Poetry – Art & Theology

Roundup: Stained glass by Kerry James Marshall, “Still I Rise” choreography, Black Liturgies, and more

February 5, 2026February 5, 2026 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

February is Black History Month, and while I endeavor to showcase Black art year-round, today’s post gives it dedicated attention.

VIDEO: “Kerry James Marshall, Now and Forever; Elizabeth Alexander, ‘American Song,’ Washington National Cathedral,” Smarthistory, January 22, 2024: Art historian Beth Harris and Kevin Eckstrom, former chief public affairs officer of Washington National Cathedral, explore the latest artwork to be permanently installed in the US capital’s “house of prayer for all people”: two Now and Forever stained glass windows by Kerry James Marshall, depicting a march for racial justice. Unveiled on September 23, 2023, these replace windows that memorialized Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which had been donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and installed in 1953. (For my international readers: The Confederacy was a group of eleven Southern US states that seceded from the Union in 1860 and 1861 to preserve the institution of race-based chattel slavery on which their plantation economies relied; its government was dissolved in 1865 following the end of the Civil War, but its legacy continued.)

In 2015, when a white supremacist, who touted the Confederate flag as symbolic of his ideology, murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, Washington National Cathedral’s dean at the time, the Very Rev. Gary Hall, called for the removal of the Lee-Jackson windows, which initiated a two-year discernment process involving ample community discussions. The cathedral finally took down the windows in 2017 following a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that claimed yet another life. The Very Rev. Randolph Hollerith, then the dean, said the windows “were a barrier to our mission, and an impediment to worship in this place.” Their removal and the installation of the Now and Forever windows in their place were funded by private foundations.

Marshall, Kerry James_Now and Forever — Kerry James Marshall (American, 1955–), *Now and Forever*, 2023. Fabricated by Andrew Goldkuhle. Stained glass windows, south outer aisle, bay 7, Washington National Cathedral, Washington, DC. Photo: Steven Zucker.

“American Song” by Elizabeth Alexander, commissioned by Washington National Cathedral and inscribed below Kerry James Marshall’s Now and Forever windows in bay 7. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.

In addition to commissioning Marshall to design new windows, the cathedral commissioned the Pulitzer-nominated poet Elizabeth Alexander, who wrote and read “Praise Song for the Day” for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, to write a poem for this occasion. Titled “American Song,” it is inscribed on two limestone tablets beneath Marshall’s windows. The Windows Replacement Committee gave both artists this assignment:

We seek to tell a story of resilience, endurance, and courage that gives meaning and expression to the long and arduous plight of the African American, from slavery to freedom, from alienation to the hope of reconciliation, through physical and spiritual regeneration, as we move from the past to present day. The artist will capture both darkness and light, both the pain of yesterday and the promise of tomorrow, as well as the quiet and exemplary dignity of the African American struggle for justice and equality and the indelible and progressive impact it has had on American society. Each artist should respond in his or her own creative way to these ideals and aspirations, framing both the earthly and the divine, within the sacred space of the Washington National Cathedral.

When I was there last year, I asked the guide why the signs the figures hold don’t bear any of the more familiar slogans of our historical moment, such as “Black Lives Matter.” She said the artist deliberately did not want to tether the protest to a particular time period, in order to emphasize that the struggle for racial equality is ongoing. “Fairness,” “No Foul Play,” “No,” “Not”—these are expressions of demand and defiance that could apply to a number of justice-related issues and that encompass people of all races.

Learn more at https://cathedral.org/college/windows/.

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DANCE: “Still I Rise,” choreographed by Sean Cheesman: I really miss the TV show So You Think You Can Dance, which had aspiring dancers train across genres—contemporary, hip-hop, ballroom, jazz, etc.—with renowned choreographers, performing to compete for the title of “America’s favorite dancer.” It was entertaining, impressive (the athleticism!), and often moving. Here’s a contemporary routine choreographed by Sean Cheesman to spoken word artist Alexis Henry’s reading of a classic poem by Maya Angelou about Black strength and defiance. It’s danced by Koine “Koko” Iwasaki, Kiki Nyemchek, Taylor Sieve, and Mark Villaver. It’s from season 14, episode 12, which aired September 4, 2017.

(Another memorable Cheesman-choreographed dance from season 14 is an African jazz duet to Sheila Chandra’s “Speaking in Tongues II,” which unfortunately, I cannot find online.)

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ARTICLE: “Stephen Towns’ Quilted Works Emphasize Black Joy as Resistance in ‘Safer Waters’” by Kate Mothes: Through June 14, the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas is hosting the exhibition Safer Waters: Picturing Black Recreation at Midcentury, featuring eleven quilts and six paintings by the Baltimore-based artist Stephen Towns [previously]. Black history has always been an important aspect of Towns’s work, and in this series he was inspired by historic photographs (by Bruce Mozert) of Paradise Park, a segregated attraction in Silver Springs, Florida, that operated from 1949 to 1969 and that was popular among Black vacationers, providing a space for leisure and togetherness away from Jim Crow.

Towns, Stephen_All We Knew Was Joy — Stephen Towns (American, 1980–), *All We Knew Was Joy*, 2025. Natural and synthetic fabric, polyester and cotton thread, cubic zirconia, glass beads, and shell, 55 × 65 1/2 in.

Towns began his Paradise Park series in 2022 after reading Remembering Paradise Park by Cynthia Wilson-Graham and Lu Vickers, and this show is a continuation of it, for which he made seven new quilts (pictured in Mothes’s article). His art is displayed alongside some of Mozert’s photographs and related objects from Florida archives and collectors. See an exhibition walk-through on the artist’s Instagram page; see also photos from the opening on January 16–17.

Here is a short 2024 interview with Towns about this body of work, as presented at the earlier exhibition Private Paradise: A Figurative Exploration of Black Rest and Recreation at the Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York:

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SONGS:

Gospel music is one of the many gifts the Black church has given the world. Here are two songs from that distinctive choral tradition.

>> “Perfect Praise (How Excellent)” by Brenda Joyce Moore, performed by the Sunday Service Choir: Written in 1989 based on Psalm 8, this song gained recognition through its performance on the 1990 album This Is the Day by Walt Whitman and the Soul Children of Chicago, featuring Lecresia Campbell. It has since become a gospel choir standard, though often with the lead vocals eliminated (and that part taken by the full choir). It’s performed in this video by Sunday Service at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris on March 1, 2020.

