I have had a lot of powerful moments connected to Mary recently – just seeing here woven throughout all the moments of the beginning of the Church through the Church’s first days. She was present at all the key moments. Is it any wonder why we revere Mary as Our Mother?
Jesus literally even told us that she is Our Mother in John 19: 26-27:
26 When Jesus saw his mother* and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son.”
27 Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.
I’ve been contemplating the disciples in the Upper Room, gathered together after Good Friday and Holy Saturday before the Resurrection. How they must have relied on Mary to comfort them in their time of great distress.
I’ve also been looking at a lot of church art and architecture recently and so it was on my mind that I haven’t seen any depictions of Mary comforting the disciples in this “in between time”. (Or at least I don’t think I have.) So I’ve been envisioning it and today I finally tried to sketch it out.
It poorly captures what I envisioned, but at least I got something on paper.
I then had the brilliant idea to use ChatGPT to see if it could take my poor sketch and turn it into something more “real”. I told it: “take my attached sketch of mary comforting john the beloved disciple and convert it into an image in the style of a guido reny painting. the background shouldn’t be discernable but if you set it in a scene make it the upper room where jesus’ disciples gathered after jesus’ crucifixion”. And within one attempt it made the following incredible image:
I was astounded and dumbfounded! Short of being an incredible artist myself and short of getting a talented human person to try to bring this to life, I feel like here is an example of a great use of AI.
Now I personally have issues with Mary always looking calm and un-aged. And I get the usefulness of that as symbolic of her perfectness and love, etc — but I would like to see her aged to her proper mother age with perhaps some wrinkles on her face and some sad emotion (because I assume she was sad even if she was perfectly confident in her Son) and perhaps even a tear as she seeks to comfort the beloved disciples / her children. But that’s on me and wanting more realistic representations of her. …anyways…
ChatGPT could see past all my sketchy lines and bring out more of what I was envisioning. I personally wanted John to be more distraught so I did ask ChatGPT to “create the same thing again but have them gazing into each other’s eyes and have john with a tear on his face”. This is better I think though still not entirely perfect (but I shouldn’t judge cuz all I managed was a few disproportionate pencil lines on a sheet of paper after perhaps 20 minutes and AI churned out something much more impactful within 20 seconds).
The second image loses the fact I want them kneeling barefooted on the ground — but the faces are better. But you get the idea. Maybe someday someone real will be able to make this for real. But for now I will happily accept this AI version of a thought in my head.
What do you think?
Give God Your Yes 