LOOK: Contours of Mary’s Dream by Lauren Wright Pittman
Contours of Mary’s Dream by Rev. Lauren Wright Pittman of Knoxville, Tennessee, shows Mary, the mother of Jesus, bonding with her in utero son. She sits cross-legged and nimbed, tenderly caressing a hovering gold halo that represents the Holy One, the light of the world, taking shape inside her. Repeated in roundels, the design on her shirt is an upraised, open hand illuminated by sunrays, an allusion to the Magnificat, Mary’s praise song from Luke 1:46–55, which begins, “My soul magnifies the Lord!” A whole world of possibility opens up with God’s taking on flesh. Wright Pittman says,
I have this instinct to read the Magnificat alongside the first creation narrative in Genesis. I imagine Christ taking form in Mary’s womb much like I imagine all of creation emerging at the Creator’s voice. I collaged macrophotography of patterns, textures, and colors from creation—such as sunsets, bird’s feathers, fish scales, galaxies, leaves, planets, fur, water, etc.—and wove them into her hair. Jesus, the thread of creation, is being knit together in her womb. God’s dream for all creation is materializing as cells divide in her body; all the while she sings of a dream, still unrealized.
Creation–new creation, and Jesus the firstborn of both.
There’s wonder and excitement in the image, but there’s also a trace of loss, as the orb that Mary cradles could be seen as not only a potentiality that’s forming, a God-lit body coming to be, but also an absence, the vestigial essence of a boy wrenched from the protective arms of his mother. The artist said she was thinking of the painting Analogous Colors by Titus Kaphar that appeared on the cover of the June 15, 2020, issue of Time magazine, which reported on the nationwide protests in the US in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer. In Kaphar’s image, a grieving Black mother holds an empty silhouette of her infant close to her chest, alluding to the many African American women whose children’s lives have been taken by police and racist vigilantes.
“When I read the Magnificat, Kaphar’s image came into sharp relief,” Wright Pittman says. “How could I image Mary holding the contours of her dreams for the world, while also holding the contour of her loss? Mary’s son would be publicly murdered at the hands of the state. Mary’s song reverberates for all mothers who have had dreams for their children shattered by senseless violence.”
I originally wrote this description for the Advent 2022 edition of the Daily Prayer Project.
LISTEN: “Behold, I Make All Things New” by Alana Levandoski, on Behold, I Make All Things New (2018)
Behold, I make all things new
Behold, I make all things new
Behold, I make all things new
Let there be light, let there be lightGod unseen is taking form
God unseen is taking form
God unseen is taking form
Let there be light, let there be lightFirst and last is surging forth
First and last is surging forth
The first and last is surging forth
Becoming light, becoming lightBehold, I make all things new
Behold, I make all things new
Behold, I make all things new
Let there be light, let there be light
Art & Theology 