I've been thinking a lot about Mary, the mother of Jesus. It is December after all, the season of Advent, when many people start to think about all the various meanings of Christmas.
I've also been thinking about the idea of God as midwife. I saw this tweet the other day: "So many of our God metaphors are aggressively masculine, obsessed with war, power, authority. Maybe they’re true, but they aren’t the whole truth. God is our Father but also our Sister. God is our savior but also our midwife" (from Laura Jean Truman).
I wrote in response: "God as midwife--am I the pregnant woman or the baby being delivered? Perhaps both."
On the same day, Dec. 1, I saw an icon of the Virgin Mary (go to the RevGalBlogPals website and scroll down to the Tuesday prayer--I wasn't able to capture the image of the icon created by Terri Cole Pilarski).I was taken with the swirling blue robes and the red cloak.
I tried to replicate the shapes and came up with something a bit closer to cartoon than icon. So I tried again and came up with a very abstract image (blurry in this picture, but not worth trying to capture in a better image for this post--you get the idea):
Yesterday, I decided to do something in my larger sketchbook, the one with better paper quality. I was also thinking about the online journaling class I've been taking, where we've been reading and creating visual responses to Barbara A. Holmes' book, Race and the Cosmos. I really love this sketch I created, of a pregnant Mary and the cosmos:
I wrote this post to go with it: "I saw an icon of Mary, pregnant with Jesus (or was she just in swirling blue robes?). I've been experimenting with the shapes in that icon, and this week, I merged the idea of the icon with some cosmic imagery of the types that have delighted me as we've read this book. This image seems like a good ending note (or perhaps not ending, but a gateway to the next set of images)"
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