THE WAY OF THE MOTHER

Treasa O’Driscoll

In 1990, after considerable inner struggle, I managed to break loose from a domestic situation that had become intolerable to me. A firmly held conviction of the indissolubility of the marriage bond died hard. Although friends and family were encouraging the move, I only crossed the threshold of realization one day when I finally admitted to a trusted counselor in a very small voice, “I do not want to be married anymore.” Like many other women in later life who have once been timid, I felt a gathering of forces in me that enabled me to say no to a way of life that I could no longer sustain but which was a source of material security to me. Finding myself at odds with many of the events of a household that was once my pride and joy gave rise to great upheaval in the life of my family. All order was displaced for a time as though we were living in the wake of an earthquake. The illusions and unexamined assumptions with which I began an earlier, more naïve phase of my life all surfaced for review and redemption. It was not difficult to trace them retrospectively from the compromising circumstances that crowded around me and from which I now sought release.

Change intensified during the following years. A new order of life seemed intent on breaking through from within. This power was termed menopause. It was to be celebrated rather than deplored, for a natural shift of focus occurred as my bodily reality altered to accommodate awakening spiritual faculties and the greater expansion of my intrinsic love nature. With it came an appetite for new adventure rather in the spirit of the three Irish monks who set out from the south of Ireland sometime during the sixth century. They pushed out in their little currach [“small boat”] without benefit of oar or sail. After some time at sea they drifted ashore somewhere on the English coastline. Emerging from their frail vessel, they were questioned by an inhabitant: “Why have you come here?” “We do not know,” came the reply. “But we must be always on pilgrimage, we know not where.”

So much were they imbued with an awareness of the love indwelling every human heart that they were impelled to go forth to meet as many people as possible in order to more fully live this mystery. Divine presence was known not simply inferred. This is how I began to know it at this time of my life. All encounters with other people seemed more than ever enchanted and sacred. I sense this realization in many women my age in the climate of freedom and changing values in which we live that is charged with the potential of “ that – which – is – not – yet”. Some fifty million women are moving through menopause at the turn of this twenty first century. Many are imbued with conscious spiritual intent, peaceful and loving, holding the focus of a more harmonious and unified whole, to bring mankind through the proverbial eye of the needle. Ralph Waldo Emerson has expressed the essence of what many of my contemporaries realize :

The secret of culture is to learn that a few great points steadily reappear... and, that these few are alone to be graded: the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are, and love of what is simple and beautiful; independence and cheerful relation, these are the essentials, these, and the wish to serve, to add something to the well-being of men and women.

There is a mother’s heart at the centre of existence whose warmth can penetrate selfishness, exploitation and apathy. It is this heart that both men and women are learning to access today. In later life when the demands of mothering and homemaking have been largely satisfied women begin to recognise a profound desire to be of service to the whole. We are entering an age of opportunity for women to become inspiring counsellors and far sighted leaders imbued with a new feminine ideal that arises out of the breakdown of the old order of analytic consciousness.

The new feminine calls for trust in the face of adversity, unconditional living on the edge of uncertainty, a freeing and schooling of our attention and a renewal of the imagination. The American poet Paula Brown had entered into this deepest of all hearts when she gave voice to her experience of the divinity she found imminent in the company of women keeping vigil at their peace camp at Greenham Common in England. She entitled her poem, The New Mary:

If in time to come

A child should ask me why...How?

I would reply

There came upon the earth a new Mary

She sung songs

She built a web

She grew like a great flower in the light of

Her own truth and sisterhood.......

The presence of this new Mary fully and sadly acknowledges the painful reality that men women, children and the old are living in abject conditions of disease, war and poverty, that forests and seas are dying, that many are condemned to homelessness and hopelessness.

As if to underscore these thoughts as I drove the winding country road to Killaloe, my attention was drawn to a large statue of Our Blessed Virgin, as she is fondly called here, her arms outstretched to gather in her children. Her figure commanded a stretch of road as I rounded another bend. A source of bemused speculation for scientist, skeptic and believer was a phenomenon that occurred in 1986, when no less than fifteen of these wayside statues of Mary began to perceptibly sway backwards and forwards and from side to side. I was sojourning in County Cork at the time, my place of residence located only six miles from Ballinaspittle, where the most remarkable of these phenomena could be witnessed. Kathleen Raine, England’s great poet wrote, admonishing me to ...go and see if the statue is really moving. Perhaps you can determine what it is the Virgin is trying to tell us… Each time I cycled to the spot and knelt before the roadside shrine, I could distinctly observe the movement in the statue. Paula Brown’s poem, discovered when I opened a newly acquired book, was the closest I came to revelation. I knew the Virgin was drawing the attention of women everywhere to the wellspring of renewal that lies within our collective consciousness.

