Mater Dei.

Prior to her, the history of the gods was filled with wars, storms, violence and different perambulations.

Satan rebelled against God in heaven and he was cast down. In Eden, man was co-opted into this rebellion. From the serpent, through Eve, man became enslaved and got engrossed the more into this rebellion such that the more rebellious humans are, the more they are initiated into the company of the gods, for Satan, a fallen angel, who would want to be God, had colonised the earth and made himself its god, such that he is referred to as the prince of the world.

With time, the good spirits as was created in the Garden of Eden got chocked up and holy men who appeared throughout the course of history increasingly despaired and became more and more exasperated so to say about a return to the Beatitudes. Such was the agony of John the Evangelist when he saw no one was found worthy to open the scrolls of the book in the Book of Revelations.

The world, until Christ, was under Satan’s yoke. From the highest to the lowest, man was in bondage and the strife either to be an Orisa (god) or to parley with such, was rife. It was a question of winner takes all, the whole world was embroiled in an unpalatable and unhealthy competition for the survival of the fittest, while Satan sat as its Prince and delighted pawning both gods and man into despair and exhumes in triumph at the chaotic emblem stamped on earth since the fall of man.

The strong and powerful men maintained the status of being beneficiary of the gods, sometimes they are referred to as 2nd only to the gods to preserve an awe for them, or even at their deaths, a cult is formed in their honour and they are worshiped as gods.The poor who were always at the bottom of the echelon and could only look with despair at the length of alienation from the strong, and in futility at the gods who must have abandoned them to their fate as outcasts and scapegoats of life. They as such live miserably, as any hope for recompenses even afterlife seemed far out of grasp.

Spiritual time is not as it is in everyday observation or as it is conceptualized in scientific studies. These issues described above, regarding the sport in which Satan has made of humanity and the futility to which the poor have been abandoned are still happening in this age, at this moment. You only need to look around to witness the sport Satan makes of men when they refuse to look deeply at the world from Christ’s perspective. Adam and Eve might well have fallen gigantically in the heart of a man today. Evil still reigns in the heart of men until Christ be made manifest fully upon earth. Principalities and Powers still looms, perhaps as close as the heart of your home, or closer still, in your mind and intellect.

There is one who dwells in the secret place of the most high and abides under the shadow of the Almighty. She is Mary. The deepest mysteries are embedded in her. Mary knows deep mysteries that are difficult for any human mind to fathom. What, for instance, if she has not revealed to some just a glimpse of the mysteries of her son’s birth? We would probably have no clue regarding Christ’s divinity, and that is only a tip of the iceberg of what she knows.

When God decides to manifest His glory, He uses nothing and nothingness to beat the devil at his game. Sure the last thing being expected by Satan was for a poor tiny nonentity from an obscure village like Nazareth to beat him at his game. He was busy looking up and waiting to beat whoever would come any near his domain since the call of Abraham. Not in his wildest dream did he think God would stoop so low as to become a man. Tufiakua! That, to him is an extremely insane and scandalous act to conceive. Stooping to conquer is not in his ‘Wikipedia’, humility is not part of his DNA.

Before Christ, the Law of Moses came as a process back to the unity and beatitude of the beginning, Satan foresaw that man would be incapable of fulfilling all its rites, so he was certain man would still get locked under his yoke and rebellion against God, and that this would continue ad infinitum. He also believed that man would perpetually perambulate within himself in a perpetual struggle for supremacy without the realization of his oneness. Man was constantly manipulated by Evil and the land was literally stuck under in the knot of the venture for supremacy of the Orisas.

As an expert of the art of God, Satan knew justice demands that man makes recompense for his disobedience and he believed the Law to be a big distraction through which man would hopelessly hope to redeem himself, for he was aware that no flesh and blood would be capable of fulfilling all the rigours that the Law demanded for a journey back to the beatitudes. He also knows that, according to natural law he was aware of a perpetual gulf between man and God, and God would need a perfectly pure medium to travel to save man, and as long as he, Satan remained the prince of the world, there was no way a pure creature would survive sin and corruption. Even if there was to be such a person, the question of free will to which every man must be subject would make the task insurmountable.

