When I visited the Black Madonna at the Chartres Cathedral in France in August 2022, I was at first confused. Why was this deeply feminine expression of the Divine power of the universe housed in an ornate colonial edifice, built with the sweat of indigenous people, and worshipped in a thoroughly patriarchal manner? Like Guadalupe, housed at Tepeyac in Mexico City, her deep wisdom is co-opted and sequestered, as if she were not here for the people of the earth but was the private property of the Catholic Church.
It was the feast day of the Black Madonna when I was at Chartres, and I marched through the streets of this old village, following her elegant sculptured embodiment, with the child on her lap. Nuns had been working all morning to create wreaths to surround her. She was carried on the shoulders of priests.
My heart yearned to embrace her, to claim her for myself, rather than to be marching in a procession organized by priests. I wanted to beseech her to come to our aid because humanity is dancing with death now and there is a shadow hanging over the future of our children. The child on her lap seemed to me to be the purpose of all of this, the one for whom we needed her mercy. Reflecting on this in November 2024, when freedom is being suffocated by ignorance, I implore her fervently, with more passion than ever before.
Since then, what I have discovered is that all pre-colonial feminine power has been co-opted by a patriarchy that recognizes the vibrancy of the feminine and therefore siphons it for itself. The current US election reflects this. More women voted for the rapist, criminal candidate than for a Black woman, including Latinas, many of whom carry the name Guadalupe.
I am committed to finding the language and the compassion to communicate with these women and revealing the Black Madonna for who she really is, the voice of the earth and her creatures. She is the celebration of the feminine as the life force. She is never the property of men. Men cannot comprehend nor protect her because she has her own consciousness that transcends theirs and is, in fact, only accessible to the feminine.
I know that I have to go beyond prayer, but whatever portals I open, I will initiate them with prayer.
The Black Madonna
Mother of the lost tribe
Madonna of the magnetic earth
Madonna exuding the nectar of spiritual sensuality
Madonna of the lonely wanderer
Madonna of the empty handed
Madonna of the abandoned child
Madonna of the blood and the wound
Madonna of our broken hearts
Madonna in the palms of our hands
Madonna of the sins of the fathers
Madonna of the world of darkness and the world of light
Madonna of the mystery and the revelation
Madonna of the unspoken, the suppressed, the secrets and the truth-telling
Mother who guards the amber box scented with myrrh containing the cords of all humanity
Mother who holds in her heart the innocence at the core of all people
Mother who sees our oneness
Mother who is our shelter
Mother of the temple of eternal and triumphant truth
Mother who grants us freedom, her child blooming from her breast
Ecstasy of the illuminated merger with the Feminine Divine
Mother who redeems us from the time of deception
Mother of justice and equality
Mother of the golden treasury of humanity’s love
Mother of Africa, the birthplace of us all
Mother of all faiths and all people
Mother, the only one who can restore the order of the order, and
Liberate us from this time of affliction.
Remove the curse of our ignorance, Mother.
Come out from where you are removed from us
Into the light of our unity.
Walk with us.
Show your face
And redeem your people.
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