Conversations with Mary, pt. I

On the risk of creating something new

This time last year, I began thinking about Mary, Christ’s mother, on a near-daily basis. It’s a story I’d love to tell you sometime, better saved for an in-person conversation. I wrote here about how I came to see Mary with new eyes during pregnancy after decades of picturing her as a static and pious side character destined to live only in nativity sets. But last December, following a series of synchronous conversations and glimmers of intuition, I began reading, writing, and wondering about Mary. Now it feels like I’ve been in conversation with her—and with the theologians, artists, poets, and ordinary people who love her—for the past twelve months. 

People have thought about Mary in so many different ways for the past two thousand-plus years. They’ve worshiped her and dismissed her, elevated her and forgotten her. To some she’s an icon of liberation, to others an argument for female submission. She’s been cast as a queen and as an unremarkable teenage girl living under occupation. She’s got a fierce grip on the human imagination. Because of the myriad ways people have imagined Mary, looking for her is like looking through a hundred different windows and glimpsing different angles each time. She is kaleidoscopic.

During Advent—the time of year when our minds are most likely to turn to her—I’m sending you a weekly essay about Mary. Each one will try to answer a variation of this question: How does Mary help us think about _______? How does the Mother of God help us think about creativity and risk? About interdependence and suffering? About birth? The female body? Our extraordinary, ordinary humanity?

(PSA: Paid subscribers will also receive a bonus round up of Advent and Mary-related resources. Join the fun here.)

Up first: How Mary helps us think about creative risk.

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Last year I tried to sell a book proposal that ended up filed away in the metaphorical drawer. Writing and shopping the proposal was a creative risk, and in the traditional sense, it failed. That failure was the risk I accepted when I chose to pursue a project with no guarantee that it would ever see a future beyond the pages of my notebooks and laptop files.

For two years I shaped and refined an idea that ultimately didn’t sell. In the aftermath of my decision to press pause and put away the book proposal—along with the idea itself—I was hounded by fear that I’d “wasted” the time. This fear felt particularly prickly because I’d written the bulk of the proposal while my daughter was just a few months old. During the first three seasons of her life, as she morphed from passive infant into a happy butterball of a baby, I wrote and refined and talked with my agent and began conversations with acquisitions editors. Then, at the end of the year, I collected rejections, one by one. When I put the project aside, my fear was not just that I’d wasted months I could have spent on other writing projects, but that I’d squandered time that I could have spent not writing at all. I worried I had lost opportunities to nap with my daughter in the filmy afternoons or take her to the beach and watch her convey chubby fistfuls of sand to her mouth.

Eventually I had to put that fear of time “wasted” aside and decide that the writing, the work itself, was valuable—whether or not I had a tangible product to show for it. I decided to trust that the work fed into some unseen tributary that would one day water other ideas, new work. I came to see those months of writing as gestation: a necessary period of growth. 

I wished so often during my first pregnancy that I could look inside the womb, just to confirm my daughter was okay—still growing, still moving, still healthy. Maybe this is part of the reason I like Our Lady of the Sign icon (aka “ultrasound Mary”) so much. I like the ability to see into Mary’s womb and confront Christ there. It’s like the artist who first sketched the icon (maybe a mother?) understood our impulse to see inside ourselves and chart what is growing. Gestation is a risk, in so many ways. In giving life to something new—a child, an idea, a dream, a creative endeavor, a relationship—we also give away control. So much evolves beyond our understanding, hidden from our vision. 

One of my favorite takes on making art comes from the writer Madeleine L’Engle. In Walking on Water, she argues that Mary models how to say yes to the risk of creation, even when she doesn't understand where it will lead.

“The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birth-giver,” L’Engle writes. “In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary, who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command. … If the work comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am, serve me,’ then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve.”

Mary’s “yes” was an assent to many risks, the greatest one being the risk that all parents take: that of loving a child unto death. But on a smaller scale, she also illuminates something about creative risk. Any new work that we create requires buy-in, a “yes” that’s not tied to a guaranteed outcome. A period of gestation is necessary to create something new. We cede control and hope that good things grow in the dark.

Creative work—songs, stories, all of it—takes time to form, and we can’t coerce it into evolving faster than it wants to. As Catholic mystic Caryll Houselander wrote, “A seed contains all the life and loveliness of the flower, but it contains it in a little hard black pip of a thing which even the glorious sun will not enliven unless it is buried under the earth. There must be a period of gestation before anything can flower.”