>> “He’s a Wonder” by Jamel Garner, performed by the Chicago Mass Choir, feat. Cornelius Owens: This song about Jesus’s miracles is from the Chicago Mass Choir’s 2024 album Greater Is Coming.

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PODCAST EPISODES:

>> “Artist Archetypes with Jakari Sherman,” Be. Make. Do., January 21, 2025: I really enjoyed this conversation with Jakari Sherman on the soul|makers podcast hosted by Rev. Lisa Cole Smith, where he describes his journey as an artist and a believer. Sherman is a choreographer within the tradition of stepping, a percussive dance practice in which dancers use primarily their hands and feet to create music. Stepping comes from the African American Greek letter organizations and has roots, Sherman explains, in the antebellum South, where enslaved people had their drums taken away and thus had to find ways to express the rhythms they felt using just the floor and their own bodies. (Tap evolved largely for the same reason.)

Sherman is the creative director of [Jk]creativ, a multidisciplinary company developing purpose-driven and truth-seeking cultural works. From 2007 to 2014 he served as the artistic director of Step Afrika! and has continued to develop and direct works for them, such as Drumfolk and The Migration (which I saw in 2024 and was excellent). To establish a foundation for his scholarly research on the history of stepping, he completed a master of arts program in ethnochoreology at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance in 2015. Below is a trailer for one of Sherman’s latest works, Our Road Home, an interactive rhythmic production that meditates “on what is means to find freedom—and to live it fully in body, soul, and spirit”; it premiered last June as part of a year-long collaboration with the Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy.

>> “Cole Arthur Riley – Black Liturgies,” Nomad, February 9, 2024: Tim Nash interviews Cole Arthur Riley, the best-selling author of Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human (which grew out of her popular Instagram account @blackliturgies) and This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us. She is a wise, feeling, richly spiritual and embodied writer and speaker whose work I’ve appreciated. In this conversation she discusses her hang-ups with the Book of Common Prayer; battling chronic illness; balancing the active and contemplative lives; the revival of lament; self-sacrifice versus self-care; her experience of white people engaging with her work (“I like to think that there’s something mysterious that’s healed in us when we encounter each other’s interior worlds; when we hear words written by a Black woman toward God, that that could somehow move someone in some way, and move us closer to each other”); and what hope means to her and where she sees signs of it.

Even though I, as a white person, am not the intended audience for the book Black Liturgies, in reading it, I found it meaningful to listen to the cries of Riley’s heart. While many of the prayers are particular to the experience of being Black, still many others are general enough that they could be prayed by anyone. Part 1, organized thematically, consists of chapters such as “Dignity,” “Wonder,” “Doubt,” “Lament,” “Rage,” and “Rest,” whereas part 2 contains prayers for dawn, day, and dusk as well as for the liturgical year, secular holidays, and life occasions. I like the names for God with which she opens each prayer—e.g., “God of the shadows,” “God who expands,” “Divine Labyrinth,” “God aware,” “God of locked doors,” “God who reclaims,” “God our home,” “God of delight,” “God of the art that will never be seen,” “God who whispers”; it has prompted me to consider the names and descriptions I use for God and how they influence how I pray.

To give you a flavor of Black Liturgies, here are two prayers from the book (and note that prayers are only one component; also included are letters, quotes, questions for contemplation, confessions and assurances of pardon, and benedictions):

For Marveling at Your Own Face

God of the flesh,
When we consider what is worthy of our wonder, it is easy to forget our own faces, our bodies. The world is relentless in indoctrinating us into self-hatred—into anti-Blackness, into transphobia, into misogyny in all forms. We are slowly and steadily brainwashed to despise our own faces from the time we’re tall enough to stare up at ourselves in the mirror. How can we resist this? Let the tyranny of the mirror be no more. May it instead become a portal—to delight, to pleasure, and to love. These noses, these hips, the way our hair rises and falls. The memories etched into our hands and faces. Remind us of the miracle of flesh that grows back, of blood that pulses warm beneath the skin that holds us. Of bodies, these holy beautiful bodies, that are working a thousand unseen miracles just so that we can read these lines, breathe this air, cry or not cry. As we peer into the face before us, remind us that we are something to behold. We believe; forgive our unbelief. Ase.

For Those Who Doomscroll

Still God,
We confess that we are addicted to pessimism. Although we rarely name it as such, so much of our attention is devoted to negativity. Show us how we use technology to soothe and stir the aches in us. Keep us from turning control over to our anxiety, that it would no longer feed itself with news of tragedy and impending disaster. It is easy to become lost, buried in the quicksand of digital catastrophe. Draw our attention upward. Guide us to look away habitually; and not just away, but up at the sky, the grass, the table. Guide us inward as well. Acquaint us with goodness again. In the world, and in ourselves. Let us follow the children, freed from the grip of seriousness. Renew our playfulness. Lead us into wise rhythms of engagement, retreating to rest and breathe. Remind us that there is much the world needs, including our attention to atrocity—but if we watch the world burn for long enough, the fire will become our only reality. Amen.

“Unfinished” by Nellie deVries (poem)

February 2, 2026February 3, 2026 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

Rembrandt_Simeon in the Temple — Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669), *Simeon in the Temple*, 1669. Oil on canvas, 98.5 × 79.5 cm. Nationalmuseum Stockholm, Sweden. Photo: Erik Cornelius.

after Simeon in the Temple, 
Rembrandt, 1669

Fingers stretch
as if supplicating hands
are interrupted—
the answer placed
in his waiting arms.

Light glistens on his temple—
the mind consoled
by consolation’s burden.

Death takes the prophet;
takes the artist
before his painting is complete;
takes the one
already bearing sin’s stripes.

So certain are the words
“It is finished.”

Originally published in the anthology Adam, Eve, and the Riders of the Apocalypse: 39 Contemporary Poets on the Characters of the Bible, edited by D. S. Martin (Cascade, 2017). Used by permission of the poet.

Nellie deVries is a retired nurse and a poet from Michigan. Her debut book of poetry is forthcoming from Wipf & Stock in 2026.

Roundup: Lament songs, Inkwell poetry booklet, and more

January 30, 2026January 30, 2026 Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: February 2026 (Art & Theology): An assortment of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, old and new.

