This is the final installment of a four-part Advent series about Mary. Read the first three essays here, here, and here.
Most Renaissance-era depictions of Mary make me grumpy. You know the paintings I’m talking about: Mary represented as a pale, round-faced white woman with a rosebud mouth, downcast eyes, flushed cheeks. She wears opulent blue robes and a veil; her gaze appears bored. She looks soft and incapable. The child she holds is equally pale and soft-looking: a cherub topped with a mop of blond curls. These are the predominant images of Mary I encountered for most of my life, and they irritate me.
Why? On the surface, there’s the obvious dissonance between the historical Mary—a young, brown, Middle Eastern peasant girl—and these plush blonde queens who look like they’d wilt under the Galilean sun. At the same time, I love to see Mary reimagined outside of her historical context, like the Black Madonnas or the Virgin of Guadalupe, a mestiza Mary. In the Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington D.C., which is absolutely stuffed to the brim with Marys of every shape and size, I was especially drawn to a Vietnamese Mary carved in marble and crowned with stars. So it’s not that I think different cultures cannot or should not imagine Mary in their own contexts. (In Black Madonna, Courtney Hall Lee writes that “diverse human representations of Mary are crucial” for highlighting the image of God in all identities.) It’s just that the Renaissance versions of the Virgin, at least in the art I was exposed to, are so damn prevalent.
The writer Kathleen Norris wonders if, as Christians reimagine Mary, they will “require more depictions of her as a robust, and even muscular, woman, in both youth and old age. But I would also caution that if we insist too much on a literal Mary, encasing her too firmly in the dress of a first-century peasant, we risk losing her as a living symbol.”
Fair play, Kathleen. But then the question becomes: who is she as a living symbol? And what does she symbolize? Certainly not wealth and elite class status, as those Renaissance paintings imply. She would have to symbolize, at least in part, the lowliness that she praised in her Magnificat. She would have to symbolize all the facets of her lived experience. Oppression and stigma. Grief and sorrow. Exile. Creativity. Courage. The fierceness and relentlessness of a mother’s love.
The Marys of Western art are often depicted as extraordinary: as queens, angels, or exemplars seated high above the rest of humanity. Mary was, of course, extraordinary in that she was chosen by God to bear Christ into the world. But in a very important way, she was also ordinary. Her humanity is, I think, what so many people have always loved about her. She was young and unremarkable and poor and uneducated and a woman, and she lived in a remote village in a land occupied by an empire. And yet, and still, God chose her, as God often does, showing up among overlooked people and places.
Maybe this is why I love seeing the Holy Family depicted as asylum seekers and migrants: because they were exactly that, and today that is still the story of many. For people who cross borders and seek refuge in strange countries, how beautiful must it be to see Mary as a living symbol that reflects and empathizes with their circumstances? How much more compelling than a blonde Renaissance queen?
Until a few years ago, I was ambivalent about Mary, because I was ambivalent about the flat and untextured representations of her I’d encountered. Likewise, I was ambivalent about motherhood, which is similarly flat and untextured in many popular representations. (Think: movies, novels, sitcoms, small talk, bad jokes.)
The ambivalence I felt about both Mary and motherhood was a failure of my personal imagination, but it was also a failure of collective imagination. The Christian waters I swam in neglected to take Mary’s role as Mother of God seriously, and to love her as Christ loved her. She was always a side character, painted demurely as a Caucasian women with a submissive expression. It was only during pregnancy that I turned to Mary with something like hunger. I wanted to know what Mary thought as she felt those first twinges of God within her. I want to see the experience of pregnancy and birth reflected in the story of my faith. I wanted my tradition to make space for an experience that felt hugely profound, but has often been stigmatized or ignored or rendered irrelevant.
Like my imagination of Mary, my imagination of parenting was also small, shaped by prevailing myths about motherhood. Most of my female friends were ambitious in their careers and put off having children until their thirties. We assumed, I think, that mothering constituted mostly a lack, a sacrifice, a diminishment of self. There are one thousand narratives out there about motherhood—that it will fulfill you, expand you, make you whole, lend moral superiority to your life. That it will diminish you, erase you, shrink you until your life is nothing more than domestic chores and caregiving, typically in an unequal partnership with a male. Both extremes are caricatures. But for better or worse, I had absorbed the myth of diminishment.
It’s true that what is most readily visible about caring for small children is, well, small. As an outsider, it’s easy to observe the tedious elements of parenting. It’s nearly impossible to imagine, let alone experience, the transcendent bits. Those in the throes of parenting might also find it hard to communicate the depth and texture of the experience, buried as they are under the enormity of their love and the piles of laundry (how do tiny people produce so much laundry??). And yet, the myths I absorbed don’t encapsulate my lived experience. My life has more restrictions since becoming a mother, but motherhood hasn’t given me a restrictive life.
When we imagine experiences other than our own, we often default to the abstract and superficial—that is, until something explodes the small box of our imagination. My understanding of Mary was abstract until I became pregnant, and suddenly I began to imagine her with specificity. Art can do this too. I began looking for Mary in poetry and scripture and art because I wondered whether Mary felt any of the ambivalence or tenderness or fear or awe that I have felt in recent years. And I found that art showed me her humanity, in all its texture and nuance.
It turns out that Mary is depicted as more than a plump, reclining Renaissance lady (go figure). She’s everywhere: on catacomb walls, in living room shrines, tattooed on shoulders, hanging from a rearview mirror, in gilded frames, sketched in amateurs’ notebooks. She appears in icons, folk art, pop art, tattoos, figurines, murals, ceiling frescoes, oil paintings, and graffiti. Art historians note that she is depicted more frequently than Jesus, which makes me think that many people have felt the way I do: hungry for images that reveal the Mother of God in all her humanity.
On Monday, Christians will celebrate God becoming human through Mary. The Incarnation, says Eastern Orthodox writer Frederica Mathewes-Green, “shows that a real flesh-and-blood body can bear the divine, as a candlewick bears flame.” Mary matters precisely because she was ordinary. Her humanity matters; it was the matter through which God’s body was made. She calls herself “lowly,” nobody special, and yet God chose to be born through her into the world.
This is a hopeful thought. It means we don’t have to be anything more than what we are for God to choose us. We can be ordinary, and the divine still comes to dwell within us.
To do a simple thing well, simply out of love, seems to me immensely difficult, yet that is precisely what we need do to make God’s love incarnate. Remembering how well Mary did this throughout her life gives me the encouragement i need to try again each time I fail.