Iain Atkinson

As I mentioned briefly in this poem (slide 4), I heard the word ekphrasis once when when meditating on the person of Gautama Buddha. I feel a specific imperative to continue this little “Ekphrasis” series.

In a thinking that belongs to the past, the mission of a series like this would have been to describe why images bore some kind of significance to me. But for the thinking that is unfolding today, it is the piece that speaks itself of my importance to it.

My latest blog stated that “the thing thinks”. I kept on imagining readers thinking to themselves “well it is after all people who think”. And I kept thinking, “no the thing really does think”. I’m looking around myself. I’m sat at home in domestic comfort. The beer can over there thinks these words. The succulents speak. The modern mind wants to insist that these thoughts are rumbling after all in my brain, but we can’t experience it that way, can we, dear computer? Or, to avoid seeming obtuse, we can indeed experience it that way, and can also choose to experience it alternatively. Anyway if the thought were rumbling in my brain, it is also rumbling in the quantum entaglement of my brain with this beer can, with this computer, with everything in existence. The thing thinks.

And the art speaks. I do not come to you with it in hand to describe to you why it’s important to me. In this particular case, I come with a photo I took and have hardly thought about until now when it occurred to me that this image was the right one with which to create “Ekphrasis 3”. It wants to speak. Mary wants to speak here.

The earth enshrouded is Mary. Though the world be the locus of the flesh and the devil, though it be covered in war and disease, though there be no hope or future, that same earth is as water over which the Spirit hovers. Covered, we are Mary, where spirit incarnates. Hovered over, we are Mary whom the Spirit overshadows. Though war engulf us, that upside-down peace is Mary’s halo.

Let’s understand Mary as the place and person of God’s incarnation by means of the Holy Spirit. Let’s understand the world today as this Mary. The world, a place, this place, is that very place, is placedness, in which God incarnates. God is incarnating here, as the one who has utterly not yet incarnated. The Trinity today is three world-Marys on a billboard. In this world in which the thing thinks, the art speaks, the people are like Mary in whom the Spirit incarnates. We’re all mediums of God’s voice.

The world, the flesh, and the devil are the infernal trinity. The world, the body, and Mary are the redeemed Trinity. These are three names of the fourth divine element, as Leahy describes it, the foundation. Finally, Mary speaks. Mary had been silent all this time, but now speaks. She is silence speaking, saying nothing much. She speaks the nothingness of what we all are.

You are Mary who is the body and who is the world. Your body is the divine world incarnate in this very place. You are the place of the incarnation of God here and now. Your body, having existed in place and having been resident in space, is now existing as a place, and is very space for material incarnation. You are the perfection of body which is the multiplication of creative substance. Body is incarnating us as present to each other. Multiplicative essence of being is defining the place of our meeting as who we are now. This is us meeting, and this us who is now meeting is you. You, us meeting, is your very body, utterly place, utterly the whole world.

God holds the whole world in His hands. You, Mary, precious friend, hold the whole world in your head. Atlas held it all on his shoulders. You hold it all in your mind. You embody it now in how you think. Your thought is the reincarnation of the world as divine substance.

The art above says: the virgin Mary is also mother nature. How can we see things that way? Well why shouldn’t a humble girl be the planet earth? Why shouldn’t she, in her submission to God, become a representative of the earth in its reception of the divine? A representative, a part, yes, but the whole thing? Why not? We might think: here on one side is planet earth, there, a part of it, is some Jewish teenager Mariam or Mara. Hold both in your mind’s eye. Here the world, there the virgin. If you can do this, you are the gently paired hands of the picture above. Your hands bring together the world and Mary in a prayer that embodies them both. Mary embodies the world in incarnating the Lord. We embody Mary and the world in thinking about them. We are a prayer that embodies world-Mary as the new Trinity.

In this new Trinity, certainly the very concept of “Trinity” will seem defunct. The religious ideas are gone in their dogmatic resonance, in their grip on power, in their bite against opposition. They (divine concepts, the very concept of the divine, the divine as concept, the conceived divine, God beginning to become incarnate) have surrendered themselves to our use. There’s no use for divinity any more. I realized recently that the term “divine” is related to the planet Jupiter. They share etymology and ancient history. And I just hardly care about Jupiter. I’ve lost faith in the planets. We all have.

So with the divine surrendered to our use, such that this graffiti is God, such that the Lord is in our hands, how do we world-Marys pray? We are multiple world-Marys praying to each other. Our prayers are silent speech. Our prayers are us standing as mirrors to each other, allowing the other to see in us that their mind is the world, that they embody all that is in a new material moment of creation.

I like in this photo how the middle Mary is obscured by a “One Way” sign. These always set off Hillsong’s “One Way Jesus” in my mind. Jesus is the One way, the middle way, the further covering of Mary, the cover and torn veil veiling all things. All things go through the singularity that He is.

Jesus is Mary’s son and also the incarnation of Mary’s lover. He is utterly Mary’s heart. His ascended spirit brought hers with Him. To see her and to see him are two sides of the same mobius strip. He is the onesidedness of the strip, she is the two sidedness. She is the beautiful believing mum revealed behind the Messiah.

To Protestants, Mary normally means little. Now, fall in love with Jesus, and you’ll see his resurrected life everywhere. Now, believe that his saints join him in power and you’ll start to wonder whether the resurrected life of Jesus that you see everywhere incorporates the resurrected life of other saints. Which other saints? At least his mother, no? “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breast that nursed you”, someone said to Jesus, to which he replied “Blessed, rather, is the one who hears my word and obeys”. But who obeyed like Mary?

Christ is the singular saint, the only Son of God, the true hero of heaven and earth besides whom there is no name by which we can be saved. He alone is the One Way. Yes yes yes. And. All who quietly obey him, who give Him their heart’s yes, become a cell in his body, become utterly the world as His body. So is Mary, Jesus’ Mother, such a One? You can believe the Catholic church’s dogma on this point, or you can smell the fragrance of her legacy in art such as the above. Look at the art and see the ascended Mary in and as your looking. Her calm, quiet, yes to God has made her the queen of heaven. Say yes to her, and marry this merry Mary. Strip her of her veils and feel the flesh she is. Trace all sides of the Mobius strip of differentiation with Christ that her name entails. World, body, Mary, be us.