The Present Box

Those hours wandering around looking for a baptism gift never did result in a special and memorable delight for my daughter.  The only result was a bit of  progress on the inner dialogue of the blog post on presence.  Finally I resorted to looking in my present box jammed in the back of a cluttered cupboard.  I have a special box put aside for those  items to be regifted and a few unusual treasures successfully found in months and even years gone by.  Since I  mistakenly gave a lovely ornament back to the very person who gave it to me, I have not been as eager to check out that box.  This time I was surprised.  There was a delightful set of Ukrainian painted stacking wooden dolls.  They made me think of the layers of our lives unfolding.  Treasures stacked together.  The dolls are beautifully and intricately painted in rich colours and somehow seemed fitting for my special daughter and the depth and beauty of her challenging but multifaceted, deep and interesting life.

The dolls reminded me in turn of a very special painted Christmas egg ornament that stands here on my desk all year.  This painted egg creatively weaves together the truths of both Christmas and Easter.  Birth and death leading to miraculous new richness of life and hope are  linked in the smooth and symmetrical shape of an egg.  A small painting of mother and child emerge from the intricate woven pattern of colour and shape on the egg.  Sacred in the ordinary.  My career for all these years has been mostly caring for mothers and their children.  I help mothers hold and bond with their unique babies and children. I have never before linked  the importance of that early bonding and relationship with our mothers with  the emphasis in art on the mother and child Jesus.  Even the Son of God was cared for and held by his earthly mother.  Foundations of the world in the arms of a woman.  Those early months in the arms of our mothers are the primal undergirding of the rest of our lives.  For those for whom there was not warmth and comfort in those embraces, there is still hope.  In the rich depths of our hearts we can know the encircling embrace of God and  acceptance and love for our own child selves. All those images of mother and child surrounding us speak to the centrality of those sacred moments in our own lives.  I wonder if the very creation of those images has brought healing and grounding for the artists who perhaps, like so many, were wounded by their lack in reality, but encouraged in the fertile imaginations of their heart.  These images bring special life and depth to the experiences of my family this year.  May our wounded hearts know healing and rest in the quiet foundational embrace of mother and child so graphically expressed around us in this season.