Sir Henry Raeburn (Scottish, 1756–1823), Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, aka The Skating Minister, ca. 1795. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 63.5 cm. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Robert Walker (1755–1808) was senior minister at the Canongate Kirk, a prominent abolitionist, and a member of the Edinburgh Skating Society.
Portrait in oil, Sir Henry Raeburn, c. 1795
I’d like to think it’s late Saturday afternoon, sky on fire, sermon finished, and he’s happy to be skating alone, the village children gathered in for early supper and bed. Then again, this might be a method of composing just shy of dancing’s pleasure.
Dressed in black skates with red laces, black leggings and coat, wide-brimmed black top hat tipped back from flushed cheeks and pointed nose, he cuts a fine figure against the green ice, one leg swept up behind him, arms folded across his chest.
Drawn, it seems, by his steady gaze, does he lean toward thoughts of the heaven he hopes for, or the house ahead and his supper? He’ll stay out there as long as he can.
This poem is from Grip, Give and Sway by Kathleen A. Wakefield (Los Angeles: Silver Birch, 2016).
Kathleen A. Wakefield (born 1954) is the author of two books of poetry: the prize-winning Notations on the Visible World (Anhinga, 2000) and Grip, Give and Sway (Silver Birch, 2016). She was a recipient of the University of Rochester Lillian Fairchild Award and has received grants from the New York State Foundation for the Arts, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, and Mount Holyoke College. She taught creative writing at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Rochester and has worked as a poet-in-the-schools. She is also a singer, mainly of sacred and classical music.
Käthe Kollwitz (German, 1867–1945), Turm der Mütter (Tower of Mothers), 1937–38. Bronze, 27.9 × 27.4 × 28.8 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Photo: Craig Boyko / AGO. Kollwitz lost her son in World War I, and much of her work from then on grappled with the horror of that loss or expressed antiwar resistance.
a sculpture by Käthe Kollwitz
Five Bethlehem women close ranks to shield sons with hip and hide. “We will rest in the peace of His hands before your swords pierce a child. Spare them or shower us with spears. Let our blood disarm you, rout you, haunt you, cowering through nights that smother your sleep.” A bosom is no breastplate, a skirt no fortress wall. As futile as Babel the tower falls in, life upon life. Death seizes all.
Evelyn Bence (born 1952) is a writer and editor living in Arlington, Virginia. She is the author of Room at My Table; Prayers for Girlfriends and Sisters and Me; Spiritual Moments with the Great Hymns; and the award-winning Mary’s Journal, a novel written in the voice of Jesus’s mother. She has served as religion editor at Doubleday, managing editor for Today’s Christian Woman, and senior editor at Prison Fellowship Ministries. Her personal essays, poems, and devotional reflections have appeared in various publications.
What is the Christ of God?
It is his touch, his sign, his making known,
His coming forth from out the all-alone,
The stretching of a rod,
Abloom with his intent,
From the invisible. He made worlds so:
And souls, whose endless life should be to know
What the worlds meant.
Christ is the dear “I am,”
The voice that the cool garden-stillness brake.—
The human heart to human hearts that spake,
Long before Abraham.
The word, the thought, the breath,—
All chrism of God that in creation lay,—
Was born unto a life and name this day;
Jesus of Nazareth!
With man whom he had made
God came down side by side. Not from the skies
In thunders, but through brother lips and eyes,
His messages he said.
Close to our sin he leant,
Whispering, “Be clean!” The high, the awful-holy,—
Utterly meek,—ah! infinitely lowly,—
Unto our burden bent
The might it waited for.
“Daughter, be comforted. Thou art made whole.
Son, be forgiven through all thy guilty soul.
Sin—suffer ye—no more!
“O dumb, deaf, blind, receive!
Shall he who shaped the ear not hear your cry?
Doth he not tenderly see, who made the eye?
Ask me, that I may give!
“O Bethany and Nain!
I show your hearts how safe they are with me.
I reach into my deep eternity
And bring your dead again!
“My kingdom cometh nigh.
Look up, and see the lightning from afar.
Over my Bethlehem behold the star
Quickening the eastward sky!
“From end to end, always,
The same Lord, I am with you. Down the night,
My visible steps make all the mystery bright.
Lo! it is Christmas-day!”
This poem was originally published in Pansies: “…for Thoughts” by Adeline T. Whitney (London: Strahan & Co., 1872) and is in the public domain.
Adeline Dutton Train Whitney (1824–1906) was an American writer of poems and juvenile fiction, living in Massachusetts.
The heavens bespeak the glory of God.
The firmament ablaze, a text of his works.
Dawn whispers to sunset.
Dark to dark the word passes: glory glory.
All in a great silence,
no tongue’s clamor—
yet the web of the world trembles
conscious, as of great winds passing.
The bridegroom’s tent is raised,
a cry goes up: He comes! a radiant sun
rejoicing, presiding, his wedding day.
From end to end of the universe his progress.
No creature, no least being but catches fire from him.
