In Mary Within Us, David Richo demonstrates how we have always venerated not the literal Mary but the feminine dimension of the divine that she represents and enriches. Using the titles in the Litany of Loreto with depth and reverence, this book opens a dialogue about Mary as a personification of the virtues and destiny of the human psyche, including the so far unexplored dark side.“What a brilliant confluence of images and energies! David Richo has made a very useful set of connections between Mary and the deepest archetypes of the human psyche. This is how theology and psychology should come together. Good scholarship that could lead to good prayer.” – FR. RICHARD ROHR, O.F.M. Center for Action and Contemplation, Albuquerque, New Mexico. David Richo, Ph.D. is a retreat leader in Santa Barbara and San Francisco. He is the author of many books, including: Catholic Means Universal: Integrating Spirituality and Religion (Crossroad, 2000) and The Sacred Heart of the World: Restoring Mystical Devotion to Our Spiritual Life (Paulist Press, 2007). Published by Human Development Books, Berkeley, CA. Price $16 plus shipping. ISBN 978-0-9669908-5-0 Click here to order from online booksellers around the world S A M P L E C H A P T E R: The Prologue to Mary Within UsMary advanced in her pilgrimage of faith and at the same time, in a discreet yet direct and effective way, she made present to humanity the mystery of Christ and continues to do so. –Pope John Paul II Mary is the most loved woman on this planet. A powerful and loving mother who is loved and loves us all is not an invention of Catholicism. She has an ancient history in the collective psychic imagination of humankind. Only her names have changed over the centuries while her archetypal reality remains the same. When we love, honor, and invoke Mary, we are preserving the most mysterious and precious truth about ourselves: she is what we are meant to become. She is not only an icon above us but also a mirror of us. The powers of Mary are the feminine powers in our souls. Her titles are our own names as they are spelled in heaven. This is what is meant by a divine potential, the gift of grace in our souls. It is up to us to activate it by our openness to grace and our actions of love in and for the world. In fact, all the religious figures of our tradition are personifications of divine potentials and purposes in us. We now appreciate how our beliefs about God, Christ, Mary, and the saints were held in the safekeeping of faith until we were ready to acknowledge them as about us and in us. Having faith was how we were cherishing the divine life of the psyche. We could only have realized this now as the human potential movement is giving way to the divine potential movement. The Litany of Loreto (Appendix) is a stirring summation of the highpoints of Mary’s place in the divine plan. In this sense, there are blessings in the sound of its words and graces in the images they summon up in us. They are our sounds and the images of our inner life. The titles speak directly to our hearts and even carry and contain our hearts. They are not only praises of Mary. They form a portrait of our essential Self, our intrinsic nature, the depth of our incarnate life, and of our redemptive purpose. Mary is the mother of Jesus and she is our mother because we are who he is. The first extant manuscript of The Litany of Loreto dates to 1200. Saint Peter Canisius, in the sixteenth century heard it recited in Loreto, a small town in Italy where the house of Mary is supposed to have been transported from Israel by angels in 1291. Loreto means laurel grove, which is where the house first appeared on the Italian landscape. Medieval people made pilgrimages there and brought the litany home with them. Saint Peter had it printed in 1558 in Dilligen, Germany. The titles are poetic, imagistic, mystical, and mythic invocations that access the feminine dimension of the higher Self of all of us. They do not originate in or make sense to the linear cognitive mind. Cardinal Wiseman said: “A litany is not intended to be logical but to be a hymn that combines affection, admiration, and entreaty.” Most of the titles are symbols from the Hebrew Bible that acknowledge the role of the feminine in the mystery of salvation and of wholeness. The titles of the litany with our responses form a profound spiritual guide to and a mysterious mystical code about that wholeness. This is the first book that interprets the Litany of Loreto in this way. We may never have fully accessed or explored its wisdom and its nurturing potential. We may not have guessed its possible impact on our lives. Contemplation of the litany may allow that to happen. This takes meditating on the invocations and fervently praying them. They are sources that become resources when we cultivate them as gardeners cultivate flowers. In the pages that follow are the gardening tools. Feminine in this context is not equated with female nor is it a term that describes only females. It is an energy in the psyche of all humans and all of nature. Energy is a field of movement