“Gratia Plena” by Stephen Heilmer PHOTO: Mary van Balen
While in Seattle, I visited the Chapel of St. Ignatius on the campus of the Jesuit’s Seattle University. The chapel, designed by architect Steven Holl using “A Gathering of Different Lights” as the guiding concept, won a design award from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and the scale model of it is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The chapel is stunning. All of it. But today, being the feast of Our Lady, Mother and Queen, I decided to focus on one of the striking elements of this place of prayer. I don’t identify the title of “Queen” for Mary, but “Mother” is another story.
“Be sure to see the statue of Mary,” my Dutch cousins suggested when they learned I would be visiting the chapel with my friend the following day. “It is unique.” How right they were. One walks through the chapel doors (a story themsleves) along a sloped entryway and along the processional corridor, and looks to the right into the nave or main sanctuary. Much vies for attention in a subtle kind of way, but my eyes fell immediately on the Mary statue, unlike anything I have seen before.
I stood a long time there, gazing at the golden bowl head, the overflowing stream of milk that poured from it and covered the figure. Carved out of one piece of marble the figure is unspecific yet particular. I could not move my eyes from the bowl and milk which flowed from it.
Maybe my experience of being mother myself, one who nursed three children and who had an abundance of milk to nourish them, made the image more powerful. Perhaps not. Maybe everyone who sees it, mother or not, is riveted by the image of outpouring of life and grace.
Pouring out. That is what I saw. Pouring out as a mother does in countless ways: Life from her womb. Milk from her breasts. Love from her heart. I rejoiced and ached at once, for what mother does not do both?
An image of Mary, Mother of Jesus. An image of God who is Mother as well. An image that calls us to both receive grace as children of the Divine and to pour it out as sisters and brothers of Jesus, transforming the world.
Slowly, I turned my eyes to other parts of the chapel. The light playing on plain walls. The Blessed Sacrament chapel with wall covered with six-hundred pounds of (That’s another story). My friend and I did not have much time. Not enough, this trip anyway. When I return to Seattle someday, I hope, I will take more time in this place. I will sit before the statue. I will simply be. With milk and grace and beeswax and love falling all over me.
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