This paraphrase of Psalm 19:1–6 by Daniel Berrigan is from Uncommon Prayer: A Book of Psalms(University of Michigan Press, 1978; Orbis, 1998).Used by permission of the Daniel Berrigan Literary Trust. www.danielberrigan.org
The first section of Psalm 19 is about how the natural world declares the glories of its Maker. The night sky, the psalmist describes, is like a tent that spreads its cover over the sun, parting open every morning to release it on the world. The sun is compared to a bright-eyed, handsome, and happy bridegroom emerging from his chamber, and to a vigorous runner who tracks a massive course.
I like to read Psalm 19:1–6 for Advent, especially the poet-priest Fr. Daniel Berrigan’s paraphrase of it, as his use of he/him/his pronouns instead of it/its draws out a Christological connection I hadn’t seen before in this text, made even more pronounced by the apocalyptic tone Berrigan adopts and the sense of excitement he conveys. The poem can, of course, be read as simply the glorious waking of a day, as the psalmist intended. But there’s another layer I want to explore: signs in the heavens, and the coming of Christ.
In the Christian tradition, Jesus is compared to both a sun and a bridegroom, and he, too, like the skies, “bespeak[s] the glory of God.” “Oriens”—Dawn or Dayspring—is one of the traditional titles of Christ, typically invoked in liturgies on December 21 as part of the O Antiphons cycle. From the Church of England’s Common Worship: “O Morning Star, splendor of light eternal and sun of righteousness: come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death” (cf. Luke 1:78–79; John 8:12; Mal. 4:2). The coming of Jesus—in Bethlehem, in human hearts, and on the last day—illuminates and sets ablaze, revealing who God is and who we ourselves most truly are and exciting the world, flinging abroad the divine light.
As for the bridegroom, Jesus uses this metaphor for himself in his parable of the ten bridesmaids (Matt. 25), as God does in Isaiah 62:5, and indeed one of the major motifs in the book of Revelation is a wedding between Christ and his people. Christ will return to us, scripture suggests, like a husband coming to bring home his new bride.
One of the antiphons for First Vespers of Christmas, I’ve just learned, sung the evening of December 24, connects the bridegroom of Psalm 19 with Jesus. Cum ortus fuerit sol de caelo, the church chants, videbitis Regem regum procedentem a Patre, tanquam sponsum de thalamo suo. (“When the sun shall have risen in the heavens, ye shall see the King of kings coming from the Father, as a Bridegroom from his bride-chamber.”)
Tanja Butler (American, 1955–), Woman Clothed with the Sun, 2008. Acrylic paint, collaged painted paper, and cotton fabric on gessoed acid-free paper, 14 × 5 in. Collection of Victoria Emily Jones.
Artist Tanja Butler further extends Psalm 19’s fittingness for Advent by drawing the passage into conversation with Revelation 12:1–6. This section of John’s Apocalypse introduces us to “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars”; she gives birth to a baby boy “who is to rule all the nations” but whom a great dragon seeks to devour. In most Christian interpretations, this Woman of the Apocalypse is associated with the Virgin Mary, and there’s a robust iconographic tradition in this vein.
Butler innovates on that tradition with her mixed-media work Woman Clothed with the Sun by showing the infant Jesus busting out of his mother’s womb like the strong athlete of Psalm 19:5. (Ready. Set. Go!) He has a race to run, a mission to fulfill. He is also shown as the sun that clothes his mother and that emerges from a dark (uterine) tent. He is the source and center point of the explosive rays of colorful light in the painting.
In an ArtWay profile, Butler describes her piece as follows:
Mary is represented with the unborn Christ, Light of the World, ready to “come forth from his pavilion, like a champion rejoicing to run his course” (Psalm 19:5). She holds a ladder, referencing both Jacob’s vision and the cross, the ladder of ascent between earth and heaven.
This is a cosmic birth necessitated by a cosmic struggle that will resolve in a cosmic victory: the reunion of God and humanity.
Daniel Joseph Berrigan, SJ, (1921–2016) was an American Jesuit priest, peace activist, award-winning poet, and professor of theology and biblical studies. Through his writings and public witness, he endorsed a consistent life ethic, opposing war, nuclear armament, abortion, capital punishment, and the causes of poverty in the name of Jesus Christ and his holy gospel. Fr. Berrigan, along with his brother Philip, was one of the Catonsville Nine, imprisoned in 1968 for destroying draft files in a protest against the Vietnam War. Later, he spent much of the eighties ministering to AIDS patients in New York City. He is the author of some fifty books.
Tanja Butler (born 1955) is a painter and liturgical artist based in the Albany, New York, area. Her subjects are devotional in character, and her sources of inspiration include Byzantine icons, medieval art, and folk art. Her work is included in the collections of the Vatican Museums, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, and the Boston Public Library. “My aim is to develop imagery that has the simplicity and clarity of a child-like vision,” she says, “required, we’re told, if we are to see the kingdom of God.”
