Mary Kept All These Things, Luke 2:19 Wall Art

Lilies, roses and a burning heart

Mary is painted from just below the shoulders, a cream veil over her long brown hair and a sky-blue mantle falling around a rose-pink dress. Her eyes are closed, and both hands are crossed flat against her chest. Just above them glows a red heart topped with a small flame and ringed by tiny white roses, with fine gold rays spreading from it across her dress.

White lilies with open trumpets grow up on her right, pink roses and buds on her left. Everything floats on bare cream paper, with Luke 2:19 lettered in brown above her head: “But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”

What did Mary keep and ponder?

The verse closes Luke's account of the first Christmas night. Shepherds have burst into the stable with a story about angels in the fields, and everyone who hears it is amazed. Luke then turns the camera, so to speak, onto the mother. While others talk, she holds on to what has happened and turns it over. The Greek verb behind “pondered” suggests placing things side by side to see how they fit.

Luke uses almost the same phrase again at the end of the chapter, after the twelve-year-old Jesus is found in the Temple: “his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.” Many scholars take the repetition as a quiet hint about where Luke's childhood stories came from. Whatever one makes of that, the portrait is consistent: Mary is someone who does not understand everything at once and keeps faith while she waits.

The flaming heart with roses belongs to the Catholic devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which draws directly on this verse and on Simeon's words about a sword piercing her soul. Lilies stand for her purity, roses for her role as the mystical rose of the old litanies. Christians outside that devotion can still read the image simply: a mother's heart, full.

Who it is for

For a baby girl's baptism, or for a mother holding memories of her own children, the verse says something tender without saying too much. Confirmation candidates who take the name Mary also receive it, and it is a thoughtful present for a new mother in the first weeks at home.

The soft blues and pinks suit a bedroom, a nursery or a prayer corner in a Catholic household. Because the figure is centered and small on the page, a wide mat and a slim white or gold frame give her room to breathe.