That God would decide to go through the pain of re-creating another world in order to save a world who would do no good to His hallowedness is an effort too great for nothing. A recreation was started, this time, not externally, as happened in Genesis, but internally in the heart of a masterpiece of His. Creation was secretly and quietly fine tuned and perpetually made infinitely more beautiful than was of Eden. Mary was the creation. In her, nature was recreated. Water, earth, vegetations, fish, birds sky etc was fully embedded in her, because in the 2^nd and final epic battle between goodness and evil, God Himself was to come down to save man, and inside this creature called Mary, creation was perfected as a medium for the Creator to descend and live and be born in order to rescue man out of his enslavement and his co-option into the rebellion against Him.

Satan cannot understand the reason for 3 things: Love, mercy and grace. As such one of the deepest prayers that evil cannot stand is this longing: O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee. For that 2nd creativity was hidden from him. This new refashioning of creation, in the Church’s dogma is referred to as the Immaculate Conception.  But there was still one thing God would not do in this grand design of His. Out of His justice, He could not touch free will.

To save man, God depended yet on the response of a girl He had made. All heavens remained in suspense as Angel Gabriel was sent to deliver this message to the little girl of Nazareth. It was a gargantuan risk taken by the Divine, similar to a football game, when the final spot kick by a team player would determine the victory or defeat. All heavenly hosts held their breadth hoping that the divine gamble would pay off and not be a double ‘mistake’ if she refuses. Fingers crossed...

Divine Intelligence had perfected everything in that girl, she was immaculately conceived, she was filled with every grace, but free will was what His justice would not allow Him to tamper with in man.  From that moment: from that fiat, from that acknowledging statement: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord…”, the Fall was reversed in an instant. A family of man had become god without having to go through the rebellious route and thus not in allegiance to Satan but through the humility route, by the acknowledgement of her nothingness. Nothingness is a verb the devil loathes but which he has become. Mary acknowledged and faced up to her nothingness and by that she has become Something. God pierced through into humanity, the Word was made flesh, the genius out of the divine had paid of and the first out of all humans –Mary- was saved! “My spirit rejoices in God my saviour!”

All strives, chaos, and kirakitas now have a new channel, an authentic one, a lasting one. God has created a medium, through which all the rebellious ideologies of the evil one is smashed by a sincere and realistic acknowledgement of one human of her nothingness in utter dependence on Divinity, so that she can offer back to God everything that is rightly His. “He has looked upon the nothingness of His handmaid…”

A Vacuum who understands perfectly the fallen state of man allows the passage of Eternity into time. In her, time and eternity become married. In time, Satan is a billion of year’s old intelligence who holds humanity to ransom in gravity and friction. In Eternity, Satan is a ‘no-more’ force; the actual nothing, for it has been cast in the lake of fire. In the Product of God in Mary : The Christ Jesus, time is being purified and made authentic so that it can be in true subjection to eternity and a cause for authentic freedom.

Because she has been there, a subject of the law, born and bred in the law and under the law, she is able to appeal to all ancient gates to arise and allow enter the king of glory: Her Son and God’s Son, the Christ Jesus, right from His conception in her womb. In the response of her body to the laws of nature, as water and blood flowed through her being, through His movement, respiration, nutrition, growth, excretion in her and by the work of her memory, intellect and will , she commands all ancient gates, right from her body, all the laws of time and space to be lifted and the king of glory was entered fully into this new creation , until He was fully gestated and like God, through Him, with Him and in Him, she is able to freely offer this masterpiece, this God Man, for the salvation of humanity. She is truly the mother of God and that of all authentic children of God. In her we can concretely say: Orisa bi iya ko si (There is no god as a mother). Every human mother who would resonate this saying would have to strike a root in Mary. Her faith and humility naturally smashes barriers generated by Satan and his allies. They are either, both lifted up and co-opted into divine plan or they are smashed into oblivion. That is the enmity promised by God between the serpent and the woman in Genesis.