Arcade, Main Chapel, Marianist Retreat and Conference Center, Eureka, Missouri. The chapel was designed by Br. Mel Meyer, SM. Photo: Kelly Kruse.
Behold the natural light filtered through the stained glass windows of this Marianist chapel in Eureka, Missouri, bathing the walls and flat arches in color.
LISTEN: “Come, My Way” | Words by George Herbert, 1633 | Music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1911; arr. Edward A. David, 2013 | Performed by Fr. Austin Dominic Litke, OP; Fr. Bob Koopman, OSB; and Leah Sedlacek of Blackfriar Music, 2013
Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life: such a way as gives us breath, such a truth as ends all strife, such a life as killeth death.
Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength: such a light as shows a feast, such a feast as mends in length, such a strength as makes his guest.
Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart: such a joy as none can move, such a love as none can part, such a heart as joys in love.
This phenomenal poem, “The Call,” is from The Temple by George Herbert (1633), a posthumously published collection of all his English-language poems. The famous British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) set it to music in 1911, along with three of Herbert’s other religious poems (“Easter,” split into two parts, “Love [III],” and “Antiphon [I]”) for his composition Five Mystical Songs. Williams’s setting can be found in dozens of hymnals, usually under the title “Come, My Way, My Truth, My Life.”
In 2013, the media division of the Dominican Province of St. Joseph—one of four Dominican provinces in the United States, extending from New England to Virginia to Ohio—produced a music video featuring a new arrangement of the hymn by Edward A. David, who has a bachelor of music degree in classical piano performance from New York University. (He later went on to earn a master’s and doctorate in theology at Oxford and is now an ethicist.)
The project was inspired by Pope Francis’s call during the World Youth Day festivities in Rio de Janeiro in July 2013 to “take to the streets” in sharing the gospel. Scenes were filmed throughout New York City: at Brooklyn Bridge, Our Lady of Good Counsel Roman Catholic Church, Grand Central Station, Columbus Circle, and on the Staten Island ferry.
The filmmakers are graduates of NYU’s film school: A. Joshua Vargas, John S. Fisher, and Michael Crommett.
The singer in the video is Father Austin Litke, who at the time served as chaplain of NYU’s Catholic Center. He is currently an adjunct instructor at The Saint Paul Seminary and a visiting professor of Catholic studies at the University of St. Thomas.
For an acoustic performance by Ryan Flanigan, an Anglican church music director and the founder of Liturgical Folk, see here:
This post is part of a daily Advent series from December 2 to 24, 2023 (with Christmas to follow through January 6, 2024). View all the posts here, and the accompanying Spotify playlist here.Blackfriar Music’s and Ryan Flanigan’s recordings of “Come, My Way” are not on Spotify.
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903), Be Be (The Nativity), 1896. Oil on canvas, 67 × 76.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. A midwife holds the newborn Christ as his mother rests in the upper left corner.
O child of man,
Wombed in dark waters you retell
Millenniums, image the terrestrial span
From an unwitting cell
To the new soul within her intricate shell,
O child of man.
O child of man,
Whose infant eyes and groping mind
Meet chaos and create the world again,
You for yourself must find
The toils we know, the truths we have divined –
Yes, child of man.
O child of man,
You come to justify and bless
The animal throes wherein your life began,
And gently draw from us
The milk of love, the most of tenderness,
Dear child of man.
So, child of man,
Remind us what we have blindly willed –
A slaughter of all innocents! You can
Yet make this madness yield
And lift the load of our stock-piling guilt,
O child of man.
“Agnus Dei” is the seventh of nine titled sections of the poem “Requiem for the Living” by Cecil Day-Lewis, originally published in The Gate, and Other Poems (J. Cape, 1962) and compiled in The Complete Poems of C. Day Lewis (Stanford University Press, 1992).
Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (1904–1972) was one of the leading British poets of the 1930s, closely associated with W. H. Auden. He was born in Ireland of Anglo-Irish parents, his father a Church of Ireland clergyman, and was educated at Oxford, where he taught poetry from 1951 to 1956. In the 1940s he “turned from poetry of left-wing political statement to an individual lyricism expressed in more traditional forms” (Britannica) and served as poet laureate of England from 1968 until his death in 1972. In addition to writing poetry, he also wrote crime novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, sixteen of which feature detective Nigel Strangeways. One of Day-Lewis’s four children is the actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
LOOK: the heavens wept with me by Caitlin Connolly
Caitlin Connolly (American, 1986–), the heavens wept with me, 2018. Oil on canvas.
LISTEN: “A Dream / On Another’s Sorrow”| Words by William Blake, from Songs of Innocence, 1789, adapt. | Music by David Benjamin Blower, on Innocence & Experience, 2022
Once a dream did weave a shade O’er my Angel-guarded bed, That an Emmet lost its way Where on grass methought I lay.
Troubled, ’wildered, and forlorn, Dark, benighted, travel-worn, Over many a tangled spray, All heart-broke I heard her say:
“O my children! do they cry? Do they hear their father sigh? Now they look abroad to see: Now return and weep for me.”
