Mary, Once More Beckoning

The day started cold, as winter mornings in Iowa are prone to do.  Even the chickens were reluctant to emerge from the hatch I dutifully opened, or descend the lowered ramp.  Indeed, the only incremental movement anywhere apparent was the fog, thickening the air into opaqueness, whiskering the bare limbs with hoarfrost.  The hive boxes show no signs of bees.  The remaining patches of snow, caught between melting or glistening, simply harden into crusts.

 

This is the season when, by all appearances, nothing at all is happening, or thriving, or moving.  But yet again appearances are deceiving.  Mary has moved.  Indeed, she has fallen.

 

Friends, in recent years, gifted us with a statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus.  Standing perhaps two feet tall, she has thereafter graced the gateway to the garden – a maternal, gestational welcome to any who would pass inside; implicitly blessing hoes and hods and harvest crates passing by, or simply those with an appreciative appetite.  She is facing down, eyes firmly on the soil; perhaps in prayer, or simply and knowingly of the mind that good things come from that direction.  There she has stood throughout the seasons – remembering, blessing, anticipating; silently lending her prayer to the garden soil and the furrows inside for a fecund submission of their own:  “Let it be to me according to your will.”

 

But this morning we found Mary toppled.  It’s not that she was anchored in any reinforcing way – no cement or bolts or braces – but she is cement heavy and settled in a recess, frozen into place.  Nothing has moved her before, neither wind nor bump nor time.  Something, however, had dislodged her.  

Perhaps it was a vigorous curiosity of the groundhog who has taken up residence underneath the garden shed nearby, or nudging inspections by the deer nuzzling for food.  Perhaps it was simply the heaving of the earth below, variously freezing and thawing, swelling and contorting and tilting.  

 

All that’s clear is that the illusion of stillness is simply that:  illusion.  Mary will testify that something is happening; something is moving – motion that provoked her own…

 

…which provokes me to wonder what else is pulsing, pushing, heaving and nudging in the night, or nuzzling just beyond my sight?

 

Mary, for the record, is once again righted – once more standing hospitably by, prayerfully beckoning whatever may…

 

…to grow.

"Let it be to me..."