Bring Forth

Luke 6:43

For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

 

The bas-relief carving is of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus – an artist’s rendering of the classic image of Madonna and Child.  The stone has a lovely, ancient hue, with a slightly rough surface from age and, yet, the age and stone texture take nothing from the fineness of the carving, it’s lines, shape, proportion and detail.  The artist was obviously a master craftsman who could transform the dead, cold flesh of stone into warmly living, human personality.  Woman and child are not only realistically rendered in technique, but also seemingly real in life and breath.  Their faces tell their whole life story.  And, yet…

 

Is this the Holy Mother and the Divine Infant?  Her expression is that of a weary mother, succumbed to putting up with an insolent child – and he is that insolent child, uncaring of how exhausted his willful ways make anyone.  The way they hold their heads, the way their mouths are set, the look about their eyes says it all: this is not a happy family, not the ideal of what anyone should be.  Why would the artist render these expressions upon mother and son?  Why would he choose to evoke such depressing and petty emotions from the personalities of the Holy Virgin and the Christ Child?

 

Why, indeed, unless he didn’t know.  If the artist had never known true love and joy, nor even the deep yearning for true love and joy, how could he evoke this state of being?  If he only understood power as willfulness and patience as weakness, how could he understand the divinity of the infant Jesus or the tender care of his holy mother?  For an artist, as for every human being, there is what the hand executes – and then there is what is executed by the heart.  We may go about our lives doing things with great technique, but if we have not love, and no true understanding of the depth and impact of what we do on our lives and on life as a whole, then we do mere things.  We are empty.  We do not fully live.  We miss the point.  We miss the mark.  We are like trees infected by a hidden blight that can never bear forth rich and wholesome fruit.  We are barren of the true and eternal beauty of life.

 

(Inspired by the random piece of Scripture and by the carving I saw yesterday at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.)

Christina Chase