Joy is costly, but it is worth it. We choose joy when we go “all in” with our love, knowing that pain will be a necessary part of it. As Wendell Berry so beautifully puts it in his poem, The Way of Pain, “by pain we learn the extremity of love.”
We see love and pain in Heidi Petersen’s All Our Sorrows. With its bust of Mary in a ponderous pose (perhaps the “ponderings” of Luke 2), surrounded by the thorns her son would one day wear as a crown, this work embodies the sort of melancholy joy that is the alchemy of love and loss and hope and fear.
When I contemplate the visage of Mary in this work, as I listen to the song “Christmas Mourning” by J.A.C. Redford, I almost picture Mary as a mother of a large family, on Christmas night. She’s standing at the sink alone, looking down at the dishes she scrubs in the wake of the day’s Christmas feast. Her young sons have all gone to bed, exhausted by the frivolity of the day: stockings, candy, presents, games, snowball fights, turkey, pie, play. In the quiet of the night, herself exhausted, this mom’s heart is full of pondering.