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CONFERENCE: The Breath and the Clay: Exploring the Intersections of Art, Faith, and Culture, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, March 20–22, 2026: “Before the first word is spoken, before the brush touches the canvas or the note strikes the air, there is silence. Creation begins with a clearing, making space for new worlds to exist. An empty chair waits in welcome, an empty forest beckons us to come aside. Even absence itself becomes an opening for presence.

“At The Breath & The Clay 2026, we are exploring what it means to make space—for rest, for renewal, for art, for one another, and for the Presence that meets us in the emptiness. Together, we will practice making room: for the unfinished, and the unfurnished, for the overlooked, for voices not our own. In this space, we will make art—our response to the silence that precedes creation, our offering to the mystery and miracle that ever calls us onward.”

This annual gathering features presenters from across the disciplines of poetry, music, visual art, theater, film, dance, creativity coaching, and real estate development. General admission is $299.

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PRAYER: “Prayers in a Time of Tyranny, Injustice, and Violence”: From Christ Our Advocate, a C4SO Anglican church plant in Wheaton, Illinois, led by Rev. Dr. Emily McGowin, Rev. Ron McGowin, and Rev. Aaron Harrison. Lord, have mercy. [HT: Global Christian Worship]

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SONGS:

>> “How Long (A Christian Lament)” by IAMSON: This week the Richmond, Virginia–based singer-songwriter IAMSON (the artist name of Orlando Palmer) wrote his pain into a song and shared it on social media. “I challenge all Christian artists to write about what’s really going on,” he says, likely referring to the two murders committed this month by US federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and, more broadly, the agencies’ hypermilitarized tactics, indiscriminate raids, illegal detainments, and terrorizing of communities in deference to President Trump’s mass deportation initiative.

>> “Psalm 10” by Poor Bishop Hooper: Poor Bishop Hooper (Leah and Jesse Roberts) have set all 150 psalms of the Bible to music. Psalm 10 is one I had not ever heard a musical interpretation of. Belonging to the genre of lament, it opens:

Why, O LORD, do you stand far off?
Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?
In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor—
let them be caught in the schemes they have devised.

>> “Micah 6:8” by Monroe Crossing: Monroe Crossing [previously] is a Minnesota bluegrass band whose members are Lisa Fuglie (fiddle), David Robinson (banjo), Derek Johnson (guitar), Matt Thompson (mandolin), and Mark Anderson (bass). This is a song Fuglie and Anderson wrote in 2011 inspired by Micah 6:8, one of this coming Sunday’s lectionary readings: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” Many Christians hold on to this as a “life verse,” a summation of God’s values that serves as a guiding principle.

You can preview the score here, and purchase it here.

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FREE DIGITAL POETRY BOOKLET: Inkwell Poetry for the New Year (2026): Last week Inkwell (formerly Ekstasis), a publication of Christianity Today, released a collection of twenty poems curated by guest editor J. C. Scharl, and it’s excellent! “A storytelling community seeking transcendence,” Inkwell is in a period of refining their identity, and this offering is a sort of stopgap until they reintroduce poetry features into their editorial flow. (Right now they’re focusing on creative nonfiction.)

“¿Qué tengo yo?” by Lope de Vega: Jesus knocking on the door of the heart

January 26, 2026January 29, 2026 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

“Knocking on the Door,” woodcut from *Von der ynnigen selen wy sy gott casteyet vnnd im beheglich mach*, aka *Christus und die minnende Seele* (Christ and the Loving Soul), published in Erfurt, Germany, ca. 1500. Museum Otto Schäfer, Schweinfurt, Germany, OS 231, fol. 5v. Digitized by Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

“Sonnet XVIII” by Lope de Vega

¿Qué tengo yo que mi amistad procuras?
¿Qué interés se te sigue, Jesús mío,
que a mi puerta cubierto de rocío
pasas las noches del invierno escuras?

¡Oh, cuánto fueron mis entrañas duras
pues no te abrí! ¡Qué extraño desvarío
si de mi ingratitud el hielo frío
secó las llagas de tus plantas puras!

¡Cuántas veces el ángel me decía:
«¡Alma, asómate agora a la ventana,
verás con cuánto amor llamar porfía!»
¡Y cuántas, hermosura soberana,
«Mañana le abriremos» – respondía,
para lo mismo responder mañana!

From Rimas sacras (Sacred Rhymes) by Lope de Vega (Madrid, 1614). Public domain.

Lope de Vega (1562–1635) was as astoundingly prolific Spanish playwright, poet, and novelist who was a key figure in the Spanish Golden Age of Baroque literature. His 1,800-some plays encompass the categories of religious, mythological, historical, pastoral, chivalric, and comedies of manners. A known philanderer, Lope had multiple love affairs throughout his life; besides the four children he had from his two wives, he also had at least ten more by his mistresses. The death of his son in 1612, and then of his lover the following year, threw him into an existential crisis, and he turned toward religion, even joining the Catholic priesthood in 1614—but that path didn’t lead to the personal reform he had thought he wanted, as he continued his womanizing. He died of scarlet fever at age seventy-two.

Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Lord, what am I, that with unceasing care
     Thou didst seek after me, that thou didst wait,
     Wet with unhealthy dews, before my gate,
And pass the gloomy nights of winter there?

Oh, strange delusion, that I did not greet
     Thy blest approach! and oh, to heaven how lost,
     If my ingratitude’s unkindly frost
Has chilled the bleeding wounds upon thy feet!

How oft my guardian angel gently cried,
     “Soul, from thy casement look, and thou shalt see
     How he persists to knock and wait for thee!”
          And oh, how often to that voice of sorrow,
“Tomorrow we will open,” I replied,
          And when the morrow came I answered still, “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” from Coplas de Don Jorge Manrique, translated from the Spanish; with an Introductory Essay on the Moral and Devotional Poetry of Spain by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston, 1833). Public domain.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was an American poet, educator, and linguist, best known for “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Song of Hiawatha.” From 1829 to 1854, he was a professor of modern languages, first at Bowdoin College, his alma mater, and then at Harvard University. Though rooted in New England, he traveled extensively in Europe and was proficient in—besides his native English—Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and Polish, as well as Latin and Greek. He frequently translated poetry from those languages into English, his most influential translation being of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which brought that work to a wider English-speaking audience.

