Bring flowers of the rarest,
Bring blossoms the fairest,
From garden and woodland and hillside and dale.
Our full hearts are swelling,
Our glad voices telling
The praise of the loveliest flower of the vale.
-- Traditional
Catholic Hymn
We are told very little about her, and what we are told is cloaked in
myth or doctrine.
She was approaching 50 when she held vigil at the foot of the cross, and
after a peasant’s lifetime at the loom and grinding stone, in the fields and olive
groves, likely bent and gray. Veiled in public, she’d have dressed in plain
tunics and mantels she no doubt wove herself, and worn for adornment perhaps
only a wide belt.
She watched her son step onto a precarious stage, having certainly seen
other young man before him do so and die. She heard him called a lunatic by
some who’d known him all his life, and denounced as a traitor and heretic by
others who hadn’t but wished him silenced and gone.
Time and worry would have lined her dark features. Daily hard work -- the business of preparing bread consumed
three or four hours each morning – no doubt left her loving hands gnarled and
rough. And what sorrow she learned on
Calvary would have been written indelibly on her face.
And yet, despite more realistic recent artistic and literary renderings,
for many of us, in our mind’s eye, Mary remains ever youthful and beautiful. We
envision the willing handmaiden of the Annunciation; the solemn girl settling
the swaddled newborn in a manger; the Holy Mother miraculously risen, clothed
in glorious, heavenly excess of gold and gemstones.
But no blank slate of a mother raises a child who changes the world, one
so bold as to challenge an occupying authority and the teachings of their faith.
No submissive, empty vessel inspires a son
to champion the ‘weaker’ sex or the pariahs on society’s fringe deep-rooted laws
and traditions kept firmly in check.
“The mother’s heart,” said Henry Ward Beecher, abolitionist and social
reformer, “is the child’s schoolroom.”
Mother’s Day approaches. Feasts in honor of
maternal goddesses and celebrations of motherhood are as old as time, of
course. In the aftermath of a late
Easter and a later true spring here in the North Country comes a welcome May,
the month the Catholic Church dedicates to Mary, a custom that dates back many
centuries. In Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer
makes the association between May, the month of flowers blossoming into
fullness, and the Holy Mother; in many lyrics of the Middle Ages, Mary is often
referred to as the flower of paradise, or symbolized most frequently by roses
or lilies.
Our
American holiday was born, appropriately, from attempts to honor the sacrifice
of fallen soldiers’ mothers and to promote peace in the aftermath of the Civil
War. Though our current commercialized
incarnation bears little resemblance to what the earliest promoters had in
mind, flowers have been an integral part of the commemorations since 1914, when
the second Sunday in May was officially established as Mother’s Day. We spend more money on our mothers on their
special day than on our valentines on theirs; only Christmas and Chanukah keep
florists busier.
What flowers might Mary have encountered in Nazareth? Hyacinths perhaps;
anemones, irises, and daffodils, as well as the yellow flowers of mustard, and
the tiny blooms that adorn the misappropriated spiny hawthorn: these might have
kept her company on her walks to the well. Humbler sorts though hardier than
the lily and the rose, among the many cultivated centuries later in her honor.
Of her celebrated flower paintings, Georgia O’Keeffee reportedly said,
“I found I could say things with color and shape that I couldn’t say any other
way – things I had no words for.” Furthermore, her reasoning for zooming in
close on the vibrant petals and stamen was that no one actually “saw” flowers; no
one took the time. The month of May -- with
its wealth of associations both spiritual and worldly, with nature in glorious,
fulsome bloom -- provides many opportunities for doing just that.
This column appears in the May 2014 issue of The North Star Monthly. Check out their site:
Information on flowers in the Holy Land was found on www.blblewalks.com
All illustrations are works
on display this summer in the New Mexico History Museum's exhibit,
"Painting the Divine: Images of Mary in the New World." From
the top: Our Lady of the
Lote Tree, 1716, by Melchor Perez Holguin. Our
Lady of Copacabana with Saint Joseph and Saint Peter,
Unidentified
artist, Peru or Bolivia, early 17th century. Our Lady of Bethlehem, Unidentified
artist, Cuzco, Peru, 18th century. Our
Lady of Saint John of the Lakes
José Aragón (active 1820-1835), Santa
Fe, ca. 1825. Follow this link for more information:
