The Paradox and the Time Traveling of Virgin Mary and Her Truck

The Paradox and the Time Traveling of Virgin Mary and Her Truck

Pamela Uribe

During my venture out to the unknown land of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I came across this peculiar pick-up truck. The first thing that stroked me about this car was how old, outdated and out of place the truck seemed in relation to its environment. The next thing I noticed was what decorated this already spectacular car, I found inside the back part of the pick up truck, plants. In fact, it even has a garland wrapped around the front part of the car. Inside the car, there was a portrait of the Virgin Mary facing the plants in the back of the outdated pickup truck. She looked as if she was overseeing the plant’s progress. In the front of the truck, there were prayer candles displayed and some were even lit.

            Now, the reason why I chose this truck as a religious artifact worthy enough to be showcased in the blog is because I saw it as a huge paradox, a paradox that seemed so large to me in the moment, that it seemed to have existed in its own world. After all, here I was in one of the “hippest,” fastest-growing commercial meccas of the New York City area and I come across a truck that is not what everyone necessarily defines as “hip” or “cool.” I then began to think of the truck not only as a rebuttal against modernity in a technological sense, but then as a rebuttal against modernity in a religious sense.

            The Catholic notion of the Virgin Mary is that she is the Mother of God. It is through her Immaculate Conception that the Holy One was brought to this earth. Her entire life has been devoted to God and He repaid her with the ability to deliver a child without staining her with the sin of sex. It is because of Immaculate Conception that the Virgin Mary is seen as someone who embodies a pure soul, a soul who has not been tainted by the destruction of original sin. Seeing her in the peculiar truck, over-watching the plants made me equate her and her abode to the Bases of Modernity that we learned about in class.

            The Bases of Modernity are a set of ideals that grounds itself in tradition in order to shield itself from the neutralization of the Acids of Modernity. The Acids of Modernity are a set of ideals that challenges certain parts of religion or beliefs in order to keep up with progression of reason and tolerance for the different possibilities available to answer life’s questions. The Virgin Mary in this scenario stands as a base of modernity towards the fleetingness of religious appreciation or the appreciation of a life that can be inherently good. In respect to Niebuhr and his belief on original sin, the Virgin Mary is an exact paradox of how Niebuhr categorizes people. Niebuhr suggests that justice and love are the most important characteristics that a society must learn to withhold above all else. Yet, he finds impossibility in society ever attaining perfect love or perfect justice because human beings have been tainted by the curse of original sin. It is because of original sin that human beings are greedy and self-interested. The Virgin Mary, in thinking and viewing her in the perspective of Catholicism, fits very well with the out of place, moment in time truck and its collection of plants and candles. Together it symbolizes a stand against shifting sentiments about religion, shifting presuppositions about humanity and shifting acknowledgments about the most important facets of life.