Christmas Is Mother's Day in anticlimatic

I’ve ranted and raved about this album cover before. Maybe it’s just my mommy issues, but there is something about it that does it for me. The baby, the way she’s looking at him, the hair up but spilling out as though it’s all an unimportant afterthought. The bare shoulders, the warm look on her face.

I was trying to find the photographer, hoping to see more from this set perhaps, but I turned up nothing. I read through the album jacket text, and the long prologue expressed something that hadn’t crossed my mind before. It said that the album was a celebration of motherhood, as Christmas itself is a celebration of the Holy Mother more than it is the Baby Jesus.

Christmas, a celebration of motherhood? Why, I suppose that’s true. I suppose it’s always been true.

Every year that passes, as the fabric of our culture and zeitgeist evolves to become more postmodern and less fundamentalist christian, I notice things that I had always taken for granted as an atheist from the christian culture and lifestyle. Things that either annoyed me outright or at least seemed irrelevant, I often come to discover genuine purpose that by all rational accounts outweighs the annoyances.

I’ve heard the US described as a “cut flower” society- one that has been severed from the roots that kept it alive, that is only now existing on borrowed time from the fumes leftover from the time those roots were still connected.

The idea was that “science” would identify and preserve the aspects of religion that were paramount to maintaining a steady culture, while doing away with the superstitious nonsense that surely wasn’t helping anyone. “Science” would show us the correct way to exist, in harmony with ourselves and the planet, and it pretended to. Kind of. But really, it failed spectacularly.

We failed spectacularly. But we can’t admit it.
Because the horror of those implications is too much to bear.
It’s the blind leading the blind in a world of sandcastles and waves.
Is motherhood sacred, or is it a disease?