Mary’s Smile

How many times have you seen Mary smiling in a piece of art? This has long been something that troubles me in paintings and sculptures of her. She often seems peaceful, yes, or pensive, but so rarely does she smile or laugh in depictions of her. This thought occurred also to Caryll Houselander, the British Catholic writer. She writes, “To many (Mary) is the Madonna of the Christmas card, immobile, seated forever in the immaculately clean stable of golden straw and shining snow. She is not real; nothing about her is real, not even the stable in which Love was born” (The Reed of God). 

This is why I was touched when I came across this depiction of Mary on a mural on the Catholic University campus. This, I felt, was a Mary I could be friends with. Our Lady was a human being; surely she laughed and smiled just as we did. If anything, her joy must have been greater than ours could be, since she was not tainted by original sin as we are. So many times, my happiest moments are marred by some annoyance or negative inclination. As Christians, we are called to be joyful, and I think Mary must have been, having literally born the Good News. 

There are not many words of Mary recorded in the Bible. This can make it hard to picture her or understand what she was like. But Caryll Houselander explains that this gap in knowledge can actually be for our benefit. She writes, “Christ must be born from every soul, formed in every life. If we had a picture of Our Lady’s personality we might be dazzled into thinking that only one sort of person could form Christ in himself, and we should miss the meaning of our own being” (The Reed of God). 

Recently at dinner at the Casa, one of my housemates brought up unprompted that he was friends with the woman who had posed for this mural of Mary at Catholic University. Having just read this line by Houselander, I was struck by how sweet this idea was. Not only are we called to bear Christ from our own souls, as Mary did, but this very depiction of Mary that I had been so touched by was actually the image of someone close to my community. She had modeled for our Lady in this work of art, but we are called to model her every day by bearing Christ to the world and loving Him. 

Question for Reflection: How can you model Mary’s joy?