In this episode of Creations Paths, Charlie, a non-binary sci-fi fantasy writer, along with their husband, explores the transformative image of Mary as the Tree of Life. Charlie shares their personal journey through faith, the struggles of growing up neurodivergent in an evangelical household, and finding solace in the teachings of Saint Louis de Montfort. The discussion delves into various interpretations of the Tree of Life across traditions, the compassionate and non-judgmental nature of Mary, and how this imagery provided a refuge and deeper connection to the divine. This episode offers powerful insights into practical mysticism and spirituality focused on embracing the divine presence within everyday life.
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Transcript:
Charlie- New: [00:00:00] When I was a kid, and I mean kid, I had a lot of struggles. I was undiagnosed with a lot of my neurodivergences. I knew I was different but I didn't really know what queer was and when I did start realizing what that meant I lived in a culture and in a household where that was wrong and I struggled with a lot of things.
Faith was one of those things. I've always had a deep and abiding love for the divine, for Jesus in particular, but I always felt like I was never good enough. And then one of my great aunts gave me a copy of The Secret of the Rosary by Saint Louis de Montfort.
Everything changed. Then I read The Secret of Mary and True Devotion to Mary and all of his other works. I've read everything that is available from him in English. But one of the most powerful thoughts that he ever put into my head is the image of Mary as the [00:01:00] tree of life. So let's talk about that today on Creations Paths.
Intro
hello everybody, my name is Charlie. I'm a non binary sci fi fantasy writer and I'm joined today with my husband.
Brian - New: Hello.
Charlie- New: When we talk about the Tree of Life, there are a couple places that your mind might go to. You might go to the Kabbalistic Tree of the Sephiroth. That's awesome. You might think about the Crann Bethadh, the Celtic Tree of Life. You might think about the Garden of Eden. You might think about St. Bonaventure's wonderful book, The Tree of Life, which is kind of his retelling of the life of Jesus. And yeah, for me, my mind goes to all those places. But primarily, to this image [00:02:00] of Mary. As the tree of life. And this image is born out of the Hail Mary, out of the Ave Maria. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Which, by the way, used to be where the prayer stopped. So if you've ever prayed the Ave Maria and thought, it should stop there. It used to, and often when I say it, it still does.
This image of the fruit of Mary, Jesus is the fruit of Mary, St. Louis de Montfort into this wonderful mystical theology of Mary as the tree of life and Jesus as the fruit that grows on that tree. The fruit of life, the food of life that gives us everlasting life. And so, in some of the more mystical passages of his writing, he tells us that we are, at the beginning of our faith, granted a seed for the tree, that we [00:03:00] plant within us, and we water it, we cultivate it, we help to remove the weeds from around it, so that Mary might keep growing.
That eventually the tree will bear fruit. And Jesus will be born within us. this imagery saved me as a kid. I don't know if you, um, I grew up in the kind of evangelical cult world that I did. Evangelicalism is a cult. It is a high control group that shuns people who leave it. Trust me, I know.
But perfectionism is so strong in these groups. You have to be perfect. You can't have made any mistakes. You can't have done any of the things that they classify as mistakes. They seem to be minting new mistakes that you can make all the time to help keep people in line and subservient. It's a dangerous, dangerous practice they have.
The image of Mary, my prayers to Mary, [00:04:00] learning to say the Ave Maria, learning to pray the Rosary, really did root me. Into the divine in a way that I never had before. The image of Mary as the tree of life was so powerful for Because, like I've said a million times, I love Jesus. Jesus is my Ishta Devata.
Jesus can be kinda hard to identify with, depending on how you want to put it. conceive of this person. In most schools of Christianity, this is a divine being born into the world to save it.
I am not a divine being born into the world to save it. And I hope, in a lot of ways, none of y'all will. Consider yourself to find means for it in the world to save it. That's a, that's a lot of pressure. In many ways, that's too much pressure to put on any person.
