Poet illuminates the mysticism of Mary, humanity
By Louise Reid Ritchie
In a friend's Tallahassee family room, Kim Garcia muses about the eight years that she spent living and writing in that city, a place where she calls the pace "a poetry pace."
With light illuminating her from the large windows at her back, the prize winning FSU and Reed College-trained writer adds, "Something wonderful about this landscape is that there's a quiet that's very old....You feel like that quiet seems to go back centuries."
Then, staring into the interviewer's eyes with the boldness of a Goya nude, the 44-year-old author begins discussing a 16-year-old girl who was, says Garcia, a "warrior" who made a "revolutionary feminist statement."
The teen is the Virgin Mary and what Garcia calls her "radical" statement is the "Magnificat," Mary's reply to the angel who asked her to bear the son of God: "Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to thy word.... For behold, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed."
Elaborates Garcia, who now teaches at Boston College, "When she says, 'all generations will call me blessed,' she's making a claim as a woman in a patriarchal society that is really remarkable."
In its title poem, Garcia's recently released book, "Madonna Magdalene" includes her iconoclastic image of a Virgin Mary who is no frail, submissive virgin, but is a "figure of completely yielding to love in this radical way....I think of her as a very powerful figure allowing love to happen....
"There's something funny about telling Catholic girls to act like Mary," laughingly adds Garcia, who converted to Catholicism when she was pregnant with her 19-year-old son, and also has a 15-year-old daughter. "For Mary was fortunate that Joseph came around or else she would be an unwed mother."
Seriously, she continues, "When you're looking at that moment when Mary says let it be done unto her, she's talking about risking being a single mother; she knows she could be stoned.... She's deciding to do something very dangerous at that moment. You've got to be a warrior to yield to love."
However, despite the mystic roots of their religion, most Christians, Garcia says, are not sitting silently, open to God's messages. She includes herself among those lacking such openness: "I'm such a low grade mystic that what counts as a mystical experience for me is getting out of my head and being in the present moment. For me, the challenge is to yield all the net of thinking and then feel that present moment. That's the Mary moment."
Consequently, what Garcia thinks is "so wonderful" about Mary reaction to God's request is "how much she's trusting in her own experience. She didn't go to the rabbi, her father and say, 'Explain to me what happened.' She's saying, 'Despite everything that happened and how weird it was, this is my experience.'"
Garcia recalls a line from D.H. Lawrence "which I really love: 'They call all experiences of senses mystic.'"
That resonates with her because, "We tend to break things off into, this is junk; this is great. This is spiritual; this is not spiritual."
In her Madonna Magdalene poem, she is "saying, "good luck to that kind of thinking" and the Magdalene in her poem isn't repenting the flesh, but "her lack of passion, her lack of heart."
Garcia's conversation reflects an intimate knowledge of and appreciation of the Bible that grew out of her unhappy teen years when she read it for an hour a day: "I was reading it as if God might speak to me at any moment, and I took that over to how I read all poetry as if it's all sacred."
Asked what she would like readers to get from her book, she pauses for a long time and then replies, "I would love for this book to be a doorway into the mystical in their own lives....The world's mystical.
"I'm suggesting in the Madonna poem that every child is the Christ child. Every child is that sacred being, including ourselves."
"Madonna Magdalene" was published by Turning Point. For more information about Kim Garcia: http://www.kim-garcia.com/opening.html.
Madonna Magdalene
By Kim Garcia
Place here the virgin in her Easter petals,
the ladder of green leaves, the open throat.
I was reading; my lamp was full. A bird
entered the room, and knocked the walls
with bright wings, drunk on sky-mindedness.
Here the story of my shame, pictured
above its tight band of explanation
no one reads. Here the stink
of animal dung on straw. Here milk
,
and thorn to suck, the splintering nail.
Water to wine, we were stained
and intoxicated. Do as Love tells you.
Praise virginity lost, slow and conscious
as a strip tease. Layer by layer
,
let it be done unto us. Again and again.
Copyright, 2006. Reprinted with permission
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