Earth of Heaven

I want to draw your attention to an excellent piece by my friend Scott Eric Alt over at “To Give A Defense.” It’s about yet another attempt at mass hysteria concerning Pope Francis’s consecration of Russia and Ukraine to the Virgin Mary scheduled for today. The Fatimaniacs are attempting to gin up a conspiracy theory that one of the titles of Mary, “Earth of Heaven,” is either a mistaken translation of “queen of Heaven” which would invalidate the consecration, or else a sneaky way of evoking the ancient Inca goddess Pachamana.

I can’t stress enough that this isn’t in any way how prayer works. If you mean to address the Virgin Mary, and you accidentally or by some ruse call her by the wrong title, you won’t make her unable to hear you. You definitely won’t evoke a spirit you didn’t want to speak with. The Mother of God is neither proud nor weak; she will hear and do anything she can to help.  She’s not sitting there in Heaven tapping her foot, waiting for us to call her by just the right name. I don’t understand how the people obsessed with Fatima conspiracy theories can claim to love the Virgin Mary and yet honestly believe she is such an abusive mom.

But in any case, as Scott found out, “Earth of Heaven” is not a mistranslation and it’s nothing to do with Pachamana. It’s a line from a beautiful Byzantine hymn:

Holy Mary,
mother of the Lord,
your faith guides us.

Turn your gaze
towards your children,
Earth of heaven.

The road is long and night descends upon us:
intercede with Christ for us,
Earth of heaven.

The song is singing of Mary as the piece of the Earth who willingly offered her body for God to become incarnate: the fertile ground where Heaven grew among us.

And because of her offering of herself, Christ became incarnate, and now we all can also become earths for Heaven to grow in.

It’s not a mistake, it’s the whole mystery we celebrate today on the Annunciation.

If you follow my blog, you know I’ve been hiking a lot recently, to help cope with my depression and religious trauma. Hiking is one way I can get some prayers in, since it doesn’t feel safe to pray in church. I meditate and talk to God while I hike. The other day I took my camera with me to photograph the first wildflowers over at the Wildflower Reserve in Raccoon Creek, but the wildflowers are just barely getting started for the year.  The snow had barely melted for the year. The brooks that ran back and forth across the path were gooey sludge. The creek itself looked green and sickly. The bracken was all dead hay. The trees were bare. The stretch of the path that’s supposed to be the “meadow trail” was more of a swamp; my feet kept getting stuck in the mud which was supposed to be hard packed earth.

There’s nothing wrong with the earth for looking like that, in this climate in March. That’s what the earth is.  And it’s beautiful in its way, but that’s not what I came to see. I came to see Spring.

But at one point I looked down and saw little pepper-and-salt flowers, Ergenia. Those are the earliest wildflowers, so early that another name for them is “harbinger of spring.” They don’t look like much, just janky white fuzz; it looked more like they’d been dropped on the ground as a prank than like they were bursting out of it. And on another hike I saw the very first tips of the skunk cabbage, a plant with a bad smell and an unfortunate name which is actually impressive to look at, poking out of the mud. It looked like a practical joke, like somebody had buried a plastic flower in the earth to fool the tourists. That’s the first thing that happens in the Spring. The earth begins to wake up and show us some living things, and the living things look impossible. From there it gets more and more extravagant and the whole muddy brown mess is alive with color. That time will come before you know it. Spring is inevitable, but when it starts it looks like a joke.

Spring is as impossible as a virgin becoming with child through the Holy Spirit, through no intervention by any man but simply by saying “yes.”

Yes, let it be done to me. Fiat mihi secondum verbum tuum. And the earth turns into something it wasn’t before, and life comes back.

It is such a beautiful thing that our Church celebrates the Annunciation in late March, while these mysteries are going on all around us.

“Earth of Heaven” isn’t a mistake. It’s like the Spring: an impossibility that happens anyway.