Pitying, I dropped a tear; But I saw a glow-worm near, Who replied: “What wailing wight Calls the watchman of the night?
“I am set to light the ground, While the beetle goes his round: Follow now the beetle’s hum; Little wanderer, hie thee home.”
*
Can I see another’s woe, And not be in sorrow too? Can I see another’s grief, And not seek for kind relief?
Can I see a falling tear, And not feel my sorrow’s share? Can a father see his child Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?
Can a mother sit and hear An infant groan, an infant fear? No, no! never can it be! Never, never can it be!
And can They who smile on all Hear the wren with sorrows small, Hear the small bird’s grief and care, Hear the woes that infants bear,
And not sit beside the nest, Pouring pity in their breast; And not sit the cradle near, Weeping tear on infant’s tear;
And not sit both night and day, Wiping all our tears away? O no! never can it be! Never, never can it be!
They do give Their joy to all; They become an infant small; They become a one of woe; They do feel the sorrow too.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh, And thy Maker is not by; Think not thou canst weep a tear, And thy Maker is not near.
The lyrics of this song comprise two poems from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence: “A Dream” and “On Another’s Sorrow.”
In “A Dream,” the poetic speaker dreams about a lost ant (an emmet) who is trying to find her way back to her children and husband. The speaker is moved by the ant’s distress and weeps for her. But then a glowworm (“the watchman of the night,” as he’s lit like a lantern) graciously intervenes, telling the ant to listen to the sound of the beetle walking and to follow that sound home while he lights the way.
“Told from a trusting, childlike perspective, the poem”—a fable—“suggests that those who ask for help will get it: the world is a naturally compassionate place, and guidance and protection are always at hand, even in difficult times.” (LitCharts)
Aren’t we all “little wanderers”? Many of us troubled, bewildered, lonely, and worn by our seeking and striving?
There is empathy for us not only from fellow travelers but also from the Divine.
“On Another’s Sorrow” is about how God lovingly enters into our woes through the Incarnation. He becomes a participant in the project of being human, experiencing firsthand the many trials, hurts, and vulnerabilities that come with the territory.
In the first three stanzas, the speaker expresses how keenly he feels the sorrows of others. In the fourth stanza, he reflects on how God does the same—only God is perfectly present to all, weeping with those who weep, sighing with those who sigh. Having “become an infant small,” the Creator has demonstrated solidarity with his creation. It is a comfort to know that God is so intimately acquainted with the griefs that afflict us and is keen to companion us through them.
In his creative visioning, British singer-songwriter David Benjamin Blower brought together Blake’s “A Dream” and “On Another’s Sorrow” with a single, spare musical setting, linking the two poems with an instrumental interlude but keeping the same tune throughout. The first poem is about the feeling of weariness or lostness; the second, grief. Both have to do with compassion—we owe it to one another and often receive it from others, and it is always available to us in Christ, who is God brought near.
In “On Another’s Sorrow,” Blower changed the pronouns for God in the fourth and seventh stanzas from “He/His” to “They/Their,” since God is neither male nor female. He also omitted the final stanza in Blake’s original:
O! He gives to us His joy That our grief He may destroy: Till our grief is fled and gone, He doth sit by us and moan.
This post is part of a daily Advent series from December 2 to 24, 2023 (with Christmas to follow through January 6, 2024). View all the posts here, and the accompanying Spotify playlist here.
Gabriele Münter (German, 1877–1962), Breakfast of the Birds, 1934. Oil on board, 18 × 21 3/4 in. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.
I love to rise ere gleams the tardy light,
Winter’s pale dawn; and as warm fires illume,
And cheerful tapers shine around the room,
Through misty windows bend my musing sight,
Where, round the dusky lawn, the mansions white,
With shutters closed, peer faintly through the gloom
That slow recedes; while yon gray spires assume,
Rising from their dark pile, an added height
By indistinctness given—then to decree
The grateful thoughts to God, ere they unfold
To friendship, or the Muse, or seek with glee
Wisdom’s rich page. O hours more worth than gold,
By whose blest use we lengthen life, and, free
From drear decays of age, outlive the old!
Anna Seward (1747–1809), nicknamed the Swan of Lichfield, was a British Romantic poet who wrote elegies, odes, ballads, sonnets, and the well-received verse-novel Louisa (1784). Active in Lichfield’s literary community, she benefitted from her clergyman father’s progressive views on female education. She was a prodigious correspondent and was seen as an authority on English literature by contemporaries such as Samuel Johnson, Robert Southey, and Sir Walter Scott, the latter of whom edited her posthumously published Poetical Works in three volumes (1810).
Following the popularity of last year’s “25 Poems for Christmas,” I’ve decided to publish a brand-new installment, and will perhaps make this a yearly tradition! All the selections can be read online—just follow the links.