Translated by Geoffrey Hill

Based on the prose translation by J. M. Cohen in The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse, 3rd ed. (Penguin, 1988)

What is there in my heart that you should sue
so fiercely for its love? What kind of care
brings you as though a stranger to my door
through the long night and in the icy dew

seeking the heart that will not harbour you,
that keeps itself religiously secure?
At this dark solstice filled with frost and fire
your passion’s ancient wounds must bleed anew.

So many nights the angel of my house
has fed such urgent comfort through a dream,
whispered ‘your lord is coming, he is close’
that I have drowsed half-faithful for a time
bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse:
‘tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him.’

“Lachrimae Amantis” (Tears of the Lover), from the sonnet sequence “Lachrimae: Or, Seven Tears Figured in Seven Passionate Pavans” in Tenebrae by Geoffrey Hill (André Deutsch, 1978); compiled in Broken Hierarchies: Poems, 1952–2012 (Oxford University Press, 2014). Copyright © The Estate of Geoffrey Hill. Reproduced with permission of the licensor through PLSclear.

Sir Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was an English poet and literary critic who is recognized as a principal contributor to those fields in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He was a Christian. From 1988 to 2006, he lived in the United States, where he taught literature and religion at Boston University, but throughout his career he also had professorships at Oxford, Leeds, and Cambridge. “Hill’s poetry is known for its barbed humor, personal intensity, and deep interests in culture, history, and religion,” Poets.org states, and for being dense and intellectually rigorous.

The eighteenth sonnet from Lope de Vega’s Rimas sacras—reproduced above in its original Spanish and in two English translations—portrays Jesus as a lover, knocking tenaciously to be let into his beloved’s heart. He stands outside at night in the cold, a coldness matched by the beloved’s indifference, for she says, “I’ll open tomorrow,” but then keeps putting off that promise to the next day and the next . . .

“The poet marvels at the persistence of divine love in the face of human ingratitude,” writes Colin Thompson in his journal article “‘The Resonances of Words’: Lope de Vega and Geoffrey Hill.” Lope mines the paradox of fiery passion and icy rejection, Thompson says, “pressing . . . the traditional language of Petrarchan and courtly love into the service of spiritual love.”

Lope derived the conceit of “¿Qué tengo yo?” from two biblical passages: one in the Old Testament and one in the New. Part of an ancient Hebrew erotic love poem, the first is Song of Solomon 5:2–6, in which a woman narrates how, lying in bed one night, she hears her lover’s call outside, but she waits too long to answer, for when she rises to open the door, he has gone:

I was sleeping, but my heart was awake.
The sound of my beloved knocking!
“Open to me, my sister, my love,
    my dove, my perfect one,
for my head is wet with dew,
    my locks with the drops of the night.”

I had put off my garment;
    how could I put it on again?
I had bathed my feet;
    how could I soil them?
My beloved thrust his hand into the opening,
    and my inmost being yearned for him.

I arose to open to my beloved,
    and my hands dripped with myrrh,
my fingers with liquid myrrh,
    upon the handles of the bolt.
I opened to my beloved,
    but my beloved had turned away and was gone.
My soul failed me when he spoke.
I sought him but did not find him;
    I called him, but he gave no answer.

Chapter 3, verse 20 of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, implicitly references this passage. Christ exclaims to the church in Laodicea, “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.” The extrapolation of the Song of Solomon romance to the relationship between Christ and the church, allegorized as his bride, would become common in early Christian biblical interpretation.

(Related post: “Undo thy door, my spouse dear”)

In his poem, Lope was also likely drawing on Augustine, a fourth- and fifth-century church father he is known to have read. In a famous passage from book 8 of his Confessions, Augustine describes how he initially responded to Christ’s wooing with indecisiveness:

I had no answer to make to you when you called me: Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. And, while you showed me, wherever I looked, that what you said was true, I, convinced by the truth, could still find nothing to say except lazy words spoken half asleep: “A minute,” “just a minute,” “just a little time longer.” But there was no limit to the minutes, and the little time longer went a long way. (trans. Rex Warner)

Augustine’s conversion to Christianity was a slow one because of his slothful will. Many modern readers find that they relate to him in this—procrastinating making a faith decision because of force of habit and resistance to change. We worry what a commitment to Christ would demand of us, and it’s easier to just continue living for ourselves. So we settle for the status quo. Geoffrey Hill, in his translation of Lope, describes “the heart . . . / that keeps itself religiously secure,” punning on “religiously,” which in this case means “fervently, zealously”: the heart that, unwilling to be vulnerable, not daring to love and be loved, keeps itself closed to Christ.

Besides these biblical and patristic influences on Lope’s poem, Rafael Lapesa, in his 1977 book Poetas y prosistas de ayer y de hoy (Poets and Prose Writers of Yesterday and Today), identifies another: De los nombres de Cristo (The Names of Christ) by the Spanish Augustinian friar Luis de León, a masterpiece of Renaissance philosophical and theological thought first published in 1583. The “Pastor” (Shepherd) section in book 1 reads in part:

Madruga, digo antes que amanezca se levanta; o, por decir verdad, no duerme ni reposa, sino, asido siempre al aldaba de nuestro corazón, de contino y a todas horas le hiere y le dice, como en los Cantares se escribe: Abreme, hermana mia, Amiga mia, Esposa mia, abreme; que la cabeza traigo llena de rocio, y las guedejas de mis cabellos llenas de gotas de la noche.

He [Christ] rises early, I say; before dawn he rises. Or, to tell the truth, he neither sleeps nor rests but, always clinging to the knocker of our heart, continually and at all hours strikes it and says to it, as it is written in the Song of Songs: “Open to me, my sister, my love, my bride, open to me; for my head is covered with dew, and the locks of my hair are full of drops of the night.” (my translation)

Lope eulogized Luis in his seven-thousand-line Laurel de Apolo (1630) and clearly admired him.

The “Christ as lover” trope appears copiously in Christian literature, and Lope de Vega is but one poet who developed it, engaging it from a personal, confessional angle. Written right after his return to Christianity—after he finally opened the door to Christ—his “Sonnet XVIII” looks back on the many years he spent ignoring Christ’s entreaties so that he could pursue various lusts, which he would continue to struggle with for the rest of his life. He expresses wonder that Christ would love someone like him, and be so steadfast in his knocking. Unlike the knocking lover in the Song of Solomon, Christ stood before Lope’s door until Lope answered at last, “Come in.”

