Conversations with Mary

The Annunciation

A blade of light scissors the air

Between them.

—“Annunciation” by Katharine Coles

I am getting to know Mary. This is a recent development; as a Protestant, Mary’s presence in my spirituality can be mostly categorized by her absence. The Mary of my childhood was a side character in stories and sermons. Every December she emerged—having already assented to the angel Gabriel’s announcement, having already visited Elizabeth and sung her prophetic hymn and swelled with child—as a set piece in nativity scenes. She gave (sanitized) birth in a stable and then faded gently into the background. 

In my twenties, as I gravitated toward a faith that was both separate from but still shaped by the one of my childhood, contemplative practices and the liturgical calendar’s rhythms became more important to me, including the season of Advent—Mary’s yearly moment in the spotlight. It was during these years that I started looking and longing for places in scripture where women were uplifted, hungry for the feminine presence as a counter-balance to Christianity’s male-dominated history. In this search I occasionally thought about Mary. But my imagination was limited to the most basic tropes in visual art: robed in blue, inexplicably blonde, wearing an expression of serene submission. I found her static, pious, a little boring.

There were exceptions to this one-dimensional characterization. In two books, I found versions of Mary that I wanted to keep company with. The first is a poetry collection titled Incarnadine. I read Incarnadine for the first time back in 2016, when the author visited my graduate program and read her poems to a hushed room. Since then I’ve returned to the book again and again. The poems imagine the Annunciation through different forms and voices. There is terror, desire, sensuality, openness, and emptiness. In some poems Mary speaks and in some she is silent. She takes the shape of a child kneeling in the grass, of a whale, of a dove. In some Gabriel and Mary are absent, but the poem reckons with other kinds of annunciations.

The second book that cracked a window in my dim imagination of Mary is Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water, a manual for practicing a life of faith and art. L’Engle likens the creative process to birth, and the artist to a birth-giver. Like Mary, she writes, we have the choice to say yes to the work of art that wishes to be born. Is it terrifying? Absolutely. Are we ready? Likely not. But the artist’s role, L’Engle believes, is to greet the possibility of new work with the words that Mary spoke to Gabriel: May it be unto me as you have said. L’Engle compares Mary’s yes to the assent all of us make when creating:

I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.

When I became pregnant, Mary snapped into visceral focus for me. At 20 weeks I was no longer able to run, so I started taking daily walks/waddles through the hills of my neighborhood. As the days shortened and fog rolled over the coastline and Christmas lights appeared, I huffed up and down blocks while listening to podcasts in which women recounted their birth stories in exhaustive detail. I was riveted by these mini-dramas; they unfolded like epic battles compressed into 45 minutes of audio. And I absolutely could not get over the idea that Mary carried God in this way, that God chose to grow within and depend fully on a woman’s body, and that Mary chose to entrust herself to this process of bearing Christ. Learning about birth, I imagined Christ’s neural tubes forming in Mary’s uterus, his spine solidifying, his oxygen delivered via umbilical cord. I imagined their two bodies working in tandem during labor: Christ’s body descending, Mary’s cervix dilating, Christ’s skull pushing through the birth canal, Mary’s perineum stretching to accommodate him, and then the rending and rushing as his form emerged on a tide of blood and fluid and tissue.

When my daughter was born and they placed her on my chest, my right side was spattered with blood and my left smeared with meconium. Her dark eyes were unfixed, seemingly shocked, and her lips opened and closed like a fish as she learned to breathe. The umbilical cord snapped when she slid out and the midwife had to go fishing around inside me to retrieve the placenta, an ordeal about which I was barely aware. As all of this was happening I felt my daughter’s small, vernix-covered hand reach up and pat my chest. She began feeling around this new terrain, exploring for the first time the exterior of the body that had housed and birthed her.

I could never have imagined these details of birth, just like I couldn’t have pictured the particularities of who my daughter is now. Words about labor and birth were flimsy abstractions until I experienced these things myself, and the words snapped into focus. If motherhood is so much sharper and deeper and more intricately textured than I had imagined, then what has my lack of imagination about Mary caused me to overlook? What have I missed by thinking of her only in the abstract?

I’m writing this on March 25, the Feast Day of the Annunciation. Today the church—or at least its Catholic and Orthodox branches—remembers the moment that the angel Gabriel visited an unknown teenager in a forgotten town and opened a terrifying and impossible door, through which she walked. I started writing this because I was thinking about the Annunciation. But if I’m being honest, I think about Mary most days now.

I’ve started looking for her in icons and poetry and cultural representations and historical traditions and scripture and contemporary art. She’s everywhere, and I don’t just mean on votive candles or hanging from rearview mirrors. The more I look, the more versions I discover: Black Madonnas, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mary the disciple, Mary the refugee, Mary in birth, Mary in sorrow. I want to be in conversation with her, with all these versions of her—from teenage girl to bewildered mother to cultural icon to object of global devotion. God-bearer, birth-giver, Mother of God.

“I start with Mary, because I need her, / because I, too, am mostly mother now,” writes the lapsed-Catholic poet Beth Ann Fennelly. Like Fennelly, I find that I need her. I want the Mary of art and of imagination, and I want the Mary of flesh and blood.

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Read with me:

In keeping with the theme, I’m recommending Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy & Earthquakes. Written in fragments, this short memoir constructs something whole from the rubble of new motherhood and the 2017 Mexico City earthquake. Barrera writes through pregnancy and her first year postpartum. The book’s structure imitates the disjointed nature of her days as she attempts to capture a consuming and bewildering experience in brief increments of time—taking notes on her phone while her son nurses, scribbling a paragraph while he naps. Barrera also weaves representations of motherhood in literature and art alongside her own reflections. Linea Nigra is a quick read and feels like a meditative conversation with a wise and well-read friend.

Tell me what you’re reading these days? (I just started The Book of Goose, A+ so far.)

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Lately:

• In Oaxaca last summer, I talked to locals who pointed out how the landscape has changed—from forested hillsides to a wash of blue-green agave. This story, about the soaring demand for mezcal and the toll it’s taking on the land, was born out of those conversations.

• My essay “Luminosity,” about looking for God in the dark, appears in EcoTheo Review’s winter issue. The essay isn’t available online yet, but you can order a copy of the journal here (it’s lovely!).