But that's hard for me to identify with. Mary, on the other hand, is a woman. Just a woman. We can talk about the doctrine of the [00:05:00] Immaculate Conception and how I think the visions of the words made that meaningful to me. It is not meaningful to me in any other way because I do not believe in original sin. So I don't believe that Mary had to be born without original sin. We can talk about that when the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes approaches in more detail. But Mary's relatable. She was just a girl going to the well when she got her call.
Brian - New: She was a mother of a difficult child. We will just put it like that because, you gotta be honest. Even to sit back and go, Jesus is the perfectly behaved child, this is still a child that is not going to necessarily do what the parents tell them to do. This is not perfect in the construct of perfect in a parent mind as the child is not bothering me with questions at this point in time, or, disrupting the flow of cooking, or whatever it is. They were still a child. They still had questions. They still evoked thought. So yeah, they're still a mother.
They still have motherly things. What is the [00:06:00] child up to? There is even a story in the Bible where Mary has a panic moment because her child is missing. And later finds him at the temple he runs off to the big city.
He disappears in the big city like You know, you know, he's up to and even at the temple. He's still up to trouble. He's still causing a ruckus He's still disrupting life, you know
Charlie- New: I'm just gonna bring that up because within the non canonical Gospels. We have all kinds of infant stories of Jesus where he, yes, very much a divine troublemaker.
Very, very much a trickster figure in those stories. And I have a sweet spot in my heart for quite a few of them. But even in the canonical Gospels, like you were saying, we have only one story of Jesus's childhood in the canonical Gospels. And it's, he snuck away from his family. When they show up, he backtalks them. Well, where did you think I would be?
Brian - New: The easy way to phrase this Problematic isn't necessarily a moral judgment of good or evil. It is [00:07:00] Problematic in a sense that's still disruptive, still does things that are unexpected Whether joyful or sad or whatever, you know any other later moral Attributions are given to it. It's still trying it's still testing. It's still challenging As all the mothers out there know.
Charlie- New: We fly to your patronage, O Holy Mary. Never has it been known that anyone who asked anything from you had ever been turned away empty.
Brian - New: One of the things that I found that helped make Mary and God so much more approachable. it is instinctual for us to be able to go to our mother, to be able to turn to our mother, and the concept of this is the mother, the mother of mothers, to be able to approach with problems, or questions, or concerns, and to know that they're going, like hopefully mothers do, they will Listen, and try to make it a teaching moment, and try to just comfort, and just, give [00:08:00] you that hug, without judgment.
Charlie- New: Mary is the only figure that is mentioned at being there through all of the major events of the Gospels. Mary is of course there at the Annunciation and the birth, she's there at his baptism, she's there when he's preaching. She's there at several of the miracles. She's there at the crucifixion.
She's there at the resurrection. And even in the book of Acts, the last time we have a canonical reference to her, she's there at the day of Pentecost with the apostles. She's there for all of it. She is this wonderful stand in for us as we're trying to learn this lesson of we are co creators with God.
Because when you call Mary mother of God, people have Strong reactions to this. How could a human be a mother of God? But no, that, that's the point. We are here to live Christ, we are here in this world to be the body of Christ, to be that agent of justice and healing and peacemaking and [00:09:00] compassion and wisdom.
That's what we're here for. Jesus says this over and over and over and over again. These are the things that we are called to do. To love our neighbor as ourselves,
mary is the living embodiment of that. as St. Louis points out in his books, we have very few words from Mary. One is a beautiful prayer in which she talks about God throwing down all those who think that they are powerful and all the rich and Elevating those who are of lower estate in their eyes.
Viva la revolution. She also shows up at the wedding at Cana . Whatever my son tells you, do it. There are very few quotes from her. The ones that we have are powerful. So what does it mean for us? You know I like my practical mysticism. I like my practical spirituality.
Brian - New: For me, one of the things that it means, Mary Tree of Life, when realizing that and matching that with that symbolism, back to the Garden of Eden, you had the tree of the knowledge of good and [00:10:00] evil, and then you had the tree of life.