We are the purpose, she said,

The vision is us.

The source of that renewal is our acknowledgement of the presence of the Divine Mother more than ever before active in the world. We can apprehend this force of love and transformation, of which statues, pictures and concepts are but pale reminders, wherever qualities of virtue prevail. When we cultivate Devotion, Balance, Faithfulness, Selflessness, Compassion, Courtesy, Equanimity, Patience, Truth, Courage, Discernment and Love we take up the activity of soul traditionally perfected by Mary. Virtues imply a practical doing. In the practice of virtue values, ethics and morals leave the high ground of theory, where they have been marooned by dogma and find potent expression in human relationships.Virtue arises out of a reconciliation of opposites in oneself and implies hospitality towards our own negative traits. By following closely the movement from the depths to heights of our experience we develop a conscious soul life which can work against the loss of soul in the world.

Only the practice of virtue will bring us into true community with others. Before we come to community we have to know ourselves very well, to realise that our reaction to another person is an encounter with an aspect of ourselves. The quality of our relationships is an accurate measure of the degree to which we have embodied virtue. This process begins with an ability to live with one’s own imperfections, in not hiding behind appearance or in clinging to habit, in being always ready to begin anew. Virtue demands the cultivation of imagination-which is no more than the ability to create images of all that we are not, that we might fulfill the potential inherent in our humanity.

The soul flourishes in this activity of engagement with the virtues-it is analagous with artistic activity in us-a treading of a middle way in our life of feeling. I find it comforting to know that it is by way of timidity and recklessness that Courage is born in us for instance, that one cannot realise Selflessness unless one is familiar with the extent of one’s own selfishness and self abnegation. As one becomes accustomed to the sensation of soul pleasure that the practice of virtue gives so does its activity increase in us. It is its own reward and the purpose of our life on earth. As the rose blooms so that the rest of the garden may be beautiful so patience develops in us, that Patience may permeate our world. If we pay attention to our daily lives we cannot fail to notice that virtue lives as the medium of all fruitful interaction with others. In times past religious training presupposed an increase in morals. To-day people engage in a variety of spiritual exercises which do not necessarily affect the moral sense. Witness the frequent falls from grace of venerated gurus, previously upheld as paragons of excellence whose exacting practices nevertheless failed in the development of any real moral fibre.

Virtue becomes the basis of a new psychology appropriate to modern consciousness. Virtue imbues us with the moral fortitude necessary to withstand the forces that oppose the spiritualization of the earth. Rilke could sense, like other intuitives, that our earth was urgently asking for its own transformation in the crucible of human hearts. We may join with him in his vigorous assent:

Earth, dear earth, I will do it!

The Mother prepares our hearts for this task which requires precision in thinking and expression, in increased attention to the use and meaning of words. As I drove along this Irish road I could sense that Our Lady was calling for a re-evaluation of the appellation Virgin beyond its limited biological interpretation. A wider connotation of the term emerged from my reading of Rudolf Steiner’s The Fifth Gospel. In a passage that strikes the reader with the full force of revelation, Dr. Steiner describes a meeting that took place between Jesus and his mother before the baptism in the river Jordan. Weary from his extensive travels and in deep distress at all he had witnessed of human depravity and the uneasy future that lay ahead for humanity, Jesus lays all his troubles at Mary’s feet. As he unburdens himself Mary listens in the depth of her heart. Doubt leaves him and he begins to accept the fullness of the Christ impulse and the fulfillment of his teaching mission. In the intensity of their loving exchange, Mary also undergoes a transformation. Her virgin state of soul now becomes the ground for the incarnation of that being of wisdom that we identify as Sophia. A virgin in essence, is every man and woman today who cultivates purity of intent and maintains a receptiveness to the gift of wisdom, always within human reach.Our union with the being of the Mother is always a prerequisite for the renewal of love and understanding in our souls. The following words are familiar to readers of the New Testament. When I first heard them as a child they were a source of wonder to me: “Mary kept all these words and pondered them in her heart.”

Treasa O'Driscoll was born and educated in Ireland. She assisted her late husband, who founded the Centre for Celtic Studies at University of Toronto, in promoting the spread of Irish arts in Canada. A long time student of Anthroposophy she has presented poetry, song and story at many gatherings of the School of Spiritual Psychology and helped to organize the memorable 1999 Sophia Conference at Glenstal Abbey while writing her book, Starts Above the Road, in nearby Co. Clare. She is coordinator of the Novalis Project --- Arts Inspiring Social Renewal, near Toronto.