This image was drawn in 2003 by a sister at Our Lady of Mississippi Abbey. It can be purchased through their website.
Just before Advent I came across this image. It has moved me in a way that no other piece of art has. From the beautiful stained glass I was surrounded by while worshiping at St. Andrew's Cathedral though middle and high school to the icons, architecture, and sculptures that were the framework of my Jesuit higher education, I have never felt to deeply connected to, so embedded in a composition.
This. This art. These women. They are telling their own story and also mine and also that of the women I love and those I can't stand and those I don't know. These women are my grandmothers and my daughter and my best friend.
From the Women's March in January to the 'Me, Too' hashtag that took off in October, 2017 has been a year where the universal power and pain of women has shown bright in this nation. My heart has been broken and revived and grown three sizes as I've moved through this time. The image of these women, it encapsulates it for me.
Advent changed for me when I began to see it through the eyes of Mary. I began to imagine and own that Mary is every one of us. We each carry a promise within that is magical and scary and completely unknown. While I am one hundred percent certain that I have not born the next Messiah (just a few minutes around our dinner table makes that perfectly clear) I do know that I hold the power to bring limitless love into this world if I allow myself to be a vessel for it instead of a shrine to my own ego. Pro Tip: I'm not special... you are that same magnificent vessel.
Life changed for me when I began to see it through the eyes of Eve. The world shifted when I saw that Eve is every one of us. Worthy and good people make monumental mistakes. When I owned my own brokenness, my own beloved disappointment, my own failures, it was revelaed that it is only through the crumbling of a 'perfect life' that grace and hope and redemption appear. Pro Tip: Eve is a symbol in a beautiful metaphor about the creation of this world and how we stray from God. Dinosaurs were real. Evolution is a thing.
While I could wax on and on about the Madonna-Whore Complex (I am happy to share any of the countless essays I wrote in college about the topic, you're welcome world) as women we are cast in roles we never signed up for. Mary and Eve... they know the feeling. This image, the circle they create, it is the redemption that resides in each us, even now, as we live in this place, broken and beloved.
Thomas Merton said, "Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us."
As we walk through the last week of Advent preparing for the birth of Christ, may you be the vessel, broken and beloved, that God needs to redeem Her world.
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