The tree of life is without judgment. It is separate from knowing good and evil. So therefore it is separate from judgment. There is no judgment. And recognizing it's that mother figure that is accepting, teaching, informative, but all without judgment. When you look at her life and the stories and where she fits in the stories, she is there without judgment.
That is so important, so powerful, and so helpful because so many of us experience Christianity from a more fundamentalist experience. Even the imperial experience is still with judgment. We're all damned sinners. We're going to go burn in hell. Therefore come join us. Or burn in hell.
That's such a judgy statement. That's judgment. We're taught original sin. We're taught all these things about judgment and it makes Christianity itself so unapproachable. [00:11:00] That's what was so powerful for myself because in my journey, I was raised Christian, but I had fallen away from it because of all the judgment, because of a lot of the hypocrisy that I was seeing, because you're supposed to be following Christ's teachings, but then I looked at what the various churches I was involved with were doing, and the members of the church, and I was like, you're doing none of the stuff that Christ taught.
Like, most of the things you're doing are opposite of that. And so, by that point in my life, I was just like, oh, this is all BS, a control thing. St. Louis, the Tree of Life, Imagery, and Mary made all that approachable again, That's that first thing when you think about approaching God and adding God back into, at least in my experience, back into my life.
I was afraid because I didn't want all that judgment. If there was judgment, then I wasn't worthy, just in judging myself, the things I had done and, and were up to in my life. by those judgment standards, I wasn't worthy, but [00:12:00] through Mary, through the tree of life. There was no judgment, so I was able, it gave me that safe space where I could go and start having those conversations and move beyond and realizing the illusion, the Mara that was standing there, yelling at me, keeping me from moving forward and realizing that there was no Mara there in the first place.
Charlie- New: I see a lot of discussion over Mary as a goddess. One of my favorite kind of devotional books to Brigid refers to Mary as a goddess in there. I'm not opposed to that language. I think that we are all part of the Elohim. We are all part of God in that way that I don't find that phrase offensive, but Mary is the mother of God.
if we're going to go back to older pantheons, Mary is more akin to Danu or to Jebele than to just a goddess. She is the mother of God. She is the mother of [00:13:00] Elohim, right? She's the mother of the gods. she is the matrix in which we are formed into the image of Christ and really come into our Christhood.
She is the one that forms us, this to me is where I see the Tree of Life image so powerfully, in so much of my own personal faith, Mary is the Shekhinah. Mary is the glory of God, the Shekhan, the tabernacle that covers. That's actually where the word Shekhinah comes from. The feminine aspect, the divine presence of God.
It comes from the Hebrew word Shekhan, which literally means tabernacle. It's the tent that you would go into to pray. And that is Mary. Mary is that glorious presence of God. She is that shelter, that refuge that we go into. She is the tree of life under whose boughs we seek refuge. And even more than that, [00:14:00] the Shekhinah is one of the names for the 10th sephirot.
On the Tree of Life there are the 10 circles, if you've seen the pictures of it. And the 10th one is sometimes called Malkuth, or Kingdom. But sometimes it's called Shekhinah. The Divine Presence.
that is Mary. She is the root of the tree. She's also Kether. She's crowned, she is the top of the tree. Crowned in glory, queen of heaven, queen of the angels, queen of all hearts. She is the queen who opens the divine treasury so the graces of God may flow. As saint louis points out very beautifully in his books, No grace comes into this world except by her hands. And for those who are Christ only people, I know that phrase sounds frightening, scary, out of place. But remember, Christ's hands were formed in Mary. Those are the hands that came from our mother.
We are [00:15:00] told that whoever follows the path is Jesus sibling, sister, brother, or mother. And this is the thing that we're learning when we're sitting under this glorious tree. This font of wisdom. This fountain of all graces. That is Our sweet Maria. Our Mari Stella. Our star of the sea.
Everyone is equal in God. In the one life that flows throughout all the cosmos. We're all equal. No one is greater or lesser. Jesus tried to explain this to the sons of Zebedee when they were arguing over who would be first in the kingdom. And we will sit. At your right hand, in your kingdom.
