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| (C) 2005, Sisters of the Mississippi Abbey |
This beautiful image was threaded through our church's liturgy this past Sunday. It especially captured my wife's imagination as we're expecting our second child any day now.
If you're familiar with biblical imagery and symbol, you'll recognize the pair as Eve and Mary. Their simple, interplay of nakedness and clothing, shame and forgiveness, defeat and victory centers on the profound mystery of Mary's bulging belly. The mother becomes the daughter becomes the mother.
The "foolishness" of the Christ-story is much more than the passion, cross and resurrection. Central and inevitable is the mystery of God taking upon himself the brokenness, the limitation, the beauty, fragility, and mess of humanity.
It is a great, strange comfort that the lord of all things entered my world through slime, in the birthblood of an animal.
