Stations Journal Journey #34

Dec 3, 2025 

Station #13 was completed, and we entered Advent. I would never have connected the image of Mary holding the body of Jesus with Mary becoming pregnant and anticipating the birth of this, her son, yet it has just become real for me.

Station #13 holds the moment of heart-wrenching, heavy, all-consuming grief that descends when a parent unimaginably holds their child’s last earthly remains. The colours are intense and dark, yet there is a kind of beauty in the connection as they become one in the holding too. 

On the same day I completed the creation of this art, I had arranged to be a listener to a mother who lost her teenaged son 2 years ago in a shocking way. It was a powerful conversation, one that informed me more about the kind of grief that I had depicted from my own imagination. It was an honour to listen. Let me say this young man’s name here so that it does not die for his family: Tristan.

In reading an Advent reflection today I am astonished by the words about expansion as Mary chooses to say yes to God in birthing a Messiah. Stephanie Duncan Smith writes that “Mary’s yes… is a choice for expansion over contraction, mirroring God’s own yes in creation”. She tells us that “Mary made a radical choice for expansion over happiness, and even over personal comfort, safety and reputation”. And had she chosen the easier or safer route of saying no, she never would have had to endure the loss of holding her son’s lifeless body. And thus, the two moments - death and birth -  connected.

I love Duncan Smith’s words: “expansion is the call”. On the same day I stitched the last stitches of ‘Mary and Jesus’, I birthed a conversation. I expanded from my studio to a grieving mother, to “talk about her favourite subject”. When I said yes to this year’s timeline of creating these panels, funded or unfunded, I said yes to choosing expansion over financial safety. When I said yes to preparing this whole series of art in fabric for public exhibition, I said yes to expanding from an artist in the mastery stage of her career, to living into the full call of a life standing in and leading an art ministry. When I said yes to the original idea seeded in my artist’s soul more than 15 years ago, I didn’t know I was expanding into the person God was calling me to, only that I was stretching my creative abilities.

Mostly this stretching and expanding is not even about me. I am the vessel or the handmaid for art of a profound, painful, beautiful narrative that is filled with truth and love on so many levels (the deeper I go, the more it is a mystery). But this series is going to have a life beyond me. Always, always, this art is about choosing relationship. The relationship between Creator and created. Between Parent and child. Between Lover and beloved. Between those who choose expansion and the ones their lives can touch.

This is what I trust, every day.