and activity that puts power to use. This energy combines formative and transformative qualities. The titles of the Litany of Loreto describe and promise the farther reaches of that energy becoming activated —put to use — in us. These ancient titles of Mary are a summary of the qualities of our essential Self. In fact, every religious truth and image is a metaphor for potentials in us and in the universe that we have never dared to acknowledge or release. The titles in the Litany of Loreto describe a goddess as a divine energy field within us, the feminine dimension of the Self. All our lives we have noticed that Mary is pictured as a beautiful woman. Her beauty is symbolic of divine wholeness. Perfection is associated with the masculine archetype and completeness with the feminine archetype. In the Hebrew Bible, Judith disarmed Holofernes —symbolic of the male ego— with the beauty of her face. An object of devotion is beautiful precisely in order that we be drawn to it and it thereby grants us serenity and strength. Beauty leads to devotion. What we have traditionally felt toward Mary is devotion that is responsive to her images and their kindly beauty. Through them we were learning about her love for us. Devotion can become sentimentality when it stops with rituals. It is authentic when it results in devotedness to her purpose of bringing more love and joy into the world. It is responsiveness to the meaning she has in our lives as an archetype of our feminine powers. Devotion is ultimately union with and in her, that is, full contact with life, psychic, divine, and natural. A few years ago I suffered a great loss and was in a state of grief. One night, I gazed in prayer at a picture of Mary and I was strongly struck by the warmth and beauty of the smiling medieval Madonna. I felt what Solomon must have felt: “How beautiful thou art, my love, how beautiful thou art.” Song of Songs 4:1. I could feel a release from my pain in that moment through Mary’s companionship. I experienced the beauty of her image as compassion from her heart. My many such directly felt experiences of Mary as a source of spiritual transformation is the origin of this book. I began writing it as a gift of thanks to Mary and it became a gift from her to me and now to you. That is always the way with her, she gives back much more than ever she asks. All my books so far have been written as a psychotherapist and as teacher. This book I write in response to the words: “Son, behold your mother.” I write as one who knows first-hand of Mary’s unmistakable, comforting, and adamantine love. I can tell that the happiness I feel in my love of Mary will take more than a lifetime to experience fully. I have loved her deeply all my life and I know without doubt that she loves me. Anyone can join in this because her love waits for all of us. This most touching of revelations is awaiting ears to hear it and hearts to hold it. Such revelations are the premises of this book. Most of what you are about to read was written with a special and unusual intuition I did not have before I began writing this book. As I wrote, I felt I was receiving a message directly from the heart of Mary. In my writing of these pages she continually instilled new perspectives, opened new vistas, adorned my imagination, and surprised me with a knowledge I know I did not have before. It is what she wanted me to know and I pass it on to you. There will never be a poetry large enough to praise her and there will barely be time to fulfill her only request, that we love the world as she does. Each of us can only begin now. Popular piety often preserves the profound wisdom of the psyche. In the pious but archetypally meaningful story of St. Catherine Laboure’s vision of Mary, she saw the Madonna wearing rings on every finger. Some emitted rays of light that extended into the world. Some gave no light at all. When St. Catherine asked about this, Mary said: “The rays of light are the graces I give to those who ask; the rings with no light are holding the graces no one has asked for yet.” We have not begun to ask what Mary can give. We have not dared to let ourselves believe in her fully. We have yet to imagine how committed she is to us as mother and advocate. In other words, we have not yet fully acknowledged ourselves and our marvelous destiny. Thomas Merton wrote in a poem: “Where in the world has any voice/ Prayed to you, Lady, for the peace that’s in your power?” The chapters that follow draw from Christian, Judaic, Buddhist, and many other traditions. This is in keeping with the attitude of Vatican II: “We acknowledge, preserve, and promote the spiritual and moral goods found in other religious traditions.” The word catholic means universal. A universal Catholic is one who is open to truths from all sources. Such openness is a virtue that leads to the discovery of corresponding truths immemorially preserved in all traditions and ultimately within ourselves. Our psyche indeed contains all traditions as part of our heritage from collective humanity. The Great Mother meets us there or rather here in our