From Zero to One: The Birth of Parents

In the antiquities section of the Yale University Art Gallery, there is a wall painting, found hidden in rubble in a church house in northern Syria, of a woman at a well (Baptistery Wall Painting: Woman at the Well, artist unknown, ad 232). As described in the gallery, “The woman in this image leans forward, her arms stretched downward, holding a thick black rope that hangs into a well.” Several scholars have identified the work as an Annunciation scene, in which case this piece—guileless, haunting, like a cave painting—is the earliest known representation of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the world—as she comes to know that she is expecting a child. This image stayed with me. It inspired me to seek out works of fiction preoccupied with questions about what it means to be a parent, in particular Colm Tóibín's (2012) Testament of Mary and J.M. Coetzee's (2013, 2016, 2019) Jesus trilogy, which, like the painting, bring to life the family at the heart of the Christian tradition through modern and imaginative accounts of their profound disillusionment and mourning.

In the 2,000 years that have passed since this depiction, Mary has continued to enter our imagination through images or words in prayer. In the afterword of The Testament of Mary, Tóibín (2012) writes,

It is as though her insistent and mysterious power arose precisely from her shadowy presence; it is as though the devotion to her grew from this very absence and silence. She could thus be re-created with greater force in the imagination of those who prayed to her and who sought her intercession. (p. 83)

Tóibín thus offers Mary a voice and words that are an ax to centuries of her long-suffering, devoted silence. As a solitary older woman, this mother of Jesus seeks to understand the events that inexplicably and inexorably led to her son's agonizing death, not through the will of God, but through the meticulously planned and scripted acts of men.