A few years ago, I began to write a series of poems called “Christ-Dreams” envisioning Jesus as a woman. One of those poems, “Christ-Dreams: Labor,” was published last year in Psaltery & Lyre, which you can read here. Today I ended up revisiting that series by writing this poem. Hoping you are having a very blessed Holy Week, even in these strange and stressful times.
Before they went to Gethsemane,
she’d had Mary braid
her hair tight, thinking
she’d need clear vision
for what was to come, and yet
at every stage, she ends up
longing for hair to fall into eyes,
block the pressing gaze of Pilate
for whom she has no answers;
hide her tears from mocking
soldiers as her brow tears to blood.
It’s halfway to Golgotha
when she realizes she does not
need sight, but instead the moment
to return to — a follower
more friend than anything else
touching her, rhythmic and slow,
touching without violence,
without demands that she
save herself, without demands
of any kind at all. As the braid
flops heavy against her back,
she turns the thwack of it
into reminders: You really are
loved. Thwack. You really
are loved. Even if others
will take love’s gift tight
in their hands and yank.
As the final spot looms closer,
the reminder changes: You do
love them, you really do love
them, like she knew so well
in that far-gone moment
that still is fastening her,
holding together heart and hair,
all still, somehow, in Mary’s fingers.
Rev. Megan McDermott 
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