in lieu of anything of my own, here's something about Mary...

     'There is the reality of the icon, which is a picture of some bit of this world, so depicted and so constructed as to open the world to the "energy" of God at work in what is being shown. And, most importantly, there is the person who stands on the frontier between promise and fulfillment, between earth and heaven, between the two Testaments: Mary. That she can be represented in so many ways, thought about and imagined in so many forms, is an indication of how deeply she speaks to us about the hope for the world's transfiguration through Jesus . . . ,' Rowan Williams, Ponder These Things: Praying with Icons of the Virgin, p. xv.