Excerpt from Within and Without by George MacDonald (poem)

January 1, 2026January 2, 2026 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

Stella, Joseph_Nativity — Joseph Stella (American, 1877–1946), *Nativity*, 1919–20. Oil pastel and oil on paper, 37 × 19 5/16 in. (94 × 49.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]

Julian’s room. Christmas Day; early morn.

JULIAN. The light comes feebly, slowly, to the world
On this one day that blesses all the year,
Just as it comes on any other day:
A feeble child He came, yet not the less
Brought godlike childhood to the aged earth,
Where nothing now is common anymore.
All things hitherto proclaimed God:
The wide-spread air; the luminous mist that hid
The far horizon of the fading sea;
The low persistent music evermore
Flung down upon the sands, and at the base
Of the great rocks that hold it as a cup . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But men heard not, they knew not God in these[.]
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But when He came in poverty, and low,
A real man to half-unreal men,
A man whose human thoughts were all divine,
The head and upturned face of humankind—
Then God shone forth from all the lowly earth,
And men began to read their Maker there.
Now the Divine descends, pervading all.
Earth is no more a banishment from heaven,
But a lone field among the distant hills,
Well ploughed and sown, whence corn is gathered home.
Now, now we feel the holy mystery
That permeates all being: all is God’s;
And my poor life is terribly sublime.
Where’er I look, I am alone in God,
As this round world is wrapt in folding space;
Behind, before, begin and end in Him:
So all beginnings and all ends are hid;
And He is hid in me, and I in Him.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
O centre of all forms! O concord’s home!
O world alive in one condensèd world!
O face of Him, in whose heart lay concealed
The fountain thought of all this kingdom of heaven!
Lord, Thou art infinite, and I am Thine!
        I sought my God; I pressed importunate;
I spoke to Him, I cried, and in my heart
It seemed He answered me. I said, “O, take
Me nigh to Thee, Thou mighty life of life!
I faint, I die; I am a child alone
’Mid the wild storm, the brooding desert night.”
        “Go thou, poor child, to Him who once, like thee,
Trod the highways and deserts of the world.”
        “Thou sendest me then, wretched, from Thy sight!
Thou wilt not have me—I am not worth Thy care!”
        “I send thee not away; child, think not so;
From the cloud resting on the mountain peak,
I call to guide thee in the path by which
Thou mayst come soonest home unto my heart.
I, I am leading thee. Think not of Him
As He were one and I were one; in Him
Thou wilt find me, for He and I are one.
Learn thou to worship at his lowly shrine,
And see that God dwelleth in lowliness.”

This passage is excerpted from part 3, scene 10 of Within and Without: A Dramatic Poem by George MacDonald, a verse play that, in 1855, was the author’s first published work.

George MacDonald (1824–1905) was a prolific Scottish writer across the genres of adult and children’s fantasy, realistic fiction, theology, poetry, and literary essay. He was the founding father of modern fantasy literature (Phantastes, The Princess and the Goblin, At the Back of the North Wind, and Lilith and his best-known works), a mentor to fellow writer Lewis Carroll (he was a catalyst to Carroll’s publishing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), and a great influence on C. S. Lewis (who cites his writings as instrumental in his conversion to Christianity). MacDonald served for a few years as a Congregational minister, but his preaching about God’s universal love and the ultimate salvation of all (apokatastasis) rubbed against the staunchly Calvinist grain of his time and place; after resigning his pastoral post in Arundel, England, he continued preaching without pay as a layman, as well as weaving his theological views into his fiction.

Christmas, Day 3: Stupendous Stranger

December 27, 2025 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

LOOK: The Nativity by Gerard David

David, Gerard_Nativity — Gerard David (Netherlandish, ca. 1455–1523), *The Nativity*, early 1480s. Oil on wood, 18 3/4 × 13 1/2 in. (47.6 × 34.3 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

LISTEN: “Where Is This Stupendous Stranger” | Words by Christopher Smart, 1765 | Music by Linda L. Hanson, 2012 | Performed by Fire (women’s a cappella chamber ensemble), 2020

Where is this stupendous Stranger?
Prophets, shepherds, kings, advise!
Lead me to my Master’s manger,
Show me where my Savior lies.

O most mighty, O most holy,
Far beyond the seraph’s thought,
Are you then so mean and lowly
As unheeded prophets taught?

O the magnitude of meekness,
Worth from worth immortal sprung!
O the strength of infant weakness,
If eternal is so young!

God all-bounteous, all-creative,
Whom no ills from good dissuade,
You have come to be a native
Of the very world you made.

The four verses of this Christmas hymn are excerpted from a nine-stanza poem by Christopher Smart [previously] published in Hymns and Spiritual Songs for the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England (London, 1765). The poem was recovered in the twentieth century and since then has received multiple new musical settings—by composers such as I-to Loh, Charles Heaton, Conrad Susa, Joan A. Fyock, Leo Nestor, Alec Wyton, Thomas Gibbs Jr., Scott M. Hyslop, and Jacques Cohen—as well as pairings with older tunes.

My favorite setting of the text is by Linda L. Hanson, the founding director of Fire, a women’s a cappella chamber ensemble in Charlottesville, Virginia. The group performs the hymn in the video above, which Fire member Mary Welby von Thelen spliced together from thirteen solitary recordings during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hanson is in the top row, the third from the left.

The alliterative opening line of the hymn asks where the “stupendous Stranger” can be found—the divine one sent from heaven. Stupendous isn’t an adjective we use often. It means “causing astonishment or wonder: awesome, marvelous.” The poetic speaker begs the prophets, shepherds, and magi to divulge the location of the Christ child so that he can go and worship him.

The next two stanzas marvel at the paradoxes of the Incarnation—how Christ is “mighty” and “holy,” beyond the comprehension of even the angels, and yet “mean” (humble) and “lowly,” lying here in the dirt before us, visible, tangible, vulnerable, no longer far above us but in our very midst. What “magnitude of meekness,” what “strength of infant weakness.” The eternal one is born in time.

