The Queen of Heaven

We are in the doorway to a new year, 2012, a year that many people have awaited with great anticipation, emotion, worry, and excitement for a long time. And many people have many different versions of why they have waited so anxiously for this year … because on December 21 the Mayan calendar ends. This is according to some versions of the calendar, there being a fair amount of controversy surrounding it. I suppose it wouldn’t be a great spiritual event if it wasn’t surrounded in controversy and mystery of the unknown. Ancient oracles and prophesies have foretold big planetary events for the year. The planet and the sun will align with the center of the galaxy as only happens every 26,000 years. The poles will shift. Controversy over the potential of catastrophic planetary events aside, it appears that there is consensus that beginning in 2012, we have an opportunity to choose a new path into the future, to awaken, to leave suffering behind and create our own paradise by changing our perspective. We can choose to change our ways of living, and above all, change our ways of loving, acknowledging our fellow humans and our planetary mother as all part of one source of light and loving each other in accord with this new perspective. 2012 – a year of many questions for which we hope to find answers very soon.

I have been giving it some thought during the holiday season, as Christmas always puts me in a nostalgic sentimental sort of mood. Here in Mexico one of the primary holiday celebrations is a novena (nine day period) of daily processions prior to Christmas called the “posadas.” Every evening the familiar church bells rings happily at 7 p.m. to call people to church to accompany the figures of Joseph and Mary, riding on a donkey, through the streets of the village as they look for room at the inn (posada). A litany is sung as ‒, about the idea of looking for shelter, of offering shelter, of finding shelter, of birthing within the shelter, the shelter becoming a sanctuary of which others then seek the light. I started thinking of how the Earth, the very planet at the center of all the 2012 mystery, has been our shelter, giving birth to us and nurturing us, but how she also asks us for shelter, how we have denied her, how we awaken to providing her shelter and protection, how she becomn that street build a shelter of pine boughs, strung with Christmas lights and glittery baubles, to house the saint figures during the evening’s festivities. When all the prayers have been said, songs sung, and candles blown out, the neighbors hand out hot guava sugarcane punch and string up piñatas for the kids to bat away at while folks hang out on the sidewalks.

I really got into this concept of looking for shelter this year in the posadas. I thought about the idea of a pregnant woman riding on a donkey and being denied a place to lie down and give birth. I thought about her husband’s concern, pleading for a safe place for his wife and soon-to-be-born baby. Perhaps the classic Christmas pageant story is nothing more than a wonderful myth, depending on our beliefs, but it is then a myth that has done its job perfectly because it really got me thinking, here on the eve of 2012, about the idea of looking for shelter, of offering shelter, of finding shelter, of birthing within the shelter, the shelter becoming a sanctuary of which others then seek the light. I started thinking of how the Earth, the very planet at the center of all the 2012 mystery, has been our shelter, giving birth to us and nurturing us, but how she also asks us for shelter, how we have denied her, how we awaken to providing her shelter and protection, how she becomes a sanctuary when we honor her light.

Once I thought about the Earth, our Mother, in the context of this little saint Mary figure on a donkey, looking for the posada, I realized we have really got our work cut out for us this coming year. Because while all of my thoughts are symbolically and mythologically grandiose, you know, “behold the revelation,” there is still life on Earth to think about, and that’s where I tend to get all stuck. I can’t quite figure out how to apply all that symbolism of the posadas, of shelter, of protection, of honoring, to real life. It becomes very tricky. We drove to Puebla the other day, a beautiful colonial city filled with art and culture and enough gold-clad churches to be able to visit a different one every day of the year, and I was struck by the contrast of all that finery and all the poverty. Perhaps I don’t notice the beggars in Mexico City as much because it’s a pretty bedraggled place as it is, but Puebla really made the contrast palpable. I’m never quite sure how to handle beggars. If ever there was a loaded trigger for the white middle class person, it’s got to be a small elderly hunched indigenous beggar woman with a tattered reboso wrapped around her head, black penetrating eyes, hitting you with a little plastic dish to guilt you into putting some coins into it. Or maybe she’s not elderly, she’s really young and she has two smudged grubby babies in her lap, and the one year old has already learned to stretch her hand out for the coins. So what do you do? Do you pretend you don’t see them after a while, striding busily down the sidewalk past them all? Or do you pour endless streams of coins into their hands, their aprons, their dishes, praying they’re not part of some beggar-pimp operation that has them enslaved and only gives them food if they make their daily begging quota? Do you deny them shelter? Or do you allow yourself to be convinced that they’re the Queen of Heaven and give them shelter? What do you do?

The Queen of Heaven must have been the woman standing in the intersection in the middle of the night, juggling, with her baby strapped to her chest and her little daughter at her side. She juggled 3 balls with one hand as she clutched her baby with the other, and she sent the 3 year old girl to the cars to collect the coins. She didn’t ever crack a smile, as all her energy was occupied with the seemingly impossible task of not dropping a ball, not dropping the baby, and praying that her little girl would be safe dashing in the dark from car door to car door between several lanes of traffic. No matter how many coins we send into the gap, we can’t stop it up. We can’t give enough shelter, or shelter simply isn’t enough … there has to be more. Our focus has to be not on the shelter, but what we are sheltering – what is worth protecting, what is worth traveling from afar to be in its presence, what is born, who is the child? The star, the light, the promise of 2012 and a new future… The “Christ” light, consciousness, awakening … All I know is that no amount of coins, or lack thereof, can change the light of that little baby looking up at his struggling juggling mother. Nothing can change the light of the little girl glimpsing smiling gringos in the back seat of a van and returning a tiny shy grin. And even that mother, Queen of Heaven, working so hard, has an equal potential of awakening to her inherent light as all the drivers cruising by in their smooth warm cars. If the mother can maintain her focus on 3 balls, a baby, a girl, a hundred cars, and her money, we all surely can maintain our focus on one thing: the light.