Irked by the Mother of God?

It amazes me that the Mother of Jesus has come to be such a contentious figure.  Some time ago, I painted Our Lady with the Child Jesus in her arms.  It showed at the Parker Gallery in CO.   A church met in the same building, so members of the congregation would stop by to see the artwork after services.  One Sunday only a young girl, about 9 years old, wondered  from painting to painting,  until she came to Mother and Child.  She stood before it a moment considering the painting and then to my astonishment made a disdainful sound, “Psst!” motherchild12 Then,  the child tossed her head and left abruptly.  The gesture seemed beyond her years.  Wouldn’t you expect an image of a mother and a child to touch a soft spot in a young and tender heart? Instead,  it struck like a rock bouncing off unyielding ground.   I remembered the lyrics of a song from South Pacific:

You’ve to to be taught before it’s too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You’ve got to be carefully taught!

Prejudice can effect, or more accurately,  infect us at any age or stage.  It’s sad when it blinds us to goodness; saddest when it makes us immune to holiness, which, I guess,  it always does.

Cheap Talk

For all his inaugural eloquence, President Obama can’t walk the talk. His lips say, “For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies …” Rightly, he adds, that it is, “a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.” Yet, Barak Hussein Obama is the pre-eminent obstacle to such nurture. He refuses to nurture the unborn child within the American womb. He, in fact, supports abortion on the world stage as well. In the coming days, American dollars will once again fund the death of innocents around the world. Barak Hussein Obama, who in his inaugural decried, “those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents,”  lifted the ban that Bush reinstated in 2001 known as the Mexico City Policy. Reagan instituted this policy in 1984 to stop U.S. funds from paying for counseling, promoting abortion and providing abortions internationally. The revocation engenders “slaughtering innocents” on a grand worldwide scale. However, Obama will be even handed. He plans to empty wombs at home as well as abroad. So much for eloquence. Actions still speak louder than words.