tradition is that it warns against the process of making false idols. The story of how Moses challenged the Hebrews for making a golden calf, after they left Egypt, is not simply about the victory of patriarchy over a divine goddess. It is a human story about what happens to any religious or philosophical group (even in our times), about worshipping an image of what is gendered, rather than appreciating the true meaning of the revelation. Even with monotheist tradition, especially when interpreted by a purely male elite, there was a tendency to image God as purely male, that which is conceptual and other. For this reason, the teaching developed of Wisdom (hokmah), personified as female, nurturing and sustaining creation. Jesus himself lived in the closest awareness of Lady Wisdom, and saw his mission as simply to manifest that divine Wisdom in the world.

There are many ways by which this Wisdom is manifest, by which the human tendency to self-absorption and creating idols has been countered. In the early Christian centuries, the Jesus movement developed to challenge those who had become self-absorbed with their own ideals. Yet it did not escape the problem besetting any organization, of creating an idol out of its own structure. The Age of the Church Fathers produced some great theology, but also some rather narrow perspectives. Fascinatingly, it is in the fourth and fifth centuries, precisely as Christianity became a religion of the State, that the Blessed Mother re-emerged to remind people of the source of true life. The great medieval images of Mary and her child Jesus pick up the recurring image of the divine mother and her child to counter the tendency to imagine divinity as purely female. In the Christian Middle Ages, Mary is always understood as the manifestation of wisdom, while Jesus is its embodiment in the flesh.

Inevitably, Christian devotion to Mary produced a narrowing. Islam challenged that tendency to venerate purely icons, by re-asserting the transcendent, otherworldly nature of spiritual energy. Yet within Islam, it was the great gift of the Sufi mystics like Rumi to remind us of the divine wisdom nourishing the world and drawing us to its source.

This is why every religion, indeed every philosophical movement, needs every now and then to be woken up. This is why we need an angel (the word means messenger) to wake us up. The word evangelion is simply the good message that we need, to lift us out of where we too often slip into.

In the ancient civilization of India, generated by that great awakening over five thousand years ago, there has also been a process by which religions and philosophies have sought to remind a complex society of where it came from. To speak for myself, it has been through my experience of India and some great teachers that it has nurtured, that I have learned more about the true meaning of Christian revelation in which I have been raised. There has always been in India, as anywhere else, the danger of spiritual imbalance. To counter the danger of too much intellectualism in religion, Kashmir Shaivism developed to open up the source of the heart, an ancient tradition of spiritual opening re-energized in the twentieth century by Baba Muktananda, through whom Master Charles Cannon has been profoundly shaped. I am indebted to Master Charles, or perhaps the Blessed Mother, for awakening me, and making me understand just a little more of my own tradition.

The Blessed Mother is not about a specific woman. We are dealing with what is beyond gender. What is manifested to us as feminine is simply correcting an imbalance in the way we imagine ourselves, beyond a merely physical, sexual identity. We must beware of making a false idol of this most recent revelation. This is why we always need to be stirred from outside by those who can offer images that are fresh and new.

It is quite simply amazing-indeed pure synchronicity-that what I will call two angels should live across the road from the Sanctuary, namely an internationally renowned painter, Alexander (Anufriev), and Tanya (Anisimova), a world class cellist and composer. The role of the artist is always to revitalize, to give life again by looking afresh. The visual image has a particular power to move us, in part because it is familiar (and so connecting with part of us), but also because it is new, taking us into a new space. In the jargon of our time, they give us an update. Even more amazing is that it is Alexander's mission particularly to remind us that angels are ever fresh in our life. In the picture that we shall see, the role of the angels is to point to the Blessed Mother, the source of our life. Without interaction with fresh artists, able to question old idols and suggest new ways forward, any religious tradition will stagnate.

We are coming to the unveiling. Yet I want to emphasize that the real unveiling is not what we will see with our eyes, but what must go on within each one of us. The true unveiling is in our hearts. Sometimes we must close our eyes in order to see more clearly. We should also be aware of the role of music, which we shall hear. Music exposes the very structure of reality, of the world in which we live and can live, at its deepest level. We are privileged to listen to music as we look at this picture, and thus have our hearts opened at the deepest level, to the true music and dance of the cosmos.

Associate Professor Constant J. Mews is Director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Theology, Monash University Australia. Between September and December 2006 he has been a visiting Professor at the Department of History, University of Virginia. He has written widely on philosophy, theology and history in the medieval period, but is also widely involved in promoting interfaith dialogue both within Abrahamic religions and between Abraham and non-Abrahamic religious groups. With his wife, Maryna, he has been a close friend and supporter of Master Charles Cannon and the Synchronicity Foundation for many years.