c. 1998 Religion News Service

HOUSTON _ In seeking God, China Galland, Texas-born author and adventurer, traveled thousands of miles from her home in San Francisco to such diverse places as Vietnam, Brazil, and India.

She found God _ the God of the poor and voiceless, who dwells among the neglected and defends the weak _ and she found herself. Equally important, she also found a world of women bonded by what she calls”fierce compassion”and a spirituality embodied in the Tibetan female Buddha Tara and the Roman Catholic Black Madonna, an image of Jesus’ mother, Mary.

Galland’s cross-cultural journey began close to home nearly a decade ago in South Texas while researching a previous book on the Black Madonna.

Near McAllen, deep in the reaches of the Rio Grande Valley, Galland encountered an early beacon of what she now calls”fierce compassion”in Sister Marian Strohmeyer’s struggle to assist Latino refugees.

A Sister of Mercy who lived out her vocation in a ministry at Casa de la Merced, Strohmeyer amazed Galland. So did a poster of the Black Madonna for El Salvador, Madre de Los Desparecidos _ the Mother of the Disappeared.”Suddenly it hit,”Galland writes in”Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna (Penguin).”This was the Madonna I’d come to see. … Everything I had not understood began to fit. There’s a point at which the spiritual and the political intersect.” The moment marked a turning point in Galland’s multiple vocations as writer, lecturer, artist, social-justice advocate, teacher, wilderness guide, wife and mother.”When I saw that painting, it was electrifying after just having met and interviewed refugees,”she said in an interview.”That precipitated my meditation on Mary.”But the experience I had of her was different. What I realized was that the way that Mary has been depicted in the past was a way that served the social order. I somehow was freed and liberated by my encounter with the Sisters of Mercy, to see Mary as a fierce mother,”said Galland, who is also a research associate at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif.

The staunch Catholicism ingrained in her as a child blossomed anew. And Galland, who had turned to Zen Buddhism for solace and stability, began to see her meditational practice in a new light.”If Mary embodied fierce compassion in one faith, where was her counterpart in Buddhism?”Galland wondered.

Especially important was uncovering a female manifestation of that principle in the Tibetan Buddhism she had begun to study.

Enter Tara.

Tara, Galland writes in her new book,”The Bond Between Women: A Journey to Fierce Compassion”(Riverhead), began her journey to enlightenment as a woman named”Wisdom Moon”so developed in understanding, compassion and wisdom, that”the people came from all over the kingdom to seek her counsel.”Soon monks and holy men gathered around her, urging she pray to be transformed into a man so she might be”fully and completely enlightened.” While recognizing her advisers’ holiness she knew their vision was limited and”since most buddhas have chosen to come as a man, perhaps it would be more helpful if I became enlightened in a woman’s body.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

According to Tibetan Buddhist tradition as recounted by Galland, Tara”burst fully into bloom”at enlightenment.”People came to know her by many names. Her Tibetan name is Drolma, Mother. In Chinese, she is Kwan Yin. Her Sanskrit name is Tara, which means `Liberator,’ `Saviouress,’ and `Star.’ Of all the buddhas and bodhisattvas, she is the quickest and most compassionate, the one who rushes to your aid the moment you think of her, even if you have never believed in her or called on her before.” Studying to understand Tara, Galland found a Buddhist parallel to the Black Madonna, the dark mother celebrated in many forms including that of the Virgin of Guadalupe. But she wanted more, yearning for present-day examples of such compassion.”I never forgot what a Tibetan Lama said when he saw the Black Madonna in Switzerland. He said: `What are her devotees like? It’s the practioners that bring the deity through.'” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

Galland’s new book is an effort to describe present-day examples of what followers of such exemplars as Tara and Mary might be like. Her goal was to capture the feminine healing force of”fierce compassion”at work in contemporary life.

It recounts the work of contemporary women of fierce compassion such as Dr. Aruna Uprety, a devoted physician fighting child prostitution trafficking in Nepal, and Laura Bonaparte, a leader of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina. Similar fierce compassion, she said, can be found in India among the nuns caring for lepers and the dying in ministries begun by Mother Teresa. In Vietnam, the tale uncovers the outreach of Sister Chan Khong, whose justice-oriented Buddhism led her to launch peace demonstrations amidst bombings in her homeland and to later offer retreats on forgiveness for Vietnam veterans.

In researching Tara and the Black Madonna, Galland said she began rediscovering her own Christian tradition.”We are challenged to be like Christ,”said Galland.”He was not only a philosopher. He was also a meditator. He withdrew to the mountaintops, to the desert, for contemplation. He was a healer and an activist.” Re-establishing ties to Catholicism and exploring its theology from a different perspective led to”points of connection”with Buddhism and other spiritual disciplines.”And I saw these are so much more important than cultural differences, she said.”We are blessed to be at a rare moment in time where we have access to the world’s great spiritual traditions. I think there is no accident that that is happening now. I think we need to draw on the world’s great spiritual traditions to face the dilemmas we are facing as a species now.”

DEA END HOLMES