Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna; A Ten-Year Journey [Paperback]

Chna Galland's account of her spiritual odyssey, Longing For Darkness, is absolutely riveting. Her journey from her disappointment in her male-centered Roman Catholic tradition through Buddhism with its strong female Deity,Tara,only to find that feminine spirit inspiring the Black Madonnas of her own faith.By blending the two traditions, Ms.Galland found a spirituality that satisfied her longing for a feminine aspect of God. Her complete honesty about her inner being makes this book unique. Wherever she wanders, she connects with people of deep faith and learns from every tradition. This book is worth your effort.It may start you on your own spiritual journey, as it did for me.

China Galland began her pilgrimage at a time of inner turmoil. Alcoholic, a single mother, and addicted to perscription drugs, her story would seem something for us to pity. Actually, we never get the chance to pity her, because of her great strength of character.
At one time a devout Catholic, she found that the old ways could not serve to nurture her spirit. She found the bureaucracy of the Church an obstacle, rather than a source of assistance. Its conception of an exclusively male divinity did not nurture her spiritually.
Turning to Zen opened a door for her, but she needed a concept of divinity which embraced femininity. A chance meeting changed her life, revealing to her two avenues to investigate: the Tibetan goddess Tara, and the cult of the Black Madonna. Her quest became her new lease on life.
Pursuing information about "The Goddess," with the vigor that Arthur's knights sought the Holy Grail, becomes an epic task. Every sojourn becomes a lesson in humility; her own hardships pale in comparison to the hardships of others, and the strength which they can exhibit. With determination, she seeks answers in Khatmandu, Chestochowa, Medjugorje, and many other places. The intensity of her presence apparently matches the intensity of her writing; people everwhere empathize, and help her. She convinces those in Dharmasala to allow her to speak with the Dalai Lama. In Gdansk, she persuades members of the Solidarity party to allow her to meet with Lech Walesa. She draws everyone into her pilgrimage, especially the reader.
China Galland presents a feminine way of seeing, without pushing a Feminist agenda. Her words have great potency, and will have great meaning for most people, women and men. Although she succeeds in her quest to find spiritual meaning, the emotional weight of what she conveys requires that one read it slowly, in many sittings. When finished, the reader will also feel as if at the end of a long pilgrimage, and likely gain in personal insight.

Journey to Sobriety: Journey to God the Mother

China Galland is a writer, a mother of three, an alcoholic and a pilgrim, and "Longing for Darkness" is an account of her pilgrimage toward wholeness and healing.

This book is firstly an account of China Galland's spiritual journey toward sobriety. Secondly it is an account of her journey to and through Buddhism, of both Tibetan and Zen flavors, to the recovery of her own Catholic spiritual heritage, abandoned in the wake of patriarchal authoritarianism and misogyny, only to discover through the former's female deity, Tara, the strong, resilient, resisting feminine spirit inspiring the Black Madonnas of her own ancestry, blending the two traditions.

China Galland found a spirituality that satisfied her longing for the female face of God. "Longing For Darkness" is an absolutely compelling work, impossible to set down once one has begun the journey with the author. Her complete honesty about her inner being, her wllingness to place herself in a position of total vulnerability, to live in the moment, makes this book unique. Wherever the author journeys - whether to the Shrines of the Black Madonna in Poland, Switzerland, and southern France or to the temples of the Green and White Taras in Himalayan fastnesses or to the Temples of Kali, the Black Mother, in Delhi, she encounters people of deep faith and learns from every tradition, discovering that all of these variant images of God the Mother are but collateral descendents of a common ancestor and synthesizing her own way, a path strewn with flowers but without a name.

Though this is by no means a scholarly work on the historical derivations of the Maternal God (nor does it wish to be), it does provide a large amount of useful and interesting data, elaborating the dynamic interchanges between East and West since ancientmost times. Could Tara, Durga, Kali and the Blessed Virgin Mary and the host of Mother Gods of pre-Christian Europe all trace their ancestry to Astar/Astarte/Ishtar of ancient Persia, and could she herself be but a later manifestation of Isis, the black Mother God of the ancient Egyptians?

It is a possible, if not probable, thesis, but that is not the point of this book. Its work is not the elaboration of her Divine ancestry, but of her availability and her universality. There is a wonderful Sanskrit hymn translated in "Longing for the Darkness," which I quote here:

"Alas I do not know either the mystical word or the mystical diagram, nor do I know the songs of praise to thee, nor how to meditate upon thee nor how to welcome thee, nor how to inform thee of my distress. But this much I know, oh Mother: that to take refuge in thee is to destory all my miseries."

I have no wish to take the author to task for leaving undone something she's not undertaken to do, but I would have loved to have read something in this work dealing with the many images of the Dark Mother existing in various Afro-American traditions, particularly the treatment of Ezili Danto (or Danto, as she is more commonly known in the Voodoo/Voudoun tradition) whose ancestry is directly traceable to the Madonna of Czestochowa; indeed, the image of Danto re-presents exactly the two scratches on the face of the Polish icon left from a vandal's sword attack in 1430 and in Haiti attributed to Ezili's battles with her rival deity, Freda.