The omnibenevolent Creator has deigned to become part of his creation. No potential ill that he will suffer as a result—and he will suffer many and grievous ills, culminating in death by crucifixion—can deter him from making his beloved earth his home.

Hanson has generously allowed me to share the sheet music of “Where Is This Stupendous Stranger,” and says the hymn can be freely used by local church congregations. Anything outside that context will require her permission.

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“Those Who Saw the Star” by Julia Esquivel (poem)

December 18, 2025December 19, 2025 Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

Sanchez Cerron, Josue_Christmas in the Andes — Josué Sánchez Cerrón (Peruvian, 1945–), *Navidad en los Andes* (Christmas in the Andes)

The Word, for our sake, became poverty clothed as the poor who live off the refuse heap.

The Word, for our sake, became agony in the shrunken breast of the woman grown old by the absence of her murdered husband.

The Word, for our sake, became a sob a thousand times stifled in the immovable mouth of the child who died from hunger.

The Word, for our sake, became rebellion before the lifeless body of Gaspar Sanchez Toma, “scientifically” murdered.

The Word, for our sake, became danger in the anguish of the mother who worries about her son growing into manhood.

The Word became an ever-present absence among the 70,000 families torn apart by death.

The Word, for our sake, became an inexorable accusation arising from the blazing craters which swallowed up their tortured bodies.

The word-knife cut us deeply in that place of shame: the painful reality of the poor.

The Word blew its spirit over the dried bones of the Mummified-Churches, guardians of silence.

The Word, that early-morning-bugle, awoke us from the lethargy which had robbed us of our Hope.

The Word became a path in the jungle, a decision on the farm, love in women, unity among workers,
and a Star for those few who can inspire dreams.

The Word became Light,
The Word became History,
The Word became Conflict,
The Word became Indomitable Spirit,
and sowed its seeds
upon the mountain,
near the river, and in the valley,

and those-of-good-will heard the angels sing.

Tired knees were strengthened,
trembling hands were stilled,
and the people who wandered in darkness
saw the light!

Then,

The Word became flesh in a nation-pregnant-with-freedom,
The Spirit strengthened the arms which forged Hope,
The Verb became flesh in the people who perceived a new day, and for our sake became life in Mary and Joseph who embrace Righteousness and bury the people’s ignominy.

The Word became the seed-of-justice
and we conceived peace.

The Word cried out to the world the truth about the struggle against the anti-man.

The Word made justice to rain
and peace came forth from the furrows in the land.

And we saw its glory in the eyes of the poor converted into true men and women.

Grace and Truth celebrated together
in the laughter of the children rescued by life.

And those-who-saw-the-star
opened up for us
the path we now follow.

Meanwhile,
Herod, slowly dying,
is eaten by worms.

The Word became judgment
and the anti-men ground their teeth.

The Word became forgiveness
and human hearts
learned to beat with love.

And the Word shall continue sowing futures
in the furrows of Hope.

And on the horizon,
the Word made light
invited us to relive a thousand dawns
toward the Kingdom that comes.

The Word will gather us round her table.
And they will come from the East and the West,
from the North and the South,
and dressed in incorruption
we-will-finally-be-happy.

Translated from the Spanish by Maria Elena Acevedo, René Calderón, Maria Elena Caracheo, Sister Caridad Inda, and Philip Wheaton in the bilingual Threatened with Resurrection / Amenazado de Resurreción: Prayers and Poems from an Exiled Guatemalan (The Brethren Press, 1982).

Julia Esquivel (1930–2019) was a Guatemalan poet, theologian, lay preacher, biblical studies teacher, social worker, and human rights activist. In 1953 she moved to Costa Rica to study at the Seminario Biblico Latinoamericano, returning to Guatemala to work at the Instituto Evangélico América Latina. After speaking out against the massacres, assassinations, torture, and forced disappearances being carried out by the Guatemalan military and police, she received death threats and survived two kidnapping attempts and thus went into forced exile in 1980, finding refuge in the monastic Communauté de Grandchamp in Switzerland. She studied at the Ecumenical Institute at Château de Bossey, run by the World Council of Churches. She returned to her home country in 1996 after the signing of the Peace Accords, helping document over two hundred thousand civilian deaths and disappearances for the Recovery of Historical Memory Project and working with women traumatized by violence. She is the author of several books, including the poetry collections Threatened with Resurrection (1982) and The Certainty of Spring (1993).

Roundup: Theological spinoff of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” Advent art with Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt, and four new Christmas song recordings

December 16, 2025January 29, 2026 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

POEM SERIES: “Twelve Days of Advent” by Kate Bluett: This year on her blog, writer Kate Bluett [previously] is publishing a series of original metrical verses based loosely on the cumulative song “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” She calls it the Twelve Days of Advent and through it explores the theology of Christ’s coming. I love this creative, sacred spin on the popular seasonal ditty! Here’s where the series currently stands (my favorite poems are in boldface):

“A Partridge in a Pear Tree”: Bluett imagines, in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a bird singing (representing, as I take it, God’s word), but Adam and Eve heed not his song, and, taking the tree’s forbidden fruit, find themselves exiled. The bird weeps for the alienation of his two friends, and wings his way east of Eden, into the home of a young maiden, a daughter of Eve, who receives him, shelters him, an act that leads to restoration. Bluett uses some of the language of late medieval English folksong, such as “with a low, low, my love, my love” and “welaway.”
“Two Turtledoves”
“Three French Hens”
“Four Calling Birds”: This poem is brilliant. In it the four matriarchs in Jesus’s genealogy speak to Mary, tenderly calling her “Child” and rejoicing in her “bringing forth our life’s tomorrow.” Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba—they’ve long awaited redemption, and now they’re at its threshold. Mary’s yes to God’s call “set[s] [their] dry bones stirring, thrumming / with a hope [they’d] hardly dared.” They inform her that her vocation will involve great suffering (as we know, she’ll experience the brutal death of her son)—but her willingness to give up her son to the cross, to endure that rupture, will mean new life for the world.
“Five Gold Rings”
“Six Geese a-Laying”: Picking up the Isaianic language of the wilderness being made glad, the poetic speaker sings an eschatological vision of flocks coming home to “the orchard of the rood” (rood = cross) to lay and hatch eggs in nests once empty, now brimming with life.
“Seven Swans a-Swimming”

I eagerly await the remaining five poems!

