Finches, cellos, kittens, fresh Amish
milk, and the retelling of Cupid of Psyche have commenced my summer
break. After being busier than I have ever been before with job 1,
job 2, and school, I suddenly have time and must fill it. The
six-month Daniel fast I've been on is almost over, I had to buy a
swimsuit, and its time to plant a little garden. All these things
together just scream half the year is gone. It's time to look at
where it was gone and what investments are making their return. Years
ago I used to write yearly, semi-annually and tri-monthly records on
what I observed about life, a sort of statement or conclusion. This
blog post will probably resemble those more than it will a domestic
newsflash or poetical tidbit.
It can all begin with Daniel: a captive
from Israel living in the palace of a Persian king, a man
dissatisfied with the choicest pleasures made freely available to
him, a mystic disdaining the accumulative wisdom offered by the
world's most eminent magicians. And
his passion was to understand.
I took part in this pursuit by refusing meat and sweets and seeking
real knowledge.
How do
I know if knowledge is really real? When the world confirms it and
bursts out in patterns expressing its truth, stunning my heart with
its beauty. It must be solid like a stone to bear weight and supple
like a vine connected to other proven truths. But this is a story,
not a sermon, so I move from deduction to art.
Mary.
Of all places, I least expected to find her at the community college.
And of all people, it shouldn't have been my agnostic art teacher
that unveiled her affinity to me. He translated the term theotokos
which some of the most appealing Christian art bears. Theo,
God; tokos, to carry
and birth. They are portraits of virgin Mary holding her divine son,
bearing the Word.
Suddenly,
I realized a bond with this woman because I also carry the Word and
hold him near me. Like Mary I received the gift of Jesus that turned
my life upside-down, and have found him (like a child) impossible to
ignore. At first, as a baby, he depended on his mother Mary and
everything was simple. But as he got older he grew less like Mary's
son and more like the son of a god, and finally showed himself to the
whole world as God himself. Now, Mary sees she is dependent on him
for life- the life she gave him. If I was Mary, I think I would
contemplate this mystery my entire old age. As Anna, I probe it: I,
too, hold Jesus inside; yet he holds me because he is a large scope
in which everything else easily fits.
Thinking
about this Mary brought me to another Mary who was so moved by the
presence of Jesus in her town she took her priceless vial of perfume
and broke it over him so that he dripped with it. Then she washed his
feet by crying on them and dried them with her long hair. This
devotion is so sincere and extreme it cannot be mocked! People did
mock her, however; they thought it was scandalous.
When I
read this story of abandonment my heart jumps up with a 'yes!'
Mary,
Mary and Daniel sought to understand mysteries and discovered even greater anomalies. The revealed truth always outshone what was anticipated:
like the woman who followed Christ's dead body to it's tomb and was the first
to see him alive again, seeing in awe, like Psyche did when she
raised her lamp above her husband expecting to find no supernatural
beast as her sisters feared but a good man, not just a man, but a
God!
These
two Mary's make up one calling in my mind: to let Jesus in and be
forever changed by it. Now I understand what I want to do all my
life. And I think it is a good choice because it leads deeper than
depth, further than I can imagine, revealing words when we looked for
babies, and delivering gods where we expected men.
