The feast of the Visitation, the meeting between Mary of Nazareth and her cousin Elizabeth, is observed on May 31.

On Thanksgiving Day, 2008, a popular TV morning news show featured the story of the mother of a 22-year-old soldier who had been killed in Iraq. Part of a supply convoy servicing the perimeter of Baghdad, his Humvee had been hit by an explosion-rigged vehicle. Just days after his twenty-second birthday, the young man and two of his best friends were dead, the other, permanently brain damaged. His mother, reading the diary returned in his army trunk, discovered the names of the friends who had been killed and wounded with him. Then she searched the United States until she found their mothers. In their mutual pain, these women have found both support and understanding. “There is no difference in our grief. It’s absolutely painful,” Doris said. “There is nothing in the world that is going to bring our boys back, but we have each other.” For this small bit of shared humanity, for this cocoon of emotional safety, for this personal place of support in their grief and the hope of sustenance it brought for the future, they were thankful.

It is, I think, the same story Janet McKenzie is begging the world to see in her painting, The Visitation. The faces of Mary and Elizabeth, dark and somber, thoughtful and aware, in McKenzie’s Visitation say something far beyond either the exultation of pregnancy or the creative power of it. This is not a picture about the delirium of motherhood. There is a storm stirring in the hearts of these women–deep and different than most at such a moment as this, something epochal and eruptive.

Women scholars have for long now pointed out that at the moment of change, in the face of awesome, perhaps even terrifying awareness of her situation, Mary does not go to her fiancé, Joseph, for understanding. She does not go to her father for protection. She does not go to the priests of the Temple for vindication. No, Mary goes to another woman. Mary, the pregnant but unwed woman, travels to the hill country to be with her old cousin Elizabeth, who is also pregnant, also dealing with overwhelming change and the isolating implications of it in her life. None of it, the two women knew and the academic world realized over the centuries, made any human sense. After all, to be unmarried and pregnant in the Middle East of that time was dangerous space for a woman. She can be driven out of the family. She will certainly be forever disgraced. She can be stoned to death. So, it seems sensible to wonder, why go to another woman, an old woman, who can herself do nothing to save her, who has no power to make the social situation better?

But to a woman it makes sense. Seeking the support of another woman in the midst of struggle has made emotional sense to women for centuries. And now it makes scientific sense, as well. According to principal investigator Shelley E. Taylor of a UCLA study, Behavioral Responses to Stress, “For decades, psychological research maintained that both men and women rely on fight or flight to cope with stress–meaning that when confronted by stress, individuals either react with aggressive behavior, such as verbal conflict and more drastic actions, or withdraw from the stressful situation.”

But, these researchers discovered, the participants in the five decades of research that consistently confirmed the “fight or flight theory” were primarily men. The UCLA study, using women rather than men for the first time in the history of the study of stress research, discovered that,“fight or flight” is not the primary or normal response of women. Instead, science now understands, women under stress “tend and befriend.” They gather with other women to construct other means of dealing with conflict and pressure, rather than aggressive ones. Women, under stress, they found, take care of one another. They take care of children. They continue to concentrate on the functioning and development of the human community. They bring stability to situations of tumult and confusion.

Now science knows what scripture and art, women and society, have known for eons. Mary and Elizabeth, Doris and the mothers of her son’s now dead soldier friends–women everywhere–calm the chaos of the world. They show us all another way to be in the midst of the daily maelstroms of life. They help us survive. They bind us together to carry each other, to carry the human community, to allow others to carry us when we cannot carry ourselves.

To look at McKenzie’s Visitation is to look at an alternative world. It is to define the role of women in a new way. It gives new dignity and meaning to the friendship of women. It gives us all reason to believe that there can be another way through conflict other than force.

—from "The Visitation," by Joan Chittister, in Holiness & the Feminine Spirit: the art of Janet McKenzie (Orbis, 2009)