Despite the pithy title of this post, not all the poems are “Christmas” poems, strictly speaking, but rather they encompass the season of Advent too, as well as Epiphany. Advent is a four-week season leading up to Christmas that is characterized by a mood of longing and expectation; it is oriented not only toward Jesus’s first coming but also toward his second. Christmas, of course, celebrates the birth of Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. And Epiphany, on January 6, commemorates the visit of the magi to the crib, representing God’s self-revelation to the wider world.
Each poem is accompanied by a micro-commentary or short descriptive blurb, which I suggest you read after reading the poem itself. There’s a benefit to first entering a poem without having any context—then after registering your initial impressions and questions, to consider another person’s framing or analysis or highlights, and reread. And then a third time! Each reading can potentially reveal new meaning.
Stone Nativity by Juan Manuel Cisneros, Ventura, California, December 2016 [learn more]
1.“Haiku for an Advent Calendar” by Richard Bauckham: Church services during Advent tend to focus on messianic prophecies from the Hebrew Bible, rumblings of a coming savior. In this sequence of twenty-four haiku, Richard Bauckham pulls a detail from each book of the Jewish scriptures, finding anticipations of Christ. For example, Isaiah: “In the wilderness / a voice cries for centuries / seeking an echo.” Or Job: “God answered Job but / not his question. Maybe he / will do that again.”
2. “How Christ Shall Come” (anonymous): The cosmological Christ blew in from the four cardinal directions, coming as lover, knight, merchant, and pilgrim. So says this fourteenth-century Middle English lyric, rich in metaphor, compiled in a book of preaching aids and sermons by John Sheppey (d. 1360), bishop of Rochester. (It is unclear whether he is the author of the poem.) The great medieval literature scholar Carleton Brown gave it the title “How Christ Shall Come” in his landmark Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century (1924), and Grace Hamman brought it to my attention recently in her wonderful monthly Substack, Medievalish, providing a modern English translation and commentary.
3.“Hawk Lies Down with Rabbit” by Seth Wieck: What would it look like for death to no longer have dominion in the animal world? Grappling with Isaiah’s end-time vision of a peaceable kingdom void of predation, this poem describes in graphic terms a bird of prey making its kill, feeding on flesh, and wonders how a hawk could still be itself with rewired impulses. Hear the author read and provide context for the poem on the Reformed Journal Podcast.
4.“john” by Lucille Clifton: Written in the voice of John the Baptist, this poem is part of an extraordinary sixteen-poem sequence titled “some jesus,” which features a range of biblical characters. In her retelling of his ministry as forerunner to the Messiah, Lucille Clifton casts John as a Black Baptist preacher, preparing his listeners to receive the one who “com[es] in blackness / like a star.” Clifton’s larger body of work would suggest that “blackness” here is multivalent, describing what Jesus comes into and as: the word suggests the darkness of the world that Christ entered, on the one hand, but also functions as a positive racial identifier. In Clifton’s revisioning, Christ comes as a Black man, wearing “a great bush / on his head”—which, again, could be read as an Afro, and/or as a mystical reference to the site at which God revealed himself to Moses in the Sinai desert. Luminous with truth, Christ comes, “calling the people brother.”
Pablo Gargallo (Spanish, 1881–1934), The Prophet (St. John the Baptist) (detail), 1933. Bronze, 91 3/4 × 29 1/2 × 19 in. Wurtzburger Sculpture Garden, Baltimore Museum of Art. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
5. “Christmas Mail” by Ted Kooser: Every December the story of an ancient birth comes alive again in couriers’ mailbags, in tin boxes at the ends of driveways, on mantels and fridges. This poem honors those postal workers who deliver good tidings in the form of Christmas cards, the magic spilling out the envelopes to make even the most tiresome routes sparkle a bit.
6. “December 25” by George MacDonald: Through the mid-nineteenth century, denominations influenced by the Reformed tradition, including the Church of Scotland in which George MacDonald was raised, typically did not observe Christmas, the rationale being that no one day should be thought of as holier than any other. But in his book-length dramatic poem Within and Without, MacDonald refers to December 25 as “this one day that blesses all the year”—and in this seven-liner from his Diary of an Old Soul, he describes Christmas as a gleaming blue sapphire, a structural center around which all the other jewels of the church calendar are oriented.
7. “On a Cardinal Climbing Down a Manhole to Restore Power to 400 Homeless People” by Michael Stalcup: On May 11, 2019, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the papal almoner (Pope Francis’s special appointee to distribute charity), crawled into a manhole and broke a police seal to personally restore power to a homeless shelter in Rome whose electricity had been shut off due to its failure to pay its bills. The shelter was occupied by some 450 people at the time, 100 of them children, who had been without electric light, hot water, and refrigeration for nearly a week. In this poem, which can be read Christologically, Michael Stalcup celebrates this defiant humanitarian act that brought light to a people living in darkness.
