Living Catholicism: God Works in Mysterious Ways . . . all the time

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December 16, 2006

God Works in Mysterious Ways . . . all the time

There’s a well-known restaurant in Atlanta called The Spaghetti Factory that is finely decorated almost overly so. It’s a great place to eat at a reasonable price, but I bring it up for another reason: it has a beautiful depiction of one of my favorite paintings, Our Lady of the Streets. This huge picture probably is not seen as the Madonna and Child by the largely protestant deep South, but it has always compelled me to think about the humility and the poverty of our Lady as she fulfilled the role of Mother to the creator of the universe. The picture is amazing and recently I started trying to uncover where this great Catholic art came from. I was amazed to find that the painter didn’t intentionally create a Catholic masterpiece.

The painting was actually created by Roberto Ferruzzi during the 1800’s in Italy. He actually was in Venice and saw a young girl walking while holding her brother. The image struck him and so he talked the girl into posing for a painting, which he called Madonnina or “Little Mother.” Immediately it was seized upon by Catholics as a new portrayal of the Blessed Virgin Mary – a claim that Ferruzzi actually denied. And yet, his picture lives on not as an image of a young girl and her brother, but as an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary holding the Child Jesus.

This surprising turn is exactly how God tends to work. Rather than reinvent the wheel or demand perfect purity in His creations, God often uses what already exists for our benefit. In the time of Abraham, circumcision was something the pagans did. God took it for His own (admittedly to teach a very specific lesson to Abraham). However when John the Baptist was born, baptism was something used by the pagans. God took it, infused it with real power, and cleansed our sins with the practice.

In our day I constantly hear the call that Christmas isn’t really a Christian celebration, since a similar festival existed beforehand (celebrated by pagans, no less). Why? If God can use mud to cure the blind, pagan baptism made holy to purify us, why can’t God take whatever festival He chooses and purify it for our uses? The short answer: He can.

Christmas is a celebration of Christ’s birth. I think we would do better to worry about the materialism creeping in than any possibility of a less than perfect start to our Holy Day. This is Advent, let us focus on our Baptism and the need to have our eyes opened by holy mud. And let us look eagerly toward the birth of Jesus Christ in our world.

God bless,
Jay

PS - For more of the story on Ferruzzi's Madonna of the Streets, see this amazing story.

Posted by jay at December 16, 2006 05:14 PM