“In the stillness of the truth, you rest in Me, in My serene heart.”

By Tiziana DellaRovere

I don’t know why Mother Mary appeared to me. She appeared to me in spite of my spiritual prejudices and my wandering as far away as possible from the spiritual traditions of my native Catholic Church and its abuses of power. She came to me in spite of my feminism and the fact that I plainly disliked Her, since to me She was a symbol of demure passivity, second fiddle to the Christ, and in perpetual mourning and sorrow. To top this off, her virginity was clearly an implicit condemnation of the body and sexuality, which I had worked really hard to recover from the ravaging of my Catholic conditioning. Mother Mary did not care whether I liked Her or not, whether I believed in apparitions or not.

True, I had been on a rigorous spiritual path for decades, and my research into the Self and the deep psyche had brought me many mystical experiences of Union with the Divine. But I was not prepared, nor was I expecting, to have apparitions of Mother Mary. She came into my life, sprang my heart open in an instant, and claimed me as Her “beloved daughter,” Her “sweet child,” Her “warrior of love,” Her “servant,” and the “herald of Her wisdom.” She took me and made me Hers. Powerful, sweepingly loving, exquisitely beautiful and sensual, and infinitely wise, She was not the diluted and distorted version that the Catholic Church had presented me. For over two years, she appeared relentlessly, entrusting me with Her teachings, conferring upon me a mission to impart to the world a new kind of spirituality, the spirituality of the Divine Feminine, which is embodied instead of transcendent, focused on love instead of light, and transformative of the deep psyche through love as a path of transformation that is not only personal but planetary.

I came to know Her as the Mother of us all, fully divine and completely at the service of humanity. Her presence was—and still is for me—intimately personal, yet vastly universal. My encounter with Her, was precious, extraordinary, life-changing, the culmination of many years of spiritual discipline. As time went by, and I began to teach what would eventually evolve into the Adorata work, I discovered other women and men, each with their own secret and passionately devoted relationship with Mother Mary.

In fact, more than ever in these times of turmoil, Divine Mother, in the embodiment of Mother Mary, is touching the lives of many people in powerful and unexpected ways to console them, heal their deep wounding of body and the soul, impart guidance, and most of all, to love them unconditionally.

However, most of the time, people are reticent about sharing their experiences of Her with others for fear of being ridiculed or considered deluded or even a little crazy. During my travels teaching the spirituality of embodied love that She imparted to me during those first intense years, I am often approached by people who take me aside and whisper to me of their encounters with Mary, as if they were revealing a carefully hidden secret.

Once, a beautiful woman confided that she was part of a coven of witches that had been touched by Mary in such profound ways that they had formed a support group to integrate the presence of Mary into their Wicca, earth-oriented spirituality.

Another woman I met shared with me this amazing story. She was lying in bed, extremely distressed, feeling disheartened and alone in the world, when she perceived a gentle powerful presence lying beside her and holding her in an embrace of all-encompassing love. Immediately, she felt serene and peaceful. Surprised, she asked inwardly, “Who are you?”

“I am Mother Mary,” the presence replied.

“But I'm not Catholic,” the woman, who was a Methodist, protested, confused.

“Neither am I," Mother Mary replied.

This humorous story is very telling because it points out that, Mother Mary belongs to the heart of the people, not to a particular church. She is the embodiment of the Divine Feminine on earth. She is the compassion, the nurturance of the ideal mother, capable of that perfect love that we all long for. She is power and tenderness merged with the wisdom of the ages.

One of the most significant teachings that she imparted to me is that She loves each one of us for no other reason than that we exist. We do not have to earn Her love by performing well, being talented and smart, being rich, successful, and beautiful, or because we sacrifice ourselves for others. She loves us because we are Her children, Her creatures.

She is celestial like the blue sky, brightened by a fiery sun, and She is earthly like the dark, moistened soil of the deep forest. Her presence is ephemeral, like sea foam rolling on the ocean waves and solid and majestic like a mountain, still, yet brooding with life.

In Adorata, Mother Mary is not the biblical Mary, mother of Jesus; rather, She is the Divine Essence of the Mother of us all, who infused the body of the biblical Mary, a woman who became the living expression of Divine Mother’s love walking on earth.

But, this essence of Divine Mother is universal and has taken form in other deities and goddesses called by different names. I clearly witnessed the continuity of Her many manifestations through time when I visited Sicily. There, Her presence is palpably alive in both Pagan and Christian forms, often appearing in smaller statues of the goddess Demeter around the feet of the larger Mother Mary during Catholic processions.

This process of embodying Her divine presence is now no longer limited to special people like Saints and mystics, but has expanded to include all of us. In these times of radical transformation, She is knocking at the doors of our hearts, asking us to receive Her and learn to embody Her motherly love—to re-mother our body, our children, and our planet, to give birth to the heart of the world. She is asking each one of us, women and men, to become a Mary on earth.

"I nurture your soul with My motherly love
That you may come into the full embodiment
of your Divine Self
And become an enlovened human,
A Mary birthing your Christ within…
Then love will prevail on earth,
Because you, My beloved child, become love personified…
Fear not,
Take My hand and walk with Me.
Serenity is the scent of midsummer nights,
the surface of a lake reflecting the passing of the clouds,
forming and transforming,
the quiet moments in between your wanderings when,
in the stillness of the truth,
you rest in Me,
in My serene heart."

~From Adorata: The Path of Enlovement
The Virtue of Serenity