Update, 12/23/25:

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SUBSTACK SERIES: “Art + Advent 2025” by Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt: The art historian Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt [previously], author of Redeeming Vision and the Loving Look Substack, is one of my favorite writers. This Advent she is writing a weekly series of art reflections centered on the themes of hope, peace, joy, and love.

>> “Week 1 // Hope: Abraham’s Oak and Sarah’s Laughter”: Looking at Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting Abraham’s Oak, Weichbrodt writes about shadowy promise. She also considers, with reference to an early Byzantine mosaic of the Hospitality of Abraham, how to hope again after being wounded, as Sarah did, is a vulnerable thing. “As Advent begins, I find myself peering into a Tanner-like mist, seeing the dim outline of longed-for goodness taking shape in the distance. Sometimes I’m full of hope, but I’m also, like Sarah, sometimes full of armored laughter.”

Tanner, Henry Ossawa_Abraham's Oak — Henry Ossawa Tanner (American, 1859–1937), *Abraham’s Oak*, 1905. Oil on canvas, 21 3/8 × 28 5/8 in. (54.4 × 72.8 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

>> “Week 2 // Peace: A Stitch Pulling Tight”: “How do we do repair work in a fraying world with our own, fraying selves? What thread can stitch together all these gaping wounds?” Weichbrodt asks. She looks at Mary Weatherford’s monumental painting Gloria (new to me!), finding in the hot coral neon light blazing across the canvas resonance with Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation, which portray the Light of the World as the stitch that mends the tear between God and humanity.

Weatherford, Mary_Gloria — Mary Weatherford (American, 1963–), *Gloria*, 2018. Flashe paint and neon on linen, 117 × 234 in. (297.2 × 594.4 cm). High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

>> “Week 3 // Joy: Far as the Curse Is Found”: In this post, Weichbrodt explores nine Visitation paintings and one extraordinary embroidery. “Every time I see [a Visitation artwork],” Weichbrodt writes, “I encounter joy. It’s not that Mary and Elizabeth are always smiling. Often, their expressions are quite serious. But joy—deep, sustained, sustaining joy—circulates between them like an electrical current.” Justice, threshold, and fecundity are among the supplementary themes touched on.

Visitation embroidery — *The Visitation*, England, first half of 17th century. Embroidery, 44.1 × 57 cm (framed). Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Weichbrodt’s final Advent 2025 post, on love, will be published this Saturday. Weichbrodt’s final Advent 2025 post, on love, will be published this Saturday. (Update, 12/20/25: Week 4’s post, “Love In Between,” is now published. It centers on Vincent van Gogh’s painting Almond Blossoms, a gift for his newborn nephew, but also spends time with a Nativity mosaic by Pietro Cavallini and a Nativity painting by Gerard David.)

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SONGS:

Here are four newly released Christmas songs of note: two originals, one lyrical adaptation of a classic, and a new arrangement.

>> “War on Christmas” by Seryn: Seryn’s new album is titled War on Christmas. Here’s the title track:

The refrain is:

There is a war on Christmas
But it’s not the one you think
It’s in the news, it’s out of mind
It happens overseas
Cause as we sing the hymns and songs
With families by our sides
There is a war on Christmas
Someone’s fighting to survive

“War on Christmas” is a phrase some Christian conservatives in the US use to express their feeling of having their faith traditions attacked by the sinister forces of pluralism when people or signage greet them with a generic “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” I roll my eyes big-time when I hear people complain about this, because it’s ridiculous for any American to assert that they are impeded from or ostracized for celebrating Christmas in this country, or to take offense that a stranger does not automatically assume their particular religious affiliation.

Seryn’s song affirms that yes, there is a war on Christmas—only it’s a war not against personal religious freedoms in America but against peace, love, and the other values Christ came to teach and embody. When humans wage literal wars with literal weapons, killing and maiming each other and inducing mass terror—that’s an assault against Christ’s mass, with its message of welcome and reconciliation. So, too, when we perpetuate hate, whether on personal, national, or global scales. As another Christmas song puts it, “Hate is strong and mocks the song of ‘Peace on earth, goodwill to men.’”

>> “O New Commingling! O Strange Conjunction!” by the Anachronists: The lyrics to this new song by the Anachronists [previously]—Corey Janz, Andrés Pérez González, and Jonathan Lipps—are a paraphrase from the sermon “On the Theophany, or Birthday of Christ” by Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 329–390), one of the most influential and poetic theologians of the early church. Gregory delivered the sermon, labeled “Oration 38” in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, at Christmastime in 380 in Constantinople, where he served as bishop. In section 13, the Anachronists’ source for the song, he expresses awe at the beautiful mystery of the Incarnation. Below is an excerpt from the public-domain NPNF translation.

The Word of God Himself—Who is before all worlds, the Invisible, the Incomprehensible, the Bodiless, Beginning of Beginning, the Light of Light, the Source of Life and Immortality, the Image of the Archetypal Beauty, the immovable Seal, the unchangeable Image, the Father’s Definition and Word—came to His own Image, and took on Him flesh for the sake of our flesh, and mingled Himself with an intelligent soul for my soul’s sake, purifying like by like; and in all points except sin was made man. . . . O new commingling; O strange conjunction; the Self-Existent comes into being, the Uncreate is created, That which cannot be contained is contained. . . . He Who gives riches becomes poor, for He assumes the poverty of my flesh, that I may assume the richness of His Godhead. He that is full empties Himself, for He empties Himself of His glory for a short while, that I may have a share in His fullness. What is the riches of His goodness? What is this mystery that is around me? I had a share in the image; I did not keep it; He partakes of my flesh that He may both save the image and make the flesh immortal. He communicates a second Communion far more marvelous than the first.

>> “Away in a Manger (Then to Calvary)” by Sarah Sparks: Singer-songwriter Sarah Sparks [previously] released a new EP, Christmas Hymns, last month, comprising five classic carols, including one with revised lyrics that further draw out the significance of the Incarnation. I’m a big fan of Sparks’s voice and her no-frills acoustic style.

