as a beautiful olive tree in the field
/I type this while intermittently staring at “Our Lady of the Olives,” which rests against the wall just above my computer screen. It’s a print of a painting by Nicolò Barabino: A white-and-deep-blue clad Mary holding an infant Jesus on her lap, framed by olive branches and a floral-wreath border. The top of the painting says Quasi Oliva Speciosa in Campis.
As a beautiful olive tree in the field.
Serendipitously, Trader Joe’s was selling little potted olive trees today. I bought one. Today is the anniversary of the day my girls and I went to the little white Anglican church for the first time.
One year of being weekly washed in the water of the Word.
One year of dwelling in the body of Christ, and inviting Him to dwell in me, at the sacramental table.
One year running free, unencumbered by the burden of needing to know and be right about everything.
It’s been a year of asking questions (so many questions), learning, and consistently being humbled by the rigidity of my paradigm or the incompleteness of my understanding. A year of noticing how many things I have gotten exactly backward, and never thought twice about before. A year of discovering—as if for the first time—who God is.
Thus, Our Lady of the Olives graces my desk. A reminder that God humbled Himself to come to us fully human: the kind knit together cell by cell in a mother’s womb, the kind birthed through blood and travail, the kind that becomes an inconsolable newborn or a tantruming toddler or a strong-willed child. A reminder that the Father crucially partnered with Mary—and many women before her, all the way back to Eve—to enact redemption, and that for a time, she was His very tabernacle dwelling. Somehow a holy God did not think Himself too good for us, even though we so often think ourselves too good for Him.
A reminder, too, that the Creation project began with a temple garden, lush with life and color and goodness, like the flowers that frame the figures in the painting. That the Creator delights with me in my garden’s blossoms, my children’s antics, my home’s sanctuary. He tabernacles here with us.
I went looking for Him in so many places—across the country, overseas, at a certain type of church, inside a certain version of the Bible, in my own ideas and projects and “glorious purpose”—and though He never abandoned me in any of those things, I found Him here.
Little old here.
Common and nondescript, but simultaneously significant. Like a beautiful olive tree in the field.
Like a little white church on the corner.
