An Apostate Considers Mary at Christmastime
A reflection on how certain old symbols carry new meaning
The excerpt below comes from today’s post at In Polite Company
There’s an image that a minister friend shared years ago online that I haven’t been able to shake from my mind. It’s the portrait of an imagined meeting between the Bible’s Eve and Mary, created by Sr. Grace Remington, a Trappist nun in Mississippi. In it, Eve’s leg is snared by a serpent, and she gazes in a shamed way at Mary, with her hand on Mary’s swollen womb.
Eve is naked, except her hair, and she holds a bitten apple — fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Mary is draped in blue, per various interpretations, a symbol of her purity, her essential royalty, her nearness to divinity.
There’s so much that I, an agnostic, feminist woman might want to bemoan here. Why, oh, why, are they two, thin-armed white ladies? Why, if there’s space to visualize Genesis’s original sin, does it all still fall to Eve, alone? Why is Mary equipped to help the other woman confront her shame by way of her fertility? It captures all the tropes that have long reduced women into simple archetypes, the (rebellious) Eve and the (obedient) Mary. That whole, “Death through Eve, life through Mary” thing.
