Image 11

Reflection:

Advent is about Christ coming in the midst of human living.

This image is based off a drawing by Sister Grace Remington. A few years ago I did a cover of it (with her permission) as a live painting I performed at a  Christmas Eves service. There are so many wonderful theological ideas being displayed in this image. But what I love most about it is the look that Mary and Eve have for each other.

It’s like they were at some cosmic party where they didn’t know each other at first, but when they get introduced to each other they find out they are deeply connected on so many levels. They also have a billion mutual friends on Facebook.

Eve is experiencing hope and grace from brokenness that she never thought she’d see an end to. And yet her face could also be of a knowing mom bestowing wisdom and compassion on a new mom… as if saying “...parenting is one of the greatest and hardest adventures of a lifetime. You’ll love them, and want to have them forever... but you may see one of them die before their time, and that’s the absolute worst.”

In my opinion, the little that has been written about Eve has been used againster her by male chauvinists. In the flannel board story of her life, she gets two paper cutouts - biting an apple and being cursed as the first mom to go through painful childbirth. That’s it! We don’t talk about how hard it must have been to do something for the first time. No guides. No mentors. No mommy blogs with strategies for maintaining sanity. It’s easy to knock down the forerunners of human living who made mistakes; it’s harder to see through the one-dimensional religious narratives that every mom has the unbelievable task of raising kids the best she can. 

Mary takes the hand of Eve and places it on her belly to let her feel the manifestation of restoring Hope growing in her womb. And yet it’s also of the move of sobering solidarity -  accepting the entrance into the great cloud of witnesses of brokenhearted mothers who’ve lost their kids too early.

I can never fully understand the deep connections and conversations in the worldwide society of mothers. But this art opens a small window into what that conversation might be like. That Immanuel means “God with us”… and that this divine Gift comes to us through one of us, into the womb of a blessed and humble teenage woman, and honors and dignifies the sacrificial and (w)hol(l)y involved life of being a mom.

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* this meditation is an excerpt from the book Honest Advent.