Celebrated around the world, the Christmas story has endured for more than two thousand years, centred on the birth of a man called Christ.
But somewhere along the way, we forgot about Mary.
Her portrayal in the Garden of Even™ puts her back at the centre of the story—not simply as the woman who gives birth, but as a woman with a revolutionary vision of what the world could become.
Mary lived in a homeland under Roman occupation, in a world where power was made deliberately visible. Rome's gods were mighty and victorious. Its emperors, armies and monuments projected dominance.
Mary imagines a radically different kind of power.
In the Magnificat, she describes a world in which the powerful are brought down from their thrones, the humble are lifted up and the hungry are fed. Power no longer belongs exclusively to emperors, institutions or the pious few. The divine is accessible to the poor, the suffering, the marginalized and those living under the weight of oppression.
Mary flips the script.
Yet the Mary many of us inherited is strikingly different.
Biblical interpretation, religious tradition and centuries of art have often emphasized Mary as selfless, surrendering and obedient. As the “perpetual virgin,” she became an almost impossible model of ideal womanhood, invoked in ideas about women's roles, bodies, motherhood and sexuality.
But this meek, docile Mary obscures something much more interesting.
Mary had a vision: She imagined a world ordered differently from the one she inhabited—and she participated in bringing that vision into being.
Garden of Even™ reclaims Mary as a revolutionary visionary: a woman whose story contains curiosity, courage and an extraordinary capacity to imagine beyond the world she inherited.
She doesn't simply give birth to a child. Symbolically, she gives birth to a new way of being in the world: a different relationship to power, to one another and to the divine.
Her message reaches far beyond Christmas.
There is always the possibility for something new to be born.