Houselander adds, “We ought to let everything grow in us, as Christ grew in Mary. … We should let thoughts and words and songs grow slowly and unfold in darkness in us.”

The creative disappointment of my would-be book was a shitty lesson to learn, but it also lent me a smidgen more resilience. Now when I consider pursuing a new essay or endeavor, I remind myself that the work—which is another way of saying the time, the effort, the words, and the sacrifice of other possible activities—matters because I enjoy it. The work itself matters, regardless of the outcome. Maybe in our capitalist, outcome-obsessed, product-driven culture, it makes sense to shuck the word “work” in favor of “gestation”—as in, the gestation period matters. The work itself is valuable, I remind myself, even if it never arrives in a beautifully-bound book in some gratified reader’s hands. The work is worth saying “yes” to, even when—especially when?—I can’t control the outcome.

Now I think differently about the months I gave to that would-be book. I see them as a season of fertile darkness. The hours of writing and thinking and reading grew something good in me, even if it didn’t take the shape I hoped. I can see now how some of the ideas from that book are already clarifying and growing new branches.

Good things grow in the dark, hidden from our intervention and control. Cole Arthur Riley writes that, during the Advent season, we remember “Christ is being formed in the sacred blackness of Mary's womb. This reminds us of what glory is born of the dark.”

In the story of the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and asks if she will give birth to God. Her response is brief: How can this be? Six months earlier, a similar story played out in the temple. Gabriel appeared to an old priest named Zechariah and told him that his elderly, barren wife would become pregnant with a prophet. Zechariah’s response was also brief: How can I know that this will happen? But the angel’s response differs noticeably in each scene: he praises Mary for her belief, while he tells Zechariah that God will render him mute because of his doubt.

From a cursory reading of these two stories, it seems like Mary was blessed and Zechariah punished for asking very similar questions. I’ve always found this a bit unfair. The two questions (how can this be vs. how can I know this) are nearly indistinguishable. Sure, Mary’s hints at awe while Zechariah’s hints at a need for evidence. But still. For years I read this story and thought, Tough break, Z.

In recent years I read interpretations that point out how Mary’s and Elizabeth’s voices are uplifted and honored in these two annunciation stories. By contrast, Joseph and Zechariah are silent. God amplifies and honors the women’s responses, while the men in the story keep quiet. Theologian Kelley Nikondeha puts it like this: “Within Advent’s testimony are two women leading the conversation about God’s groundbreaking work among us.” 

I like this perspective of women’s voices being elevated, something I’ve not often heard preached on. But there’s a take I like even more, from the writer Kathleen Norris:

“…while Zechariah is seeking knowledge and information, Mary contents herself with wisdom, with pondering a state of being. God’s response to Zechariah is to strike him dumb during the entire term of this son’s gestation, giving him a pregnancy of his own.”

What if Zechariah’s silence is both pregnancy and gift? What if his temporary state of muteness is a necessary gestation period? Maybe new things needed to grow within him during a period of silence and contemplation. Maybe Zechariah received the gift of gestation: new life taking shape in the dark.

In pregnancy, life takes shape in the womb’s lightless room. This life unfurls invisibly, hidden even from the one who shelters it. Creativity is a similar gestation process: ideas and art and music take shape like seeds germinating beneath the soil. Gestation requires silence. Waiting. A relinquishing of control. We can’t see inside the womb or poke and prod at the germinating seeds to encourage growth. Gestation is an underground endeavor. This is risky: we cede control as a child forms invisibly within the womb. We allow ideas to form in our subconscious, without any guarantee that they will find an audience or become a tangible product. 

“To create is to risk, every single time,” writes Stephanie Smith in

SLANT LETTER

. “Creativity consents to the risk of failure, the risk of languishing, and the risk of not being able to find the words to express the weight of what you have to say…”

Creativity is an Advent experience: one of waiting for life to bloom out of darkness. And Mary shows us how to be a birth-giver to creativity, to say yes to an idea without knowing where it will go. The outcome is not ours to control. We can only welcome the work, and follow it down the road as far as it leads.

“mary's dream” by lucille clifton

winged women was saying
"full of grace" and like.
was light beyond sun and words
of a name and a blessing.
winged women to only i.
i joined them, whispering
yes.