The Annunciation is a true celebration of motherhood

Mothers’ Day has nowadays become an international secular event, and I don’t disparage it for a moment. It’s delightful to see people on buses and in the street carrying bouquets of flowers, evidently, for their mothers on this annual Sunday in mid-March. And it’s obviously good for the restaurant business as well.

 

But the true provenance of Mothers’ Day is, surely, the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25, which, in the Middle Ages, was sometimes called Lady Day, and retained that name in the Anglican prayer books right up until the 20th Century.

 

The Annunciation is said to have been the most frequently depicted subject in the history of European painting, attracting a glittering array of painters from the earliest times, and the simplest icons. 

 

Through depicting the Annunciation early Renaissance painters such as the Dominican Fra Angelico (died 1455) developed techniques of perspective and innovatory use of light and space. A copy of the Virgin of the Annunciation hangs on my wall – one of the earliest, and one of the most beautiful of all Annunciation pictures.

 

But many distinguished artists followed with Annunciation paintings – Da Vinci, Caravaggio, van Eyck, Murillo, and the lovely French painter Philippe de Champaigne. 

 

The Annunciation was a subject that repeatedly inspired – seen as the very seed and root of Christianity when Mary is told she is to be the mother of Jesus.

 

The Annunciation paintings are hugely appreciated today by art experts, who regard them as a fundamental building-block of European art: but the subject itself is now seldom a theme in contemporary painting, which has veered off in many different directions. 

Acceptance

 

And I sometimes wonder, as I look at the Fra Angelico, whether the idea of acceptance, which is so central to the Annunciation, is antipathetic to modern thinking. 

 

Where women are concerned, acceptance is now often described as ‘passive’ and ‘submissive’.

And yet, sooner or later, we have to learn acceptance. It is one of life’s inevitable lessons.

 

The painters portrayed the Annunciation in an exceptionally serene and uplifting way and within these paintings lie so much beauty, ideas, thought, philosophy – and faith. 

 

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The state of Utah has reinstated the death penalty by firing squad and this has been widely condemned by humanitarian agencies, many of whom quote Pope Francis stating that capital punishment is wrong and degrading.

 

Yet what strange contradictions cluster around some of these issues of life and death. Abortion, even very late abortion, is advanced as a “choice”. Assisted suicide is regarded as progressive and humane; and euthanasia is seen as compassionate by modern societies. Yet when it comes to delivering the death penalty to an individual who has been convicted of a heinous crime, it is described as barbaric. 

At least the Pope is consistent: he condemns all taking of human life. 

 

The state of Utah – almost wholly run by Mormons – defends the firing squad claiming it is both just and a very quick means of death. There is also an interesting tradition with the firing squad which seeks to absolve the individual marksman of delivering the fatal bullet: some of the shooters will have blanks in their guns, so that each member of the squad may hope that he was not the executioner.

 

In Irish ballad tradition, the firing squad was considered more honourable than hanging. “Shoot me like a soldier/Do not hang me like a dog.” It was always tragic, but if I had to be executed, I think I would feel that the firing squad was the least worst option. And Mata Hari faced the firing squad with glamorous defiance.