In the city of Mosta, on the island of Malta, the main church (whose architecture is modeled after Rome’s Pantheon and which is consecrated to the assumption of Mary) was a target of bombing by German air crafts in WWII. Four bombs were aimed at the target. Three missed the target and did no severe damage to the surroundings. The people were gathered and praying Mary.
As the prayers were at their highest, one bomb did hit the main room, made a hole thru it and fell on the ground. But it did not explode. Everyone was saved – they asked for help and got their divine intervention.
“Why fear when I am here?” – Sathya Sai Baba
It is interesting that the Maltese called Mary for help – not Jesus, not God, not the archangels – and have this important church dedicated to her. The spirit of the early Goddess (Mother earth) survives on the island, even after its latest christian reinterpretation.
I am quite convinced that the original ‘goddess’ just represented the divine Love as a whole – the force that makes life possible.
But other religions, too, have created images of duality, labeling certain deities as male of female, but they are really all just different personifications of various aspects of the same Divine force.
“In the philosophic conception of Sakti, which forms the background of the Mother cult, Sakti is the dynamic aspect of the Absolute […].
It is one of the great contributions of Sri Ramakrishna to Indian religious tradition that […] has identified the Sakti not as a mere female counterpart of the Absolute, but as the Absolute himself personalized – the Saguna Brahman of the Vedanta who is the origin, the support and the end of the manifold universe. The Saguna Brahaman is, in a devotional sense, Father of Mother, and […] can be invoked in any other loving relationship as Master, Friend, Lover, Teacher and so on. […]
In other words, when God is called Mother, the implication is not so much to give us a Female Deity as to remind men that in His function of redemption (Anugraha), Motherhood is the most adequate of all humanly understandable concepts to describe His unconditioned love to those who seek shelter in Him, abandoning all other support.” – Swami Tapasyananda