8. “Incarnation” by Amit Majmudar: “Inheart yourself, immensity. Immarrow, / Embone, enrib yourself.” So begins the five-poem sequence “Seventeens.” Musical and witty, this first poem is a plea to the great I AM to take on a body and “be all we are, and all we aren’t.”
9.“The Lord Is with Thee” by Micha Boyett: Written in 2010 as the third in a five-poem sequence commissioned by John Knox Presbyterian Church in Seattle, this poem centers on the Visitation episode described in Luke 1:39–58. It’s about Mary finding belonging in God’s story, especially through the companionship of her elder cousin Elizabeth, who has nurtured Mary’s faith since infancy and continues to do so in this her moment of crisis. “How easily she spoke of God, / as if he were a neighbor, a fish vendor on the street,” Mary admires. Elizabeth supports Mary physically, emotionally, and spiritually, holding her hair back as she vomits, protecting her from vicious rumors, affirming the work of God in her life, and accompanying her at the start of this wild path God has set them both on.
Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916), Mystical Conversation, ca. 1896. Oil on canvas, 65 × 46 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Japan.
10.“Our Lady” by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge: The great-grandniece of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861–1907) grew up in a home visited by family friends Alfred Lord Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, and Robert Browning, among others. In this poem she marvels at how God chose the common-born Mary for such a task as mothering the Christ, singing along with Mary’s Magnificat about how God raises up the lowly.
Source: Fancy’s Following (privately published, 1896). Public Domain.
11. “Traveling Man”by Marjorie Maddox: With his pregnant wife alongside, Joseph plods down south to Bethlehem, “convinced of the predestined / roll of dice chrismated with Miracle.” An epigraph from a Leonard Cohen song sets the tone.
12.“Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree” by George Starbuck: This charming shape poem contrasts the extravagance of our popular celebrations of Christmas with the poverty of the first-century event it marks. The first half describes the furious wind of decorative activity that uproots evergreens from their natural habitats to bring them indoors and deck them with baubles and ribbon. I don’t know how to interpret “no scapegrace of a sect,” but “Daughter-in-Law Elect” refers to a duet from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Mikado. The turn comes with “a son born / now / now,” the latter two lines styled as the visible trunk of the tree; here the scene shifts to the simple stable of old, where Mary lies “spent” next to her newborn along with a cow and donkey, a sole “firework” guiding the magi and us all to the spot.
13.“Christmas (I and II)” by George Herbert: George Herbert (1593–1633) is one of the most celebrated poets of the English language. In part 1, a sonnet, of this two-part poem, he imagines himself a weary traveler who chances upon a humble inn where he unexpectedly finds his Lord, the infant Christ. It’s the inn of Bethlehem. Having then received rest from Christ his host, in the closing couplet he expresses his desire to reciprocate—to offer his own soul, lowly though it is, as a residence for Christ, praying that God first adorn it to make it hospitable. In the second part of the poem, Herbert uses a metaphysical conceit (extended metaphor) comparing his soul to a shepherd whose flock of thoughts, words, and deeds pastures on God’s word and who, like the shepherds of Bethlehem, sings glory to God. His shepherd-soul seeks eternal daylight, which he finds in the Son/sun, whose beams so intertwine with his song that the beams sing and his song shines.
14. “Descending Theology: The Nativity” by Mary Karr: The physicality of childbirth, from the contractions (which pierce the Virgin like a star, Karr writes) to the bodily fluids, is heavily featured in this poem. Jesus emerges from his mother “a sticky grub” with a “lolling head” and “sloppy mouth” that seeks out her breast for food. And as she feeds him physically, he feeds her spiritually. Then he falls asleep. His first nap, Karr writes, is a foretaste of the sleep of death he will eventually come to taste. But for now, he wakes up crying—as all babies do.
Scott Erickson (American, 1977–), With Us, Face to Face, 2016. Digital art. [available for purchase]
15.“from spiralling ecstatically this”by E. E. Cummings: What a fantastic opening line! The heavenly spheres whirling, twirling, down into the “proud nowhere”—Bethlehem—“of earth’s most prodigious night.” Heretofore living in mundanity, the domestic animals, hungry for miracle, for newness, are vouchsafed to be witnesses of this supernatural event, before which they kneel “humbly in their imagined bodies.” Overhead floats the “perhapsless mystery of paradise,” a phrase suggesting that heaven is beyond human understanding but not without certainty; it’s a declarative reality, not subjunctive, even if it can’t quite be put into words. Mary herself has no words—she silently, knowingly smiles, while the created world erupts in song around her. The “mind without soul” is a reference to Herod, who seeks to snuff out this new life, but to no avail.
The omission of spaces after punctuation marks (e.g., “a newborn babe:around him,eyes”) is not a mistake; that’s how E. E. Cummings liked it. Scholars say it’s to create a faster rhythm, but in this poem I don’t think that choice is as effective, as pauses and slow savoring seem more appropriate to its contemplative mood.
