Ritual and Reparations

Dear Ones,

Last week, the Temple hosted a 7-day Vespers series called “Madonna Holy Week” in which we examined 7 different epithets related to the Virgin Mary. We tipped traditional understandings of Mary over and looked at the ruins of the matriarchal ancient future foundations beneath them, much like archaeologists excavating the Goddess temples so often found buried beneath modern churches and cathedrals. We also shared heart stories and devotional aspirations during our daily ceremonies, which gave us all opportunities for deep healing.

Many of us expressed our experiences of frustration at moments of injustice in our lives and in the world, and prayed for miraculous healing of issues related to poverty, abuse, racism, systemic inadequacy, and more. As our week went along, we also gained a deeper sense of agency around the miracles we would not only like to see in our world, but which we would like to help co-create.

As a member of a multi-racial family, who has time and again witnessed both subtle and overt racism directed toward my siblings, I have long held the belief that reparations and restitution are not only a good idea...they are completely necessary if we wish to begin to rectify the imbalance of power and dignity that has occurred for over 400 years toward people of color in this country. Reparations are defined as “the making of amends (usually financially) for harm one has done.” It seems like a fair enough proposal that in this country, we would be able to find institutional and personal ways to contribute to balancing the scales of racial inequality through reparations. Yet I have often encountered resistance to the idea of reparations when I’ve brought it up. Some of the more common arguments I’ve heard against reparations are as follows:

• That they are only a drop in the bucket and could never really work to balance the scales. To which I reply, “We don’t know that. We have not tried. Why not try and see?”

• That we don’t know exactly who is descended from enslaved Africans, and therefore can’t know who deserves the reparations. To which I reply, “Then why not create a foundation to support projects that benefit people of color in general? Those who apply for the funding can detail instances in their lives when they have been subjected to racist attitudes, danger, or prejudice, and their stories of suffering would certainly be proof enough that they deserve reparative funding?”

• That impoverished white people should not have to pay any kind of reparations tax because they are suffering, too. To which I reply, “Reparations should not be an added tax for individuals, especially those struggling with poverty. It should be the willing and compassionate effort of good-hearted individuals who understand and empathise with the need for an act of rebalancing; it should come from the government, re-allocated from weapons spending; it should also be funded with special tax placed on corporations that make above a certain profit margin.”

I don’t know if me writing these arguments down will change anything. I’m not suggesting anything that hasn’t been mentioned by someone else before, after all. But I do know this: that reparations can create a potential wave of healing that would free something currently blocked and bound in the hearts of both people of color and white people...and everyone in between on this complicated spectrum of human genealogy.

So, during Madonna Holy Week, it became clear to me what to do about this, at least here in our Temple.

On August 26, the feast day of Our Lady of Częstochowa, I will be re-igniting the flame of the Order of the Black Madonna, https://orderoftheblackmadonna.com, a project which has been on hiatus since 2018. Formerly a more elaborate membership association with multiple levels of training, in its new form the revived Order will simply be focused on two things: 1) offering a monthly Madonna ceremony, in which we lift the petitions that have been submitted through our web site, and 2) gathering membership dues as reparations to help fund the “Black Woman Is God Joy Resistance Retreats” that I’ve been dreaming into being. My ideal is to begin with one retreat by the end of 2020, with two retreats in 2021, and quarterly retreats in 2022 and beyond, so that many Women of Color can have this experience. I have already been discussing this idea with several Women of Color artists I know, and they are beginning to think about the activities that will be nourishing and joyful for them, such as sourcing all of the food from a Woman of Color-owned farm, and having a professional photographer on hand to create Goddess portraits.

I know that if we dedicate the monthly dues from the Order of the Black Madonna to this project, it will grow over time into the kind of sustained, ritual replenishing reparations that can create a wave of positive change, at least for women in our little corner of the world. And in time, more projects may emerge for the Order, as inspired by the Madonna herself.

