Love it or hate it?

[hedgehog]

https://www.trinitystores.com/store/art-image/our-mother-sorrows

[demosincebirth]

1. I love Our Lady, but I don't like it. n/t

[hedgehog]

2. Can you explain why you don't like it? For me, the mixture of traditional

imagery with contemporary disaster is a reminder that Mary is with us today, a reality and not a pious myth from yesterday.

I know others have decried this image as kitsch, so have at it artistically if you wish.

[demosincebirth]

3. You know, I really can't put it into words, but maybe it detracts from

her beautiful and loving image.

[CBHagman]

4. It reminded me of Caryll Houselander's "The Reed of God."

I seem to have misplaced my copy, and online searches haven't produced the results I want -- otherwise, I'd have the right quote.

Anyway, Caryll Houselander's book The Reed of God, a meditation on Mary, suggests the experience, the sufferings of Mary, of Jesus, of the Holy Family is humankind's, and vice versa. All refugees are the Holy Family on the flight to Egypt, etc.

I think in particular of the story Houselander tells of a woman who lost her own son and then adopted a child. She said something like "There is only one boy, Jesus Christ." Her chosen son was as sacred as her biological one, and her obligation to him the same.

That's what I see in the picture -- Mary holding inside herself (Under her wings? Or indeed inside her body?) a great many human lives. The airplanes approaching her on either side take away from that, as the towers are already burning (i.e., the planes already have hit their mark), but I do think of Mary as the one who cradles all the office workers, firefighters, police officers, and others within herself.

There have been a couple of depictions of the FDNY chaplain Mychal Judge as an icon -- either in his Franciscan habit with his fire helmet beneath his arm, or as a dead friar in the arms of St. Francis of Assisi, being borne through the New York skies to heaven.

[hedgehog]

5. Here you go -

http://puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/andre/judge.html