@Kelly Latimore Icons, “Mama”

In this work, Mama, Mary’s grief is unmistakable. Yet this Pieta is unlike most we have seen. First, Jesus and Mary are depicted as Black. (While unfamiliar, it’s no more artistic license than is taken when Jesus is represented with blue eyes and light hair.) Second, Mother Mary’s gaze is directed at us, not at her son or heavenward. To me, it makes the Virgin’s anguish all the more real, more relatable. Her eye contact with the viewer also invites us to unite our own sorrows and longings with hers and with each other’s. In so doing, Mary’s gaze guides us, as the artist has remarked, to “communal thought and prayer and action”. The focus is not on Jesus’s death, then, so much as on what hope is born of it, on what comes next, on how we can be Jesus’s hands and feet.

We carry His gospel of love, among other ways, through our openness to the unfamiliar – and by seeing God in it. Our Lenten journey beckons us towards unity and understanding. Making eye contact with each other is a great start.