Away in the manger
No crib for a bed
The great King of Heaven
Does lay down his head
The stars he created
Look down where he lay
The little Lord Jesus
Asleep on the hay

And there in the manger
The Maker of earth
In riches and glory?
No, born in the dirt
With oxen and cattle
With shepherds and sheep
No stranger to weakness
He loves even me

And there in the manger
Is our Servant-King
He sits with the lowly
He washes their feet
Away in the manger
Then to Calvary
His birth, life, and death
And his raising for me

And there in the manger
Is my greatest friend
His mercy, his patience
His grace know no end
Be near me, Lord Jesus
For all of my days
In life and in death
Till we meet face to face

>> “Angels We Have Heard on High” by the Petersens: Last Friday the Petersens [previously] released a music video—shot at Wonderland Tree Farm in Pea Ridge, Arkansas—debuting their new bluegrass arrangement of one of my favorite Christmas carols. Banjo, mandolin, fiddle, acoustic guitar, dobro, upright bass—I love the instrumentation of the bluegrass genre and what it adds here, and the Petersens are consummate performers.

“The Purpose of the Incarnation” by LeighAnna Schesser (poem)

December 7, 2025December 7, 2025 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

Rusetska, Natalya_Nativity — Natalya Rusetska (Ukrainian, 1984–), *Nativity*, 2016. Tempera on gessoed wood, 17.5 × 15.5 cm.

Gravity’s maker, spinner of spheres and spiraling matter,
made into weight, to sweat. His own feet vulnerable,
drawn flat and close against the punishing ground.

Star-strayed infant, wrapped in weight, heavy heaven.
In the hollow of the years, long and narrow as a well,
he waits suspended, bucket-drawn, clapper in a bell.

Ringing and ringing in the heatfolds of gravity, lines and lines
of weight leaning us into each other, caught up, tumbled
open-face roses in a blue bolt of thorn-pricked cloth.

God made known, fleshly God, Godlight bodied, bleeding
out into wood, over stone. God from God, telluric God,
shadowcast God, lightstricken God, bloodwritten. The pull

electric of low, deep center. God flesh, corpus God, Verbum
corpse, light-riven. Inscribed, blooded, God-heft falling death-
bitten into weighted rising, made and given; the miracle of leaven.

From Struck Dumb with Singing (Lambing Press, 2020). Used by permission of the author.

LeighAnna Schesser is a Catholic writer from south-central Kansas whose poetry collections include Struck Dumb with Singing (2020) and Heartland (2016).

Advent Prelude: Not Knowing

November 29, 2025December 14, 2025 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.

—Matthew 24:42 (KJV)

LOOK: Quote-Unquote, Hyphen, and The Point of Intersection by Kay Sage

There’s a wistful quality to the paintings of the midcentury American surrealist artist Kay Sage [previously], which often feature tenuous, draped structures and a distant light in the vast dark. The first work of hers I saw in person was Quote-Unquote, which shows a ragged, exposed architectonic form—is it fallen into disrepair, or incomplete?—whose vertical wood beams pierce the dreary gray sky.

Sage, Kay_Quote-Unquote — Kay Sage (American, 1898–1963), *Quote-Unquote*, 1958. Oil on canvas, 28 × 39 in. (71.1 × 99.1 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, 1963.198. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. © Estate of Kay Sage / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The museum label at the Wadsworth Atheneum reads in part: “Sage’s later paintings featured vertical architectural structures, such as walls and scaffolding, set in otherwise deserted landscapes. These inanimate forms were often draped with plain fabric, as if to suggest a human presence or absence.” The title Quote-Unquote provides little interpretive help. What is being quoted here? Is irony intended?

Painted the same decade, Sage’s Hyphen shows a towering structure of open doors and windows.

Sage, Kay_Hyphen — Kay Sage (American, 1898–1963), *Hyphen*, 1954. Oil on canvas, 30 × 20 in. (76.2 × 50.8 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Estate of Kay Sage / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

And The Point of Intersection shows a series of wooden boards and frames standing, slightly diagonal to the viewer, on a ground that recedes into infinity. In the bottom left corner a rumpled sheet or garment lies on a squat platform.

Sage, Kay_The Point of Intersection — Kay Sage (American, 1898–1963), *The Point of Intersection*, 1951–52. Oil on canvas, 39 × 32 in. (99.1 × 81.3 cm). Collection of Selma Ertegun, New York. © Estate of Kay Sage / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Source: *Kay Sage: Catalogue Raisonné*, p. 269

Is the “intersection” of the title between time and eternity, or . . . ?

LISTEN: “Not Knowing When the Dawn Will Come” | Words by Emily Dickinson, ca. 1884 | Music by Jan Van Outryve, 2018 | Performed by Naomi Beeldens (voice) and Jeroen Malaise (piano) on Elysium, Emily Dickinson Project, 2018

Not knowing when the Dawn will come,
I open every Door,
Or has it Feathers, like a Bird,
Or Billows, like a Shore –

This is one of twelve musical settings of Dickinson poems for piano and voice by the Belgian composer Jan Van Outryve. It’s sung by soprano Naomi Beeldens, with Jeroen Malaise on keys.

I’ve always read “Not knowing” as an Advent poem, as promoting a posture of readiness for the coming of Christ—he who is, as we call out in the O Antiphons of late Advent, our Oriens, Rising Sun, Dayspring. Will he come softly, rustling, avian-like, or will he come crashing onto earth’s shore like a wave?

Expecting Dawn’s imminent arrival, the speaker of the poem opens every door, welcoming its light.

From Augustine (Confessions) to Teresa of Ávila (The Interior Castle), the picture-making nuns of St. Walburga’s Abbey in Eichstätt to C. S. Lewis (Mere Christianity), the human heart has long been compared to a house. To open the windows or doors of the heart to Christ is to invite him to come in and dwell there and to transform the place.

Advent commemorates three comings of Christ: his coming in “history, mystery, and majesty,” as one priest put it. That is, Christ’s coming (1) as a babe in Bethlehem, (2) in the Spirit, to convert, illuminate, equip, and console, and in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, and (3) at the end of time.

Have you opened every door to him? Do you eagerly expect him to arrive—this Christmas (are you telling, singing, enacting the story of his nativity?); into your struggles and brokenness, to companion you and to heal and strengthen; and again on earth, to unite it with heaven and establish, fully and finally, his universal reign?

This is the first post in a daily Advent and Christmastide series that will extend to January 6. I hope you follow along!