Welcome. This post is a long time in the making.
Many, many months back now, I did something that I had been doing for decades--often mindlessly, seemingly by instinct.
I lit a candle.
I was working as the Rector of the Seaport Shrine of Our Lady of Good Voyage. It was an early morning, and I was the only one in the plaza before the entrance to the shrine. As I typically did, after unlocking the door, I went straight to what was called the Mary Shrine. There at this shrine within a shrine, was a roughly 30% of life-size carved statue of the mother of Jesus, the Blessed Mother as she is known, and specifically Our Lady of Good Voyage. Not unlike the similarly named, Mary, Star of the Sea, Our Lady of Good Voyage was invoked by those whose livelihoods were connected to the ocean in some way. Sailors, navigators, fisherman, dock workers.
I lit a candle and my mind wandered to other Marian shrines I had been to, and there have been many...Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal, Our Lady of Lourdes in France, Our Lady of the Pillar in Spain, and more, but I stopped, in my thoughts, at one of the most memorable of these temples, the one built "over" the ancient Roman Temple dedicated to Artemis in Rome: the Santa Maria Sopra Minerva basilica in Rome. How many worshippers of the Goddess Minerva, I thought to myself, had done exactly what I had just done in the present, in Boston's Seaport. How many, in times past, walked into a shrine and lit a candle before an image of a divine figure of spiritual intercession--not so different from the one in the Seaport Shrine.
There were goddesses then! And priestesses also!
(Above photo taken at the location of one of the first Marian apparitions of Catholicism.)
And yet, as I sat alone in that temple built almost exactly in accordance with the appearance of ancient Roman places of worship, I wondered how it can be so. A religion said to be more advanced, a religion that is said to have come from God himself--could relegate women to such obvious second class status. Even the venerated Blessed Mother herself--with her multiple images outnumbering those of her son in the church I sat in--was disqualified from being a cleric. "This discrimination cannot be of God. This cannot be of God."
That was a turning point for me. I had my opinions, and a deep-seated sense of justice, but as I looked about this temple of Roman Catholicism that I myself ministered in, I realized also that the Church as an institutional bureaucracy had turned a corner a long time ago, a patriarchal elitist turn that was predicated upon the subjection of women and nothing was ever going to change.
Some things endure. People's need for spirituality. The seeking of one's Higher Power. The search for meaning. That would have been true in Minerva's temple in Rome. Or Artemis' grand temple in Ephesus, one of the Wonders of the Ancient World, sadly now only ruins.
The lighting of a candle.
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