Re-Becoming the Universal Church
“Stories can tell what history cannot describe; how the mother of God became Our Lady is such a tale. When she became the prototype of the ‘image of woman’ – never a goddess, no longer an icon, not yet the sentimental pinup of baroque art – the other figures peopling the Romanesque cathedrals also began to go their own way. Many of these saints and monsters had come into the Church together with their own ‘nation’ when it had been baptized, with their ‘gens.’
The furry guardians of local gender, upon arriving in the presbytery, were occasionally dressed up in the togas of martyrs or decorated with the insignia of clerical saints. Others found their niche in the carved stone foliage, with their horns and scales intact.
The young woman who was thrown to the dragon in the legend was now garbed as St. Margaret and placed above the altar, keeping the dragon on a leash. The river gods and satyrs, the kobolds and personified storms, all found their place, one in a capital, another in the bestiary frieze, and many as cornerstones or supports for doorways and chairs. Shaggy northern monsters shared the same column with Sassanian lions, chimeric peacocks recently lifted from a text in the library, and biblical figures in abundance.
The Church felt confident of embracing heaven, hell, and earth, together with all that could fly or crawl. For five hundred years, its rule of thumb remained: ‘Ecclesia omnia benedicat’ – let the Church bless everything people do, see, or make. In the eleventh century, even the devil had become more of a joke than a threat. Local myths and customs enriched the ritual and made the cathedral a hothouse of old lore.
The presence of this host of baptized symbols bore witness to the power of the Church’s message, and to the possibility of an infinite variety of vernacular existence under the shield, the aegis, of faith” (Ivan Illich, Gender).
Ecclesia omnia benedicat: The Church blesses everything.
The Nativity Fast begins on the fifteenth and I have been thinking about a way to use this during the abstinence period. Ecclesia omnia benedicat. The above quote is from Ivan Illich’s seminal work: “Gender,” which he uses to talk about the church’s expulsion of the spirits inhabiting the world which we baptized into the Life of the Church, for different reasons: my guess is due to the Great Schism and the split churches trying to define themselves as separate entities in the Occident and Orient alongside the Western church’s consolidation of land and power. Another factor lay with the archdeacon of Angers, Berengar of Tours, who denied the doctrine of transubstantiation which led to the beginning of the ongoing debate of the Eucharistic Mystery.
The consequences of this rejection of the Church’s initial behavior toward the world is a denial of its own Catholicity. We are either the Universal Church or we are pretending to be, and by pretending to be we are sowing division where there was once unity, which is diabolical.
“During the half millennium in which they had obediently supported columns and portals and chairs, the squatter, the billy goat, the dragon, the giant, and the dwarf had lost the edge of their sacred gender. The Church’s indiscriminate blessings had worn it down. Now the new theologians learned to distinguish carefully between the sacraments – neither more nor less than seven, universal, necessary for salvation – and the old blessings, which came to form the layer of sacramentals, clearly second class. For the new divines, the old spirits of local decency were at best no more than symbols, generally intruders if not vermin.
And as they slipped away, taking off from the steeples on being driven from the thicket of the cloister garden, roaming on their own, the ancient goblins were metamorphosed. No longer pagan gods but Christian devils, no longer unredeemed guardians but apostate spirits, no longer ambiguous hierophanies but ghosts smelling of sulphur, they began to wander. They had lost the power to exorcise vernacular fears, but they could still haunt the countryside” (Ibid.)
It is my belief that this was the beginning of the end for an embodied spiritual practice within the Church. The excommunication of local spirits, pagan gods, and the divine feminine gave way to a bereft mystical approach to God which led to the Western scholastic tradition of trying to understand God, intellectually. It also led to an exclusionary practice in the East, just as bereft of mysticism despite all appearances.
My confirmation into the Episcopal Church was last Sunday, on the feast day of All Saints, reminding us that we are surrounded by the communion of saints when we gather together in Church, but Ivan Illich’s words are a solemn echo of who we have lost to the church’s modernizing and divisive engagement of what was once more fluid and certainly more open. Now, Eve is not the one who introduced the sacred to Man, but the first to Fall; the Theotokos is the prototype for a perfect woman: submissive to her husband and subjugated to the work of the formalized gendered household.
Women can dust the altar and ask questions after the service; if they wish to be priestesses then they may attend to the expelled spirits of the church, roaming the countryside no longer pagan gods, but Christened demons—as witches.
I want the church to embrace its original stance: Ecclesia omnia benedicat.
“When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). The communion of saints involves an even larger body than we recognize in our understanding of the saints, because there are parochial spirits who held this blessed Church for a millennia before being cast out by a priesthood who turned their back on the sacred feminine and the incorporeal baptized children of God.
The Nativity Fast is an opportunity to shine a light on why the church needs to recover the feminine icon. There is a real hunger for it in the pews, among congregants who have been hurt or marginalized by this religious institution. This hurt is, to my mind, leading to an expression of bad theology, simply because the divine feminine is not as embellished within our tradition as it was in the first millennium.
I see the Theotokos as the Protector of Outcasts, making her a frontrunner for the patron saint of the Episcopal Church, and while I have recently tried making the case that the Anglican Communion is the Western Orthodox Church, this is too limiting when it comes to the Bride of Christ: the Universal Church.
The Universal Church must recover the divine feminine as perfectly embodied by our Most Blessed Mother, not to position her higher than God or take focus away from Christ, but to reaffirm our tradition’s own yin and yang: balance.
The feminine and masculine natures are complementary and without one the other crumbles… restricting the reach of both but holding the tension between the two the Church becomes universal, blessing all things “to the possibility of an infinite variety of vernacular existence under the shield, the aegis, of faith.”
Si comprehendis, non est Deus
Witness, NM 