the distance between

Assumption of the Virgin

I was on a long drive home to my family after visiting a student midwife at the clinic where she is learning the art of midwifery when I listened to an interview that Terry Gross did with Irish novelist Cólm Tóibín. He has written a new novel called The Testament of Mary, in which Mary examines her life twenty years after the crucifixion of her son.

Tóibín explains that the idea for the novel came to him after some contemplation of two paintings. The first painting that he spent time with was Titian’s masterpiece, Assumption of the Virgin. The virgin is depicted beautiful, whole, and youthful as she is brought bodily into heaven. Her heavenly Father is above, cherubim lift her up to the heavens, and the Apostles admire and reach for her from below. Colm explains that he pondered this Venetian masterpiece for some years before he saw Tinterettos’s painting depicting the Christ’s crucifixion in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. He describes the Titian as “a glorious painting” and the Tinteretto as “Enormous, it’s long, it’s untidy, it’s chaotic. It has the crucifixion at the center, but all around it every form of untidiness, and human activity as sort of odd and strange and random. “ He goes on, in his beautiful Irish lilt to explain, “It struck me the distance between the two things, between the ideal and the real. And it struck me that that story had not been told. The story of what it might have been like on that day, in real time, for somebody and how they would remember it.”

Tinteretto's depiction of the crucifixion

For me this flows naturally, because who is Mary if not the quintessential Mother? She was given an impossible task, an impossible child and an impossible marriage. All mothers feel this way at times. Yet, despite it all she brought up the Christ. People the world over look up to her, pray to her, write about her, paint her and worship her. She is not the first Mother, but we seem to have decided she was the best. You don't have to be Catholic to appreciate this.


We have an ideal of natural childbirth that many believe is as unattainable as the Virgin Mother’s assent into heaven. What do we think will happen? Do we think that our babes will slide from our bodies unaided and us unscathed as surely Mary was in the stable? I suspect her reality of birth was a bit different. We do not know from the record if Mary had a midwife, but we do know it was her first birth and that it occurred in the stable of an inn.

A few things we might extrapolate from that. She gave birth surrounded by large animals, the musty smell of horses and at least one donkey, earth, leather, sweat and manual labor. Horse shit on the ground. In the midst of this mess and quiet chaos, she probably labored hard. First babies usually don’t come that easy. She breathed deep, all those scents coming in through her nose and out of her mouth, as she tried to relax her muscles; as she gave in to her own animal nature in order to bring forth new life. And at long last that was what she did. Eventually she did have a swaddled babe in her arms, but first there was blood, and placenta, and dirt and grime. There was a gush of amniotic fluid, sweat on her skin and tears flowing from her eyes, there were gasps of joy and sighs of relief as her newborn son took his first breaths.

What is the lesson here? Perhaps that we all have untold stories. Perhaps some of us do have seemingly miraculously easy, tidy and clean births. Births with an immediate latch, an intact perineum and a suddenly slim waist. But most of us, have something a little darker, with more texture, more smells. We give birth to our babes with our own sweat and tears. Sometimes there are surgical cuts and stitches. Sometimes something down right frightening or sad happens. Sometimes we walk away with a healthy baby in our arms, and a sense of grief in our hearts, nonetheless. And this is the space between. The space between what is ideal and what is real. The space where a story is waiting to be told.