When Mother Mary Came To Me

In 2010, my sister nearly died in a quad bike accident.

We were young, wild and free, travelling across the Greek islands with our 40L backpacks and the carefree spirit that so often accompanies those early twenty-something years.

I don’t think about that time very often. It feels so long ago now, yet still, mixed with the faint bittersweet memories of ‘the time of our lives’ and ‘the time my sister almost died.’

What I do remember is, during that time, my family began to pray deeply. The kind of prayer that emerges only when you stand at the threshold of the unthinkable, face to face with the thing you fear the most.

We were there, at the threshold. Hoping. Waiting for results from the hospital in Athens to tell us whether or not my sister would recover. Whether she would walk again. Whether she would carry the scars of that accident for the rest of her life.

It was a time in our lives when we had no control. When surrender became our greatest ally and all we could do was place our trust in something greater than ourselves.

I must admit though, I didn’t pray. I couldn’t. I was deep in my rejection of the indoctrination that had all but stripped me of my own inner authority. Raised by a fundamentalist Christian father who never missed an opportunity to remind me that my very existence was sinful, I had turned away from anything that resembled religion. My faith was in something I could not name. And my faith was certainly nowhere near the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, I remember the prayers of my auntie, a devout, albeit never judgmental, Catholic who had practised her faith faithfully for as long as I had known her.

She prayed to Our Lady of Ta’ Pinu and made a promise: if my sister were healed and remained with us, she would take her story to the Sanctuary of Ta’ Pinu on the island of Gozo, Malta, a church dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption (Mother Mary).

Ta’ Pinu has become known around the world as the Church of Miracles. For decades, pilgrims have journeyed there seeking Mother Mary’s intercession in times of illness, grief and despair, believing that even the impossible might be held within her compassionate embrace. Inside the church, the walls are filled with handwritten prayers asking for miracles, alongside letters of gratitude, photographs, crutches, medical reports and stories from those who believe their prayers were answered. Now, my fully recovered sister’s story sits there, among the miracles, among the hope, among the reverence for Mary, the Divine Mother.

It would be decades later when I would, too, connect with Mother Mary. Years later, in what could be described as seemingly unrelated circumstances, though I have come to learn that these threads are seldom unconnected.

It was in Greece that I encountered the Mother. In lands that echoed my ancestral roots, not so far from Malta, she appeared to me.

I was on pilgrimage, a journey deep into remembering my role as a priestess in this lifetime. Nine of us had been called to Crete for a Sacred Feminine Kundalini Activation Retreat. Yet, with hindsight, it feels far more accurate to say that it was a divine ritual of remembrance.

Each day unveiled another layer of the veil. Time seemed to dissolve as memories beyond this lifetime surfaced for all of us. Ancient temples, forgotten priestesses, healing abilities, symbols, dreams and initiations emerged, experienced by the body and remembered by the soul.

It was as though we had stepped beyond the ordinary world and into a place where past, present and future no longer existed as separate realities. Every ceremony, every activation, every moment became another thread weaving us back into an ancient tapestry of the divine.

As we bathed in the waters of the Aegean Sea, we participated in what his-story calls baptism, and what I would later come to recognise as a far older rite of cleansing and initiation, one that relates to the sacred traditions of the priestesses long before it was absorbed into organised religion.

It was my turn to stand at the head of the woman who lay on the waters, held by her sisters, as she received the blessing. As I poured the crystalline water over her crown, Mary enveloped me.

“Hail, Mary, full of grace. Blessed are thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb...

Hail, Mary, full of grace. Blessed are thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb...

Hail, Mary, full of grace. Blessed are thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb...

The words repeated in my mind’s eye. Only these words. Only the words devoted to the sacred feminine. I had not recited the Hail Mary since I was about twelve years old, and even so, it was forced upon me by the church I was coerced into attending.

The words were channelling through my very being, as though I had crossed timelines into another dimension, a place where Mother Mary and I were not so separate.

It was this encounter, as I have come to call it, with Mary that remained with me in the months that followed. I found myself becoming increasingly curious about her life and the role she had played—not as the virgin, but as the Mother.

The title of virgin didn’t feel expansive enough for her Divine presence. It took away her authority, her spiritual power. After all, she did birth the Messiah, did she not? So many of her stories, her images, her characteristics seem to veil (even in the literal sense) the powerful woman she truly was.

As I began to lift the veil, I felt myself drawing closer to her true essence as a mystic, a spiritual healer and a priestess; I met Mother Mary as the personification of the Sacred Feminine I had been longing for in the stories of the past.

What had been hidden about her beneath layers of doctrine? I asked myself. Who was Mary before she became a symbol of purity?

My search led me to the work of scholar Marguerite Rigoglioso, whose writings offered a radically different lens through which to view the women of early Christianity. Whether one agrees with all of her conclusions or not, her books spoke to me as a truth that had been missing from my story. Within one month, I had read Rigoglioso’s books, The Secret Life of Mother Mary and The Mystery Tradition of Miraculous Conception, as well as immersed myself in the Gnostic Texts, The Gospel of Mary and The Gospel of Philip. These new perspectives invited me to ask new questions, to look beyond the familiar narratives, and to learn that the women who stood beside Yeshua carried far greater spiritual authority than his-story has told us.

What my auntie had instinctively known all those years before was not simply devotion to Mary, but trust in the sacred ministry of women. Across cultures and centuries, women have stood at the thresholds of birth, death, grief and healing. They have anointed, prayed, tended the sick, welcomed new life and accompanied the dying. Whether we call them priestesses, wise women, midwives, mystics or myrrh-bearers, they have always held the sacred.

Now, that memory is being restored.

What has become deeply apparent to me lately is that we are living through the resurrection of priestess consciousness. Across the world, women are remembering the power of the Divine Mother in all her forms, and their role in restoring balance in this great world.

I truly feel that Mother Mary was calling me back to the path of the sacred feminine. And I can finally, in my sovereignty, receive her outside of the confines of the dogma.

I can receive her as she truly was, a powerful mystic, a divine birth priestess and the archetype of feminine spiritual authority we have been waiting for.