Renewal

Spending a few days at the Franciscan Renewal Center meant spending time praying and reflecting with this beautiful stained-glass window of the Assumption. While the image is an abstract representation, we can see the figure of Mary rising up through the window into the upper portions.

As I sat reflecting on it, I was surprised to see that a spiral was used in the middle of the image, including in the figure of Mary, to give the image movement. While it is pretty common to use a spiral for this sort of thing, it can also have some negative connotations with it, and I wouldn’t consider it to be associated with Mary. Oftentimes when thinking about mental health, the term “spiraling” can be used when you begin to be overwhelmed with negative thoughts. Thinking about it deeper, I think it’s possible that Mary, being human, may have been overcome with negative thoughts every once in a while. I mean, she did have a very important job being the mother of Jesus, that couldn’t always have been an easy task.

I think the spiral could be an image that we could use for life in general. Sometimes we think we make the right decision or a good choice, and it doesn’t turn out the way we think it will. While we move forward in life, we can find ourselves looping back to where we once were, whether it was a place or a mindset or something different. In this case, I think about Mary’s “yes” to being the mother of Jesus. Mary made a choice out of faith that it was the right thing to do, just in the way that we make most of our decisions. And yet, it wasn’t just about that singular “yes”, but a whole lifetime full of yeses after that. Each yes brought an opportunity to grow and to learn, just as each decision we make offers us a chance to grow into who we are to become. That I believe is the important message behind the spiral, that even when we make a choice that doesn’t work out and we end up back where we were, we are still moving upward into who we were made to be.

In all of this, we must remember to be patient, merciful, and loving with ourselves and others as we move upwards into our full self. In the end, we will be looked upon with this same mercy and love.