Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "Inheritance"

Inheritance, in Mary’s house, was a funny game. Money,
as usual in the suburbs, in the air, but also values, value
systems on offer. As a life in art, sex, and drugs beckoned,
Mary, as a child and early adolescent, could find little that
would sustain her. Laird and Bethany were not exactly Jesus-
freaks— they did not proselytize, and were restrained in how
they expressed their religiosity— this, including semi-impositions
at worst on their three daughters— but a Christian Right back-
bone was there, inhering. Mary’s quirk— a sense of having
fallen in love with Jesus, first as a character in the Bible, then as
the subject of Renaissance art— was taken to be a source of
amusement to Laird, and a substantial “not to the point” to
Bethany, who waited for Mary to walk a certain chaste walk she
would’ve wanted for her. The chaste walk was a no go— Mary was

willful about charting her own course— but Mary’s fascination
with Jesus never left her. Mary’s Renaissance wholesomeness was,
embodied, she felt, by Jesus, whose soul had to condescend to take
on flesh, or be made meat. The key point for Mary, which lit up
the Renaissance for her, was that the indissoluble bond between
flesh and spirit found its ultimate avatar in Jesus Christ. His body
was his soul, his soul was his body. The Pieta always brought tears
to Mary’s eyes; Jesus left a beautiful corpse indeed. The soul could
never leave the flesh; matter contains, embodies, sustains the inanimate;
human flesh has the possibility of Holiness built into it, too. Mary
was not meant for renunciation, or mortification; but all her many
indulges, including ones built into our own matrimonial bed, take
as a starting point the Renaissance ideal, starting from who Jesus was,
that an unembodied soul and un-souled body are equally unacceptable.

© Adam Fieled 2026