Mary is not an icon to be reverenced, but the pattern for how the incarnation is to continue, for how God continues to take flesh in this world. And that pattern is perennially the same: We must ponder God’s word until we become pregnant with charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, faith, mildness, fidelity, and chastity. Then we must, complete with the morning sickness this causes us, gestate them into real flesh within our own bodies and, when the time is right, with much groaning of our natural flesh, give them concrete birth into the world. Finally, we must spend years of nursing and coaxing that helpless God (“self-abandoned on the doorstep of time, wondered at by cattle and oxen”) into adulthood. That’s the way the incarnation works.
In May we honor the Virgin Mary…
Image source: Stefan Salinas, "Formed From Within", 2022, acrylic on paper, used with the permission of the artist, https://www.stefansalinas.com/
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