Mutual Adoration - As Above, So Below
Romancing the Divine - Can We Fall in Love and Save the World?
(Bernini’s “Ecstasy of St. Teresa”)
When my father died, I sang the Schubert “Ave Maria” at his funeral mass in a small Catholic church in Viroqua, Wisconsin. Afterwards, my mother admonished me somewhat primly that I really ought to sing less ardently and more “liturgically.” “It really sounded like you were in love with the Blessed Mother, dear!”
I don’t recall telling her that such was my intention and such was my reality. Though she was the one who had introduced me to yoga, reincarnation, and practicing telepathy from an early age, still she was, despite this, Catholic to the bone and did not always like to acknowledge that her influence had ultimately resulted in my turning to the devotional yoga of India with its unabashed adoration of the Divine Mother aspect of God.
Eleven weeks later, in one of life’s sadder ironies, I sang the song again at my mother’s funeral mass. However, I still did not hold back on the ardent devotion which, to me, this beautiful expression of the Latin Hail Mary demands. My Catholic upbringing was a sweet one, mercifully devoid of any of the abuses we know of, and devotion to Mother Mary was a central reality of those years. My mother would call us in to their bedroom for evening prayers together (sometimes all ten siblings), and we would begin with the Hail Mary. She told often of how, before they met, she and my father were both saying Novenas on their rosaries for the Virgin to guide them to their destined partner.
(Kathryn Dooley Dunn on her wedding day)
In her late teens my mother was torn between two irreconcilable ambitions: either to become a missionary nun in India or to marry a doctor and have thirteen children. Learning of this, her parents immediately removed her from St. Mary of the Woods College in Indiana, and enrolled her at the University of Chicago to study biochemistry - a fine place to meet potential doctor husbands.
“He was wearing a polka-dot tie when I first saw him,” she would fondly recall. “And my heart skipped a beat!…I knew he was the one.”
(Paul J. Dunn and Kathryn Dooley Dunn on their wedding day, 1951)
They were indeed as divine a match as one is likely to find: her high strung dynamism anchored by his quiet strength, his steady work ethic fired by her innovative ambition, the chaos of raising a brood of ten made endurable by their unflagging affection, and (above all) in their deeply shared passionate life purpose as pioneer holistic healers and leaders in the Montessori Movement.
(Dr. Paul Dunn, Kathryn Dunn and family in the early 1970s - author at far right with collie)
Blessing though they were to us all, they proved a hard act to follow. I was left with a deeply rooted belief that marriage should be a divinely guided altruistic partnership and that marriage is forever (a belief which did not play out for me nor for any but one of my siblings). We were constantly reminded that we were here to change the world. “What this world needs is for you kids to…” - fill in the blank with whatever Mom had decided was the latest urgent global need which her children were destined to fill.
Here in 2024 it seems to me that “what the world needs now” is an altruistic passionate partnership between the Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine, for the gender wars and the gender confusion to cease, and to acknowledge and accept again the beautiful polarity enshrined in Nature while at the same time seeking the balance of the two within ourselves.
In the last twenty-five years I have ardently pursued some absurdly ambitious quests in the name of Sacred Activism: reversing 400 years of propaganda as regards the enthralling reality behind the Shakespeare plays; exposing elite corruption in the hoarded trillions of the Global Collateral Accounts; establishing a new and enforceable international court of human rights to address elite crimes against humanity; lineally restoring the original Order of the Knights Templar as a nation state subject of international law (partly to serve as a facilitator of the human rights court); attempting to forestall the rollout of the global 5G network (which thousands of medical researchers had warned against); and last and certainly not least, endeavoring to learn, practice, and embody the timeless methods of sacred science which turn out to be the most powerful weapons in our hands in the name of healing Mother Earth and creating peace among the human family.
In the end, I’m a storyteller - which seems a humble occupation for someone with those ambitions. But our destiny, as individuals and as a species, is encoded in the stories we tell ourselves. And the salvation of us all, I now believe, can truly be found in the great story of the love between the God and the Goddess (in the cosmos and in the home), of the love of both for Their children, and in an unabashedly ardent renaissance of our love for our Creator and Her Creation.
“If you only knew how much God loves you! A thousand million loves rolled into one!” said the great American saint, Sri Daya Mata. “If you only knew…so great would be your joy, your heart could not contain it.”
(Sri Daya Mata, direct disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda)
In India they say that worshipping God as the Beloved, as the intimate Reality in the Divine Romance, is the most difficult path of all, since it calls for purification of heart and soul to the highest degree. Easier, say the great ones, to let the man revere the Mother in his beloved and in all women. Let the woman revere the Father in her husband and in all men. Then we can be lifted into the ecstatic purity of the Divine Romance, which consumed Ramakrishna in his adoration of Goddess Kali, which beatified St. Francis in his passion for Lady Poverty, which burns with an almost erotic bliss of divine union in the face of Bernini’s St. Teresa of Avila.
(Maha-Prakriti - the Hindu conception of the Divine Mother of the Universe)
I had to tell myself these stories before I could try to embody them. So I wrote one book on falling in love with God, and then another about my madly ambitious sacred quests. And the fruit of it all is that She is real to me as I stumble on - as real as the desk at which I write - and has been an undeniable comforting Presence a thousand times in the last 34 years.
(Meditation was indispensable - find your path and stay with it, if you are so moved.)
And still, being the son of Paul and Kathryn Dunn and the great-grandson of a Fenian Raider (those beyond quixotic Irish veterans of the American Civil War who attempted to conquer Canada and trade it to the Crown for the freedom of Ireland), I am poised, as are we all, on the threshhold of a year of upheaval, in which those of us who demand a life of meaning must tell each other stories of salvation, healing, reconciliation, and courage.
So I look out on the dazzling wilderness in which I now live, and adore the Father whose Law makes it possible, the Mother whose Love gave it life, and the Son whose Presence set the galaxies alight before time began…and who walked in Judea 2,000 years ago.
And I believe now that my last sacred quest may be to tell that story anew for the thousandth time - to be one of those who bring forth the history, the sacred science, and the divine communion which may lift His living image from the clay…now when we need Him most.
Michael Henry Dunn