Fly Away Ladybird.....

Simnel cake.

Fly away ladybird, your house is on fire.... What is this 'ladybird', and how could her 'house be on fire'? Yet what a memorable jingle it is - it must hit some mysterious chord. Personally, I associate it with childhood bliss and also life in the womb - my own Garden of Eden - that fleeting treasure, that as we grow up, life seems bent on destroying. The Dragon awaits to devour the child - see Chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation - even while, if we are fortunate, our experience of bliss expands to that of Nature, even to ladybirds and so on. If we are unfortunate, we are torn to pieces and expelled from our mother's womb before we are born, or perhaps we find no love to welcome us into this world - very shocking thoughts for those of us who cherish 'the bliss'. But we ourselves connive at our own exile, being embarrassed by those dim, subliminal recollections of bliss in the womb and the arms of our mother, even afraid of the vulnerability they betray, as we are determined to assert our own autonomy. We may well be pleased with ourselves for having thus established our individual viability - and yet, deep down, how we miss that bliss! So on we go to seek to retrieve it in the arms of a lover.

     Indeed I count myself most fortunate in that, having done so with Fiona when she was seventeen, here we are still doing so in our seventies, in spite of those times when, with the world weighing on us, the upwelling spring all but dried up. You may say this is just a matter of luck, but I am sure there would be no such luck, had we not somehow managed to root our personal bliss beside that upwelling spring. In fact doing so is surely the principal business of our lives. To succeed, we need to recognise that it is more than a mere idea or some impersonal force. As it happened, Fiona was greatly aided in setting out with me by a mystical experience of Our Lady's presence in the Lady Chapel of the cathedral of Notre Dame, no less.*

     Abstractions, or even cathedrals, are incapable of sustaining bliss in the absence of faith; we need to become worshippers rather than tourists. Yet we must seek understanding and employ structures also. Primitive people found spirits within their springs, trees, mountains, seas, everything. Eventually it dawned that behind the multiplicity, there was unity, and in the end, personal bliss is a matter of union, of grounding in a single cosmic reality. More, it is a matter of being drawn into relationship, which nothing less than personal love can deliver. This process culminated, for the plain people of Europe and many other places beyond, in identifying the 'well-spring of bliss' with Mary, 'Queen of the Angels, Queen of Heaven and Earth', while their special places were dedicated so frequently to her - Notre Dame de Paris, Nossa Senhora da Nazaré etc,etc.

     The penny only dropped with me lately how her name, Mary, may be identified with the sea; certainly it is reminiscent of the Latin mare and its modern derivitives like mer and mar. St Jerome and St Bernard of Clairvaux at least thought it meant Star of the Sea. A little research (a dangerous thing) tells of connotations of 'beloved' and also 'bitter'. Well the sea, as well as being in a sense the womb of life on Earth, has notes of universal love as well as of bitterness too, but of course so has love itself, it being ever threatened by 'the Dragon'. For me, Mary is 'bliss' personified, and indeed it was my own mother's name, while her sister, on becoming a Carmelite, took the religious name 'Sister Mary of the Resurrection'.

     Even while my father had so luckily been sent to England on a gas course, where he and my mother conceived a baby whom they named Joy, his fellow officers in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, out of ammunition in the rearguard of Dunkirk, were as he later discovered being massacred by the SS in France. He proceeded in subsequent years to fire words at the religion of my mother and aunt that, one might surmise, in some sense echoed the thought of the bullets and hand grenades tearing into the flesh of his comrades. He would undoubtedly have loved to share that female 'dream' of bliss, but he could not bring himself to do so. No doubt I was far from unique in growing up trying to reconcile the horror of so much of reality with the dream of bliss, but I was, if that is the right word, blessed in hearing the conflict so articulated.
     
     It didn't stop at home, as you may find out by delving into the despatches From the Fractal Frontier  in this blog. Suffice here to say that I finally became convinced that, besides being indispensible for humans to flourish, it is far from irrational to believe that God loves us, and to accept the idea that He should hang his plan to rescue the human race on the slender thread of a humble young woman's consent.  'The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary....' The whole of creation was hushed, teetering on the brink, as it strained to hear the quiet voice say: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to thy word.' For all her humility, she nonetheless announced:-

Yes, from this day forward all generations will call me    blessed,
for the Almighty has done great things for me.
Holy is his name,
and his mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear  him.
He has shown the power of his arm,
he has routed the proud of heart.
He has pulled down princes from their thrones, and exalted the lowly.
The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich sent empty away.

     So it was that the 'wild imaginings' of a young Jewish woman became the well-spring of so much art and beauty, one might say of European civilisation and much more. From beautiful churches throughout the continent, at noon and eventide every day, the Angelus bell rang out and work stopped while the people recalled the great mystery. The novel ideas of freedom, of a world not ruled by violence and strength, of power being conditional upon consent, were loosed upon the people. The memory of that 'lowly handmaid' forever confronted the cult of violence, which reached an apotheosis in the 20th century. Subsequently, by some amazing quirk, the European Union found the inspiration to put Our Lady's crown on its flag - as St John wrote in the Book of Revelation, 'a great sign appeared in Heaven: a woman, adorned with the sun, standing on the moon, and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown....'

     St John warned , 'for you, earth and sea, trouble is coming - because the devil has gone down to you in a rage, knowing that his days are numbered.' One would have thought that the great warnings of the 20th century should have sufficed to wake us up - but no, and now there are more. But even Science seems to be getting there - what with new insights about for instance climate change, life in the womb, quantum physics...! Will humanity find the strength and will to rise to the challenge? I find it hard to believe that we will do so until we learn to say again together:- Hail Mary.... 

Our brave Easter lily....

...confronts its dragon.

*Fiona writes:- I was in Paris for several weeks, at the age of 18 in the summer of 1966. I loved the feel and smell of the ancient churches and sometimes went to Mass, and was moved by the realisation that this same catholic Mass was being celebrated throughout Europe and to the far corners of the world, as it had been for the last two thousand years. I had been struggling with the idea of becoming a Catholic since I was fourteen.

     One time in Notre Dame, I came by the Lady Chapel. As I stood there the statue of the Virgin and the whole chapel was filled with radiant, golden light, in which I felt myself enveloped in her arms. I felt intimately the warmth her presence, and I knew then that I would become a Catholic and that she would show me the way onward. That vision has always stayed with me, and I realised when I visited again years later, and found the space quite normal, that I had indeed been blessed with a visitation by our blessed mother.