And Jesus answered very simply, Whoever wants to be first, will be last. And whoever wants to be greatest, must be servant of all.
There is no hierarchy in the kingdom. The imperial [00:16:00] church really tries to cover this up and hide it and create all manner of hierarchy.
But Jesus is making this very flat kingdom. There is no hierarchy here. So when we say Mary is Mother of God, that is a great gift of hers. It's also a great gift of ours. That's why this image of she is the tree of life planted within us, is so powerful. It reminds me, not only, of Jesus.
Our sweet and blessed mother. But, that this is my calling as well. This is your calling. We are here to live God, to live Christ into the world. As Paul said, I struggle with you and labor my children until Christ be formed in you.
That's the point, right? We're here to bring Christ here, not to go there. This to me is the greatest lie of the Imperial Church, right up there with original sin. That our goal and all of our labors [00:17:00] are for the afterlife.
They're for here. They're for now.
We need to bring the fruit of the tree of life here now. In this world. Not in the next. In this one. In whatever small or great ways that we can.
We do that in Mary, with Mary, through Mary, and by Mary, which I've talked about before on this podcast a long time ago.
But we do that through her hands. So we sit under those beautiful, beautiful bows that Our moving in the wind of the Holy Spirit. The leaves rustling gently over our heads. The divine light of God shining through, almost making the tree crystalline, glowing, full of life, rooted deep into our ground of being, rooted deep down Into the one life from which we all [00:18:00] came and to which we will all return.
Hail Mary full of grace. The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. And that's the power in this moment. That's the power in the entire practice. In everything that we do, we're watering that tree so that it will grow. But we're not just watering it with our kindness, with our joy, with our awe, our wonder, our letting go and letting be, our creativity, our celebration.
Our justice making, our peacemaking. But we also go there to drink the waters of life that are ever flowing from its roots. We're told in the Book of Revelation that there is the tree, there is the tree of life, and the river of the waters of life pour forth from its roots.
And that's where [00:19:00] we go to find that nourishment, to find that life. To find that meaning, that purpose.
In my druidic practice, we often meditate and go into the sacred grove within. And right there, in my grove, every time, is that tree of life. It's one of the many trees around the circle. I can't tell you that it's an oak tree, or an olive tree, or a pine tree, or a cedar. Maple or Dogwood. It is the tree that it is when I go in there.
But I always know it. It's the one that is filled with life. And often with light. It's often almost glowing. That's the one that I go and I sit down in front of. Or I stand near. Or I meet one of my guides or guardians at. It's a powerful image for visualization and meditation. It's one that really helps us understand our purpose and function in this world. Those deep [00:20:00] roots. Those high branches reaching up into the heavens.
And that strong, sturdy trunk bridging the gap between them.
It's a powerful image to me. And it's one that really means a lot.
If it's not one that you're familiar with, I highly recommend that you play around with it. I really like the Latin, Prayer, Ave Maria, Mater misericordia. If you prefer English, Hail Mary, Mother of Mercy, Mother of Compassion. We really don't have a good translation for misericordia. It literally means Suffering Heart. Which to me is closer to our English word compassion to suffer with, to labor with. To me it's closer to compassion than mercy, but
Ave Maria, Regina Caeli, Hail Mary, Queen of Heaven. Whatever connects with you most, make up your own prayer. Don't say a prayer at all, just say it.
See it in front of you. Or if you have trouble seeing it, go [00:21:00] outside and find a tree that just says, I am alive just sit with that tree in real space for a while.
And just ponder The magic of its existence, its roots digging deep into the earth, and its branches reaching up to the heavens, and the strength and of its trunk.
As it carries. The waters of life up. Into the branches. And the power of the light of God. Down. Into the. I hope that. This is an image that resonates with you. It's one that I.
I have such a strong fondness for. One that I use a lot.
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And you find blessings in the light. Amen. Amen. [00:23:00]
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