I’ve set the dues for the Order of the Black Madonna Tier of the Mt Shasta Goddess Temple’s Patreon at $15 per month. After Patreon’s fees and charges, and a $3-per-month membership fee to fund the maintenance of the Order’s website and activities, the remaining $10 of each donation will go into the Reparations Fund every month.

If you are a member of the Temple at the $5 or $10 level, or thinking about joining, I invite you to consider becoming an Order of the Black Madonna member, and contributing your dues to our reparations project.

If you are a member of the Temple at a higher level, and you’d like to allocate a portion of your monthly dues to the Order of the Black Madonna reparations fund, please contact me and let me know. I’d love to facilitate this for you. You can reply to this message or you can text me at (510) 355-7912.

Thank you all for considering this invitation.

Our monthly Madonna ceremonies will be on 4th Wednesdays at 7pm, starting with the inaugural ceremony on August 26, and continuing thereafter. They will be open to all members of the Temple who feel called to attend.

May this working be blessed with the success to do its part in repairing the damage that might stand in the way of women bonding together to create a beautiful future for all beings 🙏🏼

Blessed be,

Yeshe

Feast of Our Lady of Montvergine

This piece was contributed by Soeur Marie Verité

Today as we celebrate the igniting of the sacred fires of Candlemas, as we seek within ourselves for that which is our deepest inspiration and hope, in Italy and around the world devotees of the Madonna of Montevergine prepare for a festival honoring Her and Her place in their lives which begins this weekend. They will sing and dance up and down Her holy mountainside which used to be, and perhaps still is, the home of a temple to the great mother goddess Cybele. They will play tambourines and sing songs to Our Lady of Montevergine, and floats will be drawn up by to the monastery where Her icon lives by oxen or horse-drawn carts as they have been at this time of year for hundreds of years.

The Madonna of Montevergine is an icon thought to have been painted by St. Luke as a hodegetria, the “One Who Points the Way” to salvation, and in the painting we see the Madonna with the Christ child on her lap. She is pointing to him to indicate that faith in him is the way to salvation. But the people of Italy and around the world look to Her as well, and have developed a love and reverence for her as their “Madonna Bruna,” their “Mamma Schiavona,” their slave mother, because of Her dark skin. They thought that because She had brown skin instead of white, She must be the protectress of those with equally dark skin, and that’s how She came to be associated with the slave or servant classes. They reach out to Her as their own, who understands hard work and sweat and tears, what it means to be marginalized and persecuted. She is not an icon of the wealthy or the privileged, the “white” class. She belongs to those who know what it’s like to work for a living, to be looked down at, to be pushed aside or thought to be somehow “less than.” 

She is beloved of the sexually marginalized because of the story of Her saving two gay men in the thirteenth century who had been beaten and run out of town, driven up onto the mountainside to die of exposure to the cold and the harsh elements. The sun shone down on them unexpectedly and helped them get to safety and find warmth, which they then celebrated by having sex on the spot. Or so the story goes. The celebration of human sexuality in all its forms is part of what makes Our Lady of Montevergine special, and perhaps what hearkens back to the rites and rituals of Cybele that used to happen on that very mountainside: the sacred union, the refusal to see human sexuality as something sinful or as something that needs to be hidden in dark places. Her festival is sometimes seen as a time to celebrate the joyful rites of spring, which you can imagine many of the monks of the monastery at Montevergine occasionally getting a little wiggy about. They are monks and have chosen the path of sacred celibacy, after all.

But still they come, christians and pagans alike, to do their rites and make their offerings to the Holy Mother in their own holy way. 

Her festival today includes music, dancing, and all forms of celebration: pilgrims sing and dance up and down the mountainside to celebrate Her. But it might also be said that they celebrate the coming spring and the welling up of potential, the coming of new life, which is a miracle after the hard winter. And it’s a miracle for everyone. The Black Madonna, Our Lady of Montevergine, Mamma Schiavona, smiles on us all after all our work, our struggles. She lifts up those who have been left behind, and brings them into the comfort of hope for a new beginning for everyone.