Blessed Mary of the Broken Pot **
You preside over the blessedness and the brokenness of the world.
You are Sophia, the wisdom of God and space-maker for the birth of all things sacred.
With blood and marrow, tears and sweat, ache and awe, you become the mother of God. And you teach us all to risk love for the sake of being real.
Each manifestation of your grace becomes an occasion to imagine ourselves making space within our bodies and lives for the conception and growth of something sacred.
You are an embodiment of divine hospitality. Even when the things around you are broken, damaged and harmed.
You are the image of renewal. Even when the dirt is cracked and the land parched from seventy days of beating down sun and seventy nights of cloudless rainless skies.
I learned (by osmosis, mostly) to fear you. And all things Catholic.
But really I think they were mostly afraid of your power to create the world, to renew life, and to give birth to divine presence.
They feared it in you. And they fear it in me and in all others who might give themselves over to becoming the mothers of God.
It was Meister Eckhart who first awoke me to this way of seeing. “We are all meant to be mothers of God,” he said. “For God is always needing to be born.”
So today as you preside over a baked Texas landscape, a frozen mountain, a tropical garden, an urban jungle or quiet grotto . . . .
I am taking courage from you to keep making space inside for the sacred to grow and flow through me.
For you preside over the blessedness and the brokenness of my life as well as the life of the world.
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**This statue stands along the pathway between library and dining hall at Montserrat Retreat in Lewisville, Texas.
