Annunciation with String Accompaniment (2022) Drawing by Edwin Loftus

The Christian Bible unfolds as a series of stories with third person narration in which the reader is cast as a non-witness being told about these events. There is a great debate within Christianity about the potential literal versus symbolic nature of various stories told within its text. At the closing of the Book of Revelations, the final book in the collection, there is an epitaph that says that this is all God's message to us and anyone who detracts from it will have the blessings described in the book withheld from them in the next life while any who add to it will have the punishments described added to their lot in the next life. So, don't go tinkering with the Word of God.
However, the "Old" (pre-Christian) and "New" (post-Jesus) testaments have many omissions. In the Old Testament, the whole tale of Lilith, the fallen first mate of Adam is missing and with it the potentially important element that Adam and Eve might not have been the first man and woman. In the New Testament the "Apocrypha" and various essential tales are omitted as 'unreliably sourced', and yet The Revelation to John remains. "John" is apparently not the apostle, John but a figure who may have lived generations after Jesus and recorded a dream-vision about the end of the world.
I find myself of the camp that considers the Bible "inspirational" rather than literal. It is the wisdom of a culture recorded at a time when moral and philosophical teaching took place in this fashion in many cultures. Judaism, apparently an off shoot of Canaanite culture with Egyptian, Greek and Persian influences, became the foundation of Christianity and Christianity became an important and eventually dominant religion in the Roman Empire prior to its decline. This led to it becoming the dominant religion in Europe and a small part of Africa. Europe, long a culturally and technologically trailing region, gave rise to a new importance in science and technology that propelled it to prominence and often dominance in most of the world, including the two Americas, invaded by Christians during the religion's first global expansion. At this point it is the largest set of mostly common beliefs, with what are sometimes called the Vedic-based belief systems, Islam and atheism dominating the remaining majority of the world's population.
A peculiar story is the impregnation of Mary and the birth of Jesus. It is important in Christian belief that Jesus is "The Son of God" an avatar of God, the Creator and Controller of our destinies. My image only somewhat parallels the story of "The Anunciation" in which an angel appeared to Mary in her home to tell her that she had been selected as the woman who would give birth to God's son. A secondary annunciation was required for Joseph, Mary's betrothed because he had not lain with her, and custom favored those women who were virgins at the time of marriage. This was considered important in establishing the fatherhood of the first child born to a marriage and affected inheritance or, in the case, the claim of divinity.
In this image, I have presented Mary standing in water, symbolic of the historically questionable nature of this set of stories. The angel appearing before her fits the original story, though I have put Mary in modern dress to suggest that this tale still has relevance today.
Mary stands in water, not firm ground, a stylized wave rises behind her suggesting the questionable nature of the story, but the stones at the center of the image refer to the undeniability of the importance of it. This is reiterated in the presence of the string trio, expressive of the significant cultural importance of the story of "Mary, mother of God," a very peculiar concept unto itself.
Some smart person once said, "If God did not exist, man would have had to invent Him." I've seen this attributed to various people, but whomever said it was right, as far as I can discern. Without the presence of a superhuman source of commonly accepted moral wisdom, disputes between humans would amount to one person's opinion versus another's and the resolution of disagreements would almost never favor the weaker of the two disputants. The presence of an authority greater than our own perceptions has been the glue that bonds societies and the lubricant that allows them to adapt. It is a common ground on which they can stand, and this gives meaning to the stones at the center of the image and the paragraphs about the rise and importance of Christianity in the world today ... a uniting factor that we lose at our peril, (and the same is true for other foundational religious beliefs, each in their regions of dominance). Mary, in modern dress is, as stated, a reminder that these things are not just antiquities, but important elements in the world we know as well.
And this brings up the choice of a Medieval style. Between about 1200 AD and 1600 AD (and continuing today), Christianity went through a series of conceptual revolutions we know by names like, "The Renaissance", "The Enlightenment", and "The Reformation." (Asia has been going through a similar process and we may be seeing signs of this in Islam, as well). We are, today, still involved in the Reformation. The process it describes is not finished and still very much ongoing, as is the Enlightenment. These great "movements" in civilization do not, (as you may have been taught), have beginning and ending dates. They rise gradually out of precursors and ebb away as other movements replace them in prominence, for those not still struggling through them.
And ... OH MY GOODNESS! Do you realize ... this is actually just marks made with pigment on a felt made of plant fibers? Having it appear as though it is a window on another world "forces" the viewer to confront their assumptions about the nature of perception and reality and helps them come to grips with the here and the now, while ... doing all of these other things!
I just threw that in as a slap in the face to the deconstructivism of Modernist and Post-Modernist forms of art and a "bold challenge" to the narrow-mindedness of their linear view of artistic exploration and expression in which too many somehow think that it's perfectly acceptable to suppress those that pursue other forms of expression just because they are too ignorant and under cultivated to understand them ...

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