universality. Mary can stand up to change in world views; she always has. My concern is that many Catholics seem to scuttle their fervent devotion to Mary as they mature in age and in faith. Thomas Merton is an example of a mature Catholic for whom this seemed to happen. From 1940 to 1950 he wrote twenty-five poems to Mary. From 1950 till his death in 1968 he wrote only six. For many of us, Mary does not survive our growing up and that is unfortunate since she carries an ingredient so essential to our spiritual development. Mary has to survive today in a whole new way and, hopefully, that is the way she appears on these pages. The new direction in Catholicism deemphasizes devotion to Mary and this is a loss. A pendulum is swinging too far away from the reality and significance of the feminine in our religious consciousness. Protestantism did this and now Catholicism is too. Is there a way to come back to center, to let go of the superstition and the sentimental piety and yet honor the heart and soul of Mary more fervently? I attempt to show a way to renewed and new devotion grounded in the depth of psychic truth. I am hoping that this enterprise will lead us to a self-discovery as stupendous as that of finding God’s heart as our own. The challenge now is to make our devotion to Mary and our understanding of her more adult. This book offers some paths, through text and prayers, to that maturity: visioning her as an archetypal energy in our own inner life, acknowledging her dark side with all its fertile potential, and freeing ourselves from any disabling sentimentality and literalism in our appreciation of her. The result is a love of Mary that stands up to our own personal evolution. The new vision of her is simultaneously a self-discovery. She is no longer the Madonna at a distance but the mother, virgin, and queen in our deepest interior life and in that of all the universe, a divine mirror of human and natural reality in its most exultant state. I am thankful that as a Catholic I learned to express devotion with intensity and fervor. It is one of the features of religion that is sometimes lacking in present-day spirituality. While visiting Rome during the writing of this book, the Pilgrim Madonna came to St. Peter’s Basilica. This is a statue of Our Lady of Fatima that travels from country to country as a pilgrim of peace. I joined the thousands of devotees who had come to honor her. As I passed in front of the statue of the Madonna banked with flowers and candles, I remember thinking how small the statue was in reality compared to what I expected. I felt there was something so touching about the smallness. It proclaimed humility in the midst of the grandeur of the Basilica. The image looked so utterly serene and yet so powerfully present. I felt Mary’s presence in that moment and suddenly in the midst of my intent and prayerful gazing a voice inside spoke. “Imagine, that is what is in each of us, something that beautiful and perfect.” It was the very point of this book! In effect, the statue had become, in that moment, a vision of Mary and I was hearing her speak to me. It was not a voice of my mind’s making. It was the immortal feminine in the higher Self revealing itself in mortal words. St. Peter’s was such a apt place for that connection to happen. It is so significant too, that my revelation came as I was walking away from—that is letting go of—the experience. This recalls an archetypal story. In the Aeneid, the hero Aeneas is visited by a messenger/huntress in the woods. Only as they are parting does he recognize in her the effulgent splendor of his heavenly mother, Venus. When I returned home to Santa Barbara, I told my breathtaking story to a mentor and cherished friend, Sidney Lanier, a retired Anglican priest and descendent of poets. He said without hesitation—again I was hearing something not conjured by the mind—that the event I described was a completion of my priestly ordination. He said that I had been ordained a priest in the Logos originally, but now was ordained anew in Sophia right there in St. Peter’s Basilica. He added: “The spiritual feminine in you was suddenly mirrored by the spiritual feminine represented in the statue.” I wondered later if perhaps all visions are just such realizations of how the transcendent mirrors our psychic depths. Visions grant certitude that division is illusory. The infinite is in the finite not above it. Mary does not appear to people to bring heaven to our hearts but to expose the heaven in our hearts. And all that remains for us is to feel an exuberant gratitude. I am the mother of fair love and of respect and of knowledge and of holy hope. In me is all grace of the way and of the truth; in me is all hope of life and of virtue. –Ecclesiasticus 24:24 Statements made in the Holy Scriptures are also utterances of the soul. –Jung
Mary Within Us A Jungian Contemplation of Her Titles and Powers by David Richo, PhD Published by Human Development Books, Berkeley, CA. Price $16 plus shipping. ISBN 978-0-9669908-5-0 Click here to order from Lulu.com, our online printer
for individual orders |