Something happened after forty days of His birth that can be easily ignored in the scripture. Mary freely acted God; she freely offered to God what belonged to God. As she carried her into the temple, all ancient gates arose into the old creation and the prophecy of God was fulfilled: “I shall put enmity between thee and the woman, between her offspring and yours…”. Simeon saw this salvation and prayed the Nunc Dimittis. What else?

In the Old testaments, God seemed not to really like the idea of the Israelites asking for a King, but it was through this line of kingship that His Son, the Christ was born and made manifest. Likewise, the idea of Orisa (god) can appear revolting, as in a child’s mind, it still connotes rebellion to the One Supreme God. No. Since Mary, authentic Orisas need submit to One God in Christ. In actual fact, any Christian, born in Mary and of water and the Holy Spirit is an Orisa, infinitely greater than the orisas who bully them by striking their heels. But with her faith and humility, they smack and pulverise their heads.

Because she is composed of matter and she acknowledges the fact that whatever spirit she’s got belongs to the Giver, she qualifies perfectly to be an orisa, but an orisa who alone has the means to offer everything back to the owner. Previous orisas tremble at this fact, for it was a humble acknowledgement of death and defeat, she let go of her opinions and plans to accept a seemingly impossible divine strategy.

“This girl really messed things up” That seems to be the echo resounding from the college of humanity who had reigned out of their allegiance to evil. “Why would she give to Him all what we have gathered over the years, out of rebellion and toil, to Him by a momentous fiat?” From Mary, every orisa since inception now faces a choice, either to lift higher ancient doors and succumb to the kingship of God, or to be annihilated into that which they dread the most: gehenna.

Mary has the capacity to influence God in a way that we can only call scandalous. Perhaps, if you’ve no capacity to listen to scandals, you are advised to stop the reading here.

Mary has power over nature and natural phenomena. She works on destiny and aligns it towards the straight part of mercy. She is ‘A tun ori eni ti ko suwon se’ (she remoulds an otherwise tarnished destiny) She can stay the hand of God like no one else. God is obedient to Mary. She has this capacity because she trusted and let go. Even in our age, one wonders at how much God bestows on His servants when they are truly humble and faithful. Isn’t Elijah a man like us? Mary is infinitely greater than Elijah. She is at the same time, a daughter of God, a spouse of God and the mother of God. She is soaked into the Trinity. She is full of grace. She prophesied that all generations would call her blessed. Avoid this at your own risk.

Christ was to start His public mission at 12 when He was found teaching the doctors in the temple at Jerusalem; Mary stayed this path and fashioned God’s destiny and our salvation. Christ had to wait another 18 years under her domain before she allowed His manifestation of His glory - even when He was not ready - at Cana. These signs, for the discerning mind are pointers to the one great sacrifice of Calvary. Mary, like Abraham, gave Him over for us at Calvary. If she wanted, she wouldn’t...

In conclusion...

I write because of my conviction that in our extreme materialistic, matter before mind world. If we are to return to the path of salvation and freedom, we have to rediscover the path. Christ says: You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. He said again, Learn from me for I am meek and humble of heart and you shall find rest to your souls. Humility is truth. There is a depth of humility and faith that I believe we need to rediscover in Jesus Christ and only with the help of Mary shall we arrive at it. Getting to the path of true humility is not a soft work. Mariology should be an integral path to total deliverance in our age and time.

Those who say Mary is nothing are right. She is nothing but she is a mother of Something. In Revelations 12 she was led into the desert to be rescued. Only by Mary can we discover the root of our nothingness in the desert of our being and the realisation of our utter dependence on God. Satan and his children could and would not do this because there is a dread of not being in control. In the school of Mary, her children find out that in this humility and nothingness lies the greatest power and might, even over God!

Today we celebrate the New Year in time, but the Church celebrates Mater Dei, because in her, Time and Eternity are married such that Time is made new every day through the influence of Eternity.

Happy New Year!