Just lately, I acquired an invite from Christena Cleveland, writer of God Is a Black Lady, to supply a blurb about her new ebook that comes out this fall, known as The Black Madonna: Icon of Resistance & Nourisher of Souls. The title derives from bell hooks, who urged her folks to “reclaim the Black Madonna as an icon of resistance.”
I really like the ebook, which is so wanted on this time of resistance and chaos. It has been a secret dream all my life to see the Black group take this icon and run with it, which this ebook does with panache. The writer has wrestled in depth with this excellent determine and archetype.
A number of years in the past, I used to be requested to lecture at Morehouse College, the place Howard Thurman is buried, on the Black Madonna. I used to be struck that so few of the 200 or so workers and school in attendance, all of whom had been Black, had recognized in regards to the Black Madonna. However this ebook brings her alive and lights a hearth that, I’m certain, is not going to burn out.
Right here is my blurb: It is a shifting, passionate, private and nicely researched research of the Black Madonna born of the writer’s pilgrimages by foot to obscure Black Madonna shrines in France and elsewhere in addition to substantive educational analysis. The writer identifies the Black Madonna as ‘the Icon of Resistance,’ ‘the Container of the God whom nothing can include,’ ‘Mom of Chaos,’ ‘the right portal to our diasporic non secular origins,’ and extra.
The writer provides a banquet of perception and which means to many (however not all 450+) Black Madonna pictures and tales from Cuba to South Africa, from the Philippines to Czechoslovakia, from Haiti to France, from Africa to Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland. In doing so, she invitations us to resume our imaginations and prayer and spirituality–particularly in crucial instances like we face as we speak. She provides practices alongside the best way that render the ebook sensible in addition to aspirational.
I depend this among the many most vital, substantive, and insightful books ever written on the Black Madonna. It represents a brand new stage in Marian theology, and appropriately, it comes from the pen of a Black girl who is keen to maneuver past a stale, flat, solely white and patriarchal model of God. Like Meister Eckhart, she “prays God to rid us of God.”
The Black Madonna, in selecting Christena to relay her story, has chosen correctly and astutely. Christena is a first-class storyteller, and the Black Madonna has many highly effective tales to inform. Learn this ebook and be ready to welcome the divine female into your soul, physique, spirit, and into humanity’s collective historical past as soon as once more. A very revolutionary ebook!
I wrote in regards to the Black Madonna in my ebook, The Hidden Spirituality of Males, and we’ve celebrated a number of Cosmic Plenty in her honor.
Alessandra Belloni hails from southern Italy, the place the Black Madonna custom in Europe was first born. Just lately, she wrote a vital ebook, Therapeutic Journeys with the Black Madonna: Chants, Music, and the Sacred Practices of the Nice Goddess. I used to be honored to write down the Foreword to it. She has led retreats for many years to Black Madonna shrines in Southern Italy. She and Christena are sisters, one from the African American custom and one from the Italian custom, known as by the Black Madonna to make herself recognized in these disturbing instances, calling for immense loss of life and in addition creativity.
Whereas analyzing the Black Madonna all over the world, Christena additionally provides deep insights on the custom of the labyrinth, a apply that Episcopal priest Lauren Artress of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco has delivered to life in our instances.
Banner Picture: Black Madonna from the Regina Mundi church, Rockville, Soweto. Picture by Justin Corridor on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you relate to the Black Madonna as an Icon of Resistance and apt for our instances of chaos and wrestle?
Associated Readings by Matthew Fox
The Hidden Spirituality of Males: Ten Metaphors to Awaken the Sacred Masculine, pp. 231-244
Naming the Unnameable: 89 Great and Lovely Names for God…Together with the Unnameable God
Ardour For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart
Meditations with Meister Eckhart: A Centering Guide
Meister Eckhart: Mystic-Warrior For Our Time
A Approach To God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey, pp. 143-164.
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