Swords to Ploughshares
This image of the Sorrowful Mother of God, in a posture suggesting a crucifixion scene, was painted by a Ukrainian iconographer on wood from an ammunition crate. The artist wanted to express stubborn conviction that beauty, aesthetic and spiritual, can emerge from ugliness and violence. Even in the midst of the ongoing, terrible war. ‘They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, their spears into pruning hooks’, we read in Isaiah. When? When the Lord ‘shall judge between the nations’ (2,4). Judgement has been inaugurated, but is worked out at a pace that, from our perspective, seems unbearably slow. The Mother of God displays a grief inalienable from the human condition; yet we address her in wonderful liturgical texts with the imperative, ‘Rejoice!’. Christian joy is born through things as they are. It is a lucid joy not needing to abstract from reality; for reality as we suffer it is borne, held by a humanly inexplicable benevolence, in process of redemption. The mystery of faith.