16.“How the Natal Star Was Born”by Violet Nesdoly: Narrated by the angel Gabriel, this poem imaginatively describes heaven’s nervously awaiting the birth of Jesus during the nine months following Gabriel’s dispatch to Mary, and then busting out in celebration when at last they hear his infant-cry. When his Son is born, instead of cigars, the Father passes out trumpets to his company of friends, who sound them all the way to Bethlehem’s fields, and pops open a bottle of champagne whose bubbles spray far and wide.
17. Sections 9–10 of “The Child” by Rabindranath Tagore: Hinduism was the religion of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth and upbringing, but he also held deep respect for Jesus Christ. (For more on the influence of Christianity on Tagore’s thought and writing, see chapter 4 of Rabindranath Tagore and Interfaith Dialogue by Manas Kumar Ghosh [DMin thesis, Charles Sturt University, 2010].) “The Child” is a free-verse poem that Tagore wrote in English in 1930 after seeing a passion play in Germany and then translated into Bengali in 1932 with the title “Sishutirtha” (Pilgrimage to Childhood). In it a “Man of faith” gathers people from all walks of life to join him on a “pilgrimage of fulfilment,” to “struggle [through the dark] into the Kingdom of living light.” Initially met with enthusiasm, the Man later becomes a target of the people’s anger and distrust, and they kill him. Disorientation ensues. But a man in the crowd is able to rally the others to repent and resume their quest, following the spirit of “the Victim.”
The final two sections, 9 and 10, are the selection I’ve chosen. (Scroll right to read the last.) At “the first flush of dawn,” when the time is ripe, the pilgrims arrive at a thatched hut in a palm grove, where they finally meet the eternal Light they’ve been seeking: “the mother . . . seated on a straw bed with the babe on her lap, / . . . the morning star.” Here is the Child of the title, humanity’s redeemer.
Source: The Child (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931)
Jyoti Sahi (Indian, 1944–), Adoration of the Shepherds, 1983. Oil and acrylic on canvas.
18. “Love’s Bitten Tongue (11)”by Vassar Miller: This poem, “You, my God, lonesome man, Love’s bitten tongue,” is from a crown of twenty-two sonnets, a type of sequence in which the last line of each sonnet is repeated as the first line of the next, but each time with a new twist of syntax and sense. The crown as a whole expresses the poet-speaker’s struggle against her ego, and her desire for Christ (whom she gives such an evocative name in the title!). In this particular sonnet she describes waiting at the edge of her bed every Christmas Eve as a child in anticipation of both Santa’s arrival with gifts and the holy mystery of Christ’s birth, an admixture of sacred and profane longings that fill her still as an adult.
19. “Gloria in Profundis” by G. K. Chesterton: G. K. Chesterton’s poems are of variable quality, but this one is brilliant, emphasizing God’s descent from the rich heights of heaven into an obscure cave in a simple town. “Glory to God in the lowest!” it exclaims, a clever inversion of the angels’ song to the shepherds in Luke 2:14. The poem was originally published in a 1927 Christmas pamphlet with wood engravings by Eric Gill. The Latin title translates to “Glory in the Depths.”
Source: Gloria in Profundis by G. K. Chesterton (Ariel series pamphlet) (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927); compiled in The Spirit of Christmas (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985)
20.“Silent Night” by Bonnie Bowman Thurston: Rev. Dr. Bonnie Thurston invokes a tradition that says the night of Christ’s birth, there was a whole hour in which time stood still and all was silent. What a fascinating legend! Thurston told me its origin is northern European, said she remembers reading it in some scholarly Celtic studies; I wasn’t able to locate any such mentions, but the second-century Protoevangelium of James, chapter 18, probably written in Egypt or Syria, does describe everything momentarily freezing in place around Joseph as he steps out to find a midwife for Mary. Anyway, the poem ends with a striking metaphor! Word, flesh: fire. (Reminds me of this digital artwork by Scott Erickson.)
21. “After Luke 2:19” by Michelle Ortega: When the shepherds recounted to Mary what the angels had told them in the fields about Jesus being the promised Messiah, “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart,” Luke narrates in his Gospel. Poet Michelle Ortega expounds on this verse, emphasizing the relationship of Mary’s body to her son’s from conception to birth and now postpartum—an intimacy known well by mothers across the centuries. As wondrous as it was to be part of a cosmic story writ large in the skies, Ortega suggests that Mary treasured just as much as the grand pronouncements those small moments of being just an ordinary mama.
22. “Christmas: 1924”by Thomas Hardy: “We the civilized world have given Christianity a fair trial for nearly 2000 years, & it has not yet taught countries the rudimentary virtue of keeping peace,” lamented the British novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) in a letter to Florence Henniker dated February 25, 1900, during the Boer War. World War I only increased his cynicism, which is on display in this sour little epigram that opens with an ironic quotation of the angels’ proclamation to the shepherds the night of Jesus’s birth.
Francis Hoyland (British, 1930–), Nativity, 1961. Oil on canvas, 90 × 120 cm. Methodist Modern Art Collection, HOY/1963/1.
