I hate tomatoes. Their thin skin, their oozy insides, the way they rub against your tongue, like something half-decayed. My little brother used to bite into them like apples, juice running down his chin. A communion of seeds and pulp. I recoiled. Each bite was accompanied by a cloying scent I learned to habitually dread. Summer after summer, growing fat and overripe in my grandparent’s backyard; the world’s most prolific tomato behemoth arose from the mid-august dust. Preyed upon by glutinous chubby hands and paws alike, the gargantuan plant loomed over a faded statue. A nameless, bleached saint perched there, static, hands folded in eternal worship. The tomatoes swarmed, leaching his blood to color their bodies, their vines slowly swallowing him whole. 

With her all-knowing authority, my Latin-teacher grandmother christened it, planting a label in the dirt: Solanum lycopersicum. As if giving it a proper name would make it noble, something to be respected. I stubbornly refused. I hated that monstrous vine, its greedy offspring, the way it indiscriminately fed different generations of my family. It wanted nothing to do with me, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I watched my cousins bite into the fruit of its womb, slurping them straight from the cutting board, laughing as juice dripped red rivulets down their wrists. A horror show. A crime scene.

But it wasn’t just the backyard. Inside, tomatoes haunted me too. A framed print, hung on the wall just below my popcorn-ceiling sanctuary, its bold red letters screaming, TOMATO. Yellow and orange ink exploded on paper like a stained-glass window. I hated it, that flamboyant piece of art, belonging to my grandmother, a saint in her own right, I childishly avoided it. I hated how it followed me from the dirt outside to the walls inside. 

And yet, once on a first date, I ordered a tomato sandwich and ate every last disgusting, decaying bite. I chewed through the thin skin, the wet pulp, the seeds bleeding out onto the toasted bread. I felt cold, morbid. Like I was performing an autopsy on something that wasn’t freshly dead, maybe on myself, maybe on my faith. Maybe on my adolescent years spent being known, having my order memorized, my distaste laughed at, a fry stolen off my plate. Nauseated by the small vulnerability of being seen. I swallowed, swallowed, swallowed, choking down something I despised just to prove I could smile anonymously through it. 

It wasn’t until later, when I finally looked closer, when I finally went back home, that I saw the real message, hidden inside the A of that print. Mary Mother, the juiciest tomato of them all.

The juiciest tomato. Of them all.

I must have stared at it for an hour. Turned the words over in my mouth, slimy seeds stuck in my teeth. My grandmother had never explained it to me, or maybe I’d never cared to listen, but its artist was Corita Kent. A nun who painted like a pop princess, who turned Catholic iconography into neon billboards and silkscreened prayers. The woman who looked at Mary, the ultimate holy mother, and called her a tomato: ripe, luscious, full of life. A woman who taught at Immaculate Heart College in the 1960s, who sparked controversy within the Church, daring to probe tradition post-Vatican II.

My grandmother had gone to Immaculate Heart herself. She studied under nuns who were questioning their roles, yet still piously reciting vows of silence and submission. Kent and her sisters turned religion into something loud, something bright, something with teeth. Sister Corita wasn’t just an artist; she was an activist, repurposing ad slogans and scripture, making faith urgent, radical, alive. She worked with Dr. King, designing posters to raise funds for the civil rights movement. In 1965, she created My People, responding to the Watts Rebellion with Langston Hughes’ statement  ‘Let America Be America Again’—a far cry from the red slogan that now haunts us. She believed in joy over obedience, activism over complacency, the kind of faith that didn’t sit still and wait for institutional approval. Her teachings, absorbed by my grandmother, defused down my family tree. A kind of social consciousness osmosis. 

And that phrase, her phrase, tucked inside the “A”– such a scandal it caused! The Church didn’t know what to do with it. Calling Mary a tomato, as if she were something to be eaten, something to be tasted, something bursting with juice and seeds and want. As if she were more than just a portrait in blue robes, more than the delicate figure in Nativity scenes, more than the unreachable icon of purity that women and mothers were supposed to aspire to. The Church had spent centuries insisting that Mary belonged on a cathedral pillar, untouched. Kent pulled her down and made her flesh. Gave her ripeness, gave her sensuality. She turned Mary into something not just digestible, but oh so edible.

And the Church, of course, was outraged.

I think about Kent a lot now. About how she used her color and shape to provoke the rules, how she forced change. She didn’t shrink. She painted her own gospel. She tore open the idea of Mary the way you cut open a tomato, letting all her messy insides spill out. Because that’s the thing, the Catholic Church had always kept Mary sealed tight, a fruit never bitten into, a woman never touched. But Kent saw through that. Saw that holiness and desire weren’t opposites. That devotion and autonomy could exist in the same body. That a woman, even a woman anointed by God, could be both sacred and sensual.

I wonder what Kent would think now, if she could see how little has changed, what rules are still being written, how our bodies are still being debated, not fully belonging to us. I wonder if she would laugh at the way her virginal tomato still stains the white linen of tradition, no matter how many times they try to scrub it away.

Though I still hate tomatoes, they now taste like begrudging respect — a vessel for more bearable summer horizons. Ripe with both life and decay, I let them, like everything else I once dreaded, soften into something more palatable, something that, despite myself, belongs to me. Their vine no longer swarms or leeches. Instead, in a quiet unfolding, its fruit—once a sacrament to be avoided— now rests before me. An offering. Both of us sitting, static, waiting to be cut open and consumed.