The Feast Day of the Visitation in Sketches and Storytelling

Today is the feast day of the Visitation, the day when we celebrate the time that Mary, pregnant with Jesus, goes to visit her kinswoman Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist.  Elizabeth's story, though rare, isn't completely original; scholars point out that the barren/old woman miraculously pregnant wouldn't be unfamiliar to ancient audiences.  Mary's story is much more unusual.  I've written about this feast day numerous times:  this post is a good example.

For my Biblical Storytelling class that I took in Fall of 2024, when I had to choose a passage to memorize to go with the first one I chose, the bleeding woman, I returned to Luke 1:  39-45.  I recorded it, and overall, I was pleased.  It won't win any awards, but that's fine.  You can view this effort here on my YouTube channel.

Lately I've started sketching this scene more.  I made the above and the below sketch as my Christmas and Easter seminary class discussed the passage.  

I decided not to write about the passage for my longer essay.  Instead, I wrote about Anna, the prophetess who gets much less space, but may be more important.  Here are two paragraphs that explain my approach:

"If we go back to take a closer look at Luke, we’ll see that older people and women have a starring role in many parts of the birth narrative. The main star, of course, is Mary, the woman who will incubate salvation in her womb and nurture the second part of the Trinity until he is able to move into the ministry activities for which he was born. Her story has been studied from many angles, and often it is the only one offered to those of us who want a vision of Jesus and the disciples that is more inclusive.

But what about women who aren’t young, women who don’t see the appeal in motherhood, women who don’t have a Joseph who will love them? Elizabeth might seem like an answer, but she, too, is finding fulfillment in a very patriarchal approved way, through pregnancy and motherhood. The story of Zechariah and Elizabeth (Luke 1: 5-25 and 39-80) might be the one most of us think of when we look for the presence of elders in the Nativity story or we might think of Simeon, a chapter later. Anna’s appearance, near the end of the second chapter of Luke, is much shorter, but also packed with meaning when we work on discerning the meaning of the incarnation."

Earlier this month, I started sketching, and I thought I'd do another sketch of Mary and Elizabeth.  But I didn't like the initial sketch, so I started rounding out the figures that began as the two women and ended up as chrysalises.  I love the sketch because it works on multiple levels.  The middle green part is both leaf and Holy Spirit.

It's not a traditional approach to the two women, but it's been one that has been delighting me, as I've worked on it during the month of May