23. “Eating Baklava on New Year’s Eve” by Anya Krugovoy Silver: Poet Anya Silver (1968–2018) reads a spiritual benediction in her piece of baklava, layered and sweet and consumed on the eve of a new year.
Source: Second Bloom (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017)
24. “A Ballad of Wise Men”by George M. P. Baird: Jesus so often confounds the wisdom of the wise, starting with his birth. With gentle humor and in iambic rhythm and rhyme, this poem celebrates the simple access we all have to Christ.
Source: Rune and Rann (Pittsburgh: Aldine Press, 1916). Public Domain.
25. “Excrucielsis”by Hannah Main-van der Kamp: Originally published at ArtWay.eu as a response to the contemporary Romanian sculpture The Spring by Liviu Mocan, this poem alternates between the weary journeying toward truth of one of the biblical magi and that of a modern-day seeker similarly “longing for / the something more.” It can be a trudge, finding the Light—it involves risk, a willingness to follow the signs, and the tenacity to hold on to your “vision burden,” “clutch[ing] the weight” of it all the way over rough and varied terrain. But the epiphanic moment awaits, to sound like a trumpet blast. The title of the poem is a neologism combining the words “excruciating” and “excelsis” (Latin for “the heights”); “every excelsis contains something excruciating, that’s how we get to genuine excelsis,” the poet told me in an email. Read a related prose reflection by Main-van der Kamp here.
Source: The Slough at Albion (Victoria, BC: Ekstasis Editions, forthcoming)
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Unidentified sculpture at the Grote of Sint-Laurenskerk (Church of Saint Lawrence), Rotterdam, Netherlands. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Would God I knew there were a God to thank
When thanks rise in me, certain that my cries
Do not like blind men’s arrows pierce the skies
Only to fall short of my quarry’s flank.
Why do I thirst, a desperate castaway
Quaffing salt water, powerless to stop,
Sick lark locked in a cellar far from day,
Lone climber of a peak that has no top?
To praise God is to bellow down a well
From which rebounds one’s own dull booming voice,
Yet the least leaf points to some One to thank.
The whorl embodied in the slightest shell,
The firefly’s glimmer signify Rejoice!
Though overhead, clouds cruise a sullen blank.
The first line and a half of this sonnet are a crossed-out fragment from one of the notebooks of the British poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), which he used to work out poetic ideas. This one never went anywhere. But Rossetti’s brother, William Michael Rossetti, saw something in it worthy of preservation; he salvaged it and other select scraps from his brother’s papers, publishing them posthumously in a “Versicles and Fragments” section of Rossetti’s collected works in 1901.
Page 16 of Sonnets and Fragments by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Princeton/Troxell bound manuscript volume), 1848–81. The first deletion, by Rossetti’s hand, is “Would God I knew there were a god to thank / When thanks rise in me.” [object record]
The modern American poet X. J. Kennedy developed Rossetti’s fragment into a full poem that grapples with the silence of God and, despite such, the impulse to praise. The speaker is confounded by the contradiction that the world seems infused with God’s presence—the natural world points to a Creator—and yet God is unresponsive when the speaker initiates contact. The prayers he launches toward heaven like arrows appear not to reach their target. He’s experiencing spiritual aridity. He feels like a thirsty castaway whose only drink is salt water (why doesn’t God satiate as promised?); a bird trapped in a dark cellar; a mountain climber endlessly climbing, never catching sight of the vista.
The poem tugs back and forth between despondency and awe, between clench-fisted frustration and open-handed surrender. Each glorious tree leaf, the intricate design of conch shells, the whimsy of lightning bugs—these are gifts, but where’s the giver? Gratitude must be directed to someone, but whom does one thank for the wonders and small joys experienced in nature? Who or what is their source? Oh, how I wish I knew there were a God out there to thank, when thanks well up in me. The speaker wants to place his thanks somewhere, but when he places them in God, he receives no confirmation of receipt. There’s a disconnect between what nature testifies and what the speaker has suffered: the “sullen blank” of heaven.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s brother, William, wrote in 1895 that, unlike their devout sister Christina [previously], Dante was “a decided sceptic. He was never confirmed, professed no religious faith, and practised no regular religious observances; but he had sufficient sympathy with the abstract ideas and the venerable forms of Christianity to go occasionally to an Anglican church—very occasionally, and only as the inclination ruled him.” Starting in mid-adolescence, he rejected organized religion.
Kennedy, similarly, was raised in a religious household: his father was Catholic, his mother Methodist. And yet in his adulthood he has come to question and reject some of the tenets of orthodox Christianity. But still, he searches for God. “There is a clash in his poems between his skepticism or uneasy agnosticism and his unresolved longing for faith in God,” reads his bio on the Harvard Square Library website. Kennedy’s desire to believe but his inability to do so is expressed recurringly in his work—as in this poem, in which he, taking the baton from Rossetti, is very likely the speaker.
X. J. Kennedy (born 1929) is an American poet, translator, editor, and author of children’s literