When I was a child, my parish paid a sculptor a great deal of money to carve a dying tree into a statue of the Virgin Mary. “God simply shows the artist what was waiting in the wood the whole time,” the pastor said, wisely paraphrasing Michelangelo.
I wondered then what it was like for the Virgin Mary to be inside of a tree for so long, or how she felt before it had grown big enough to fit her body. I wondered what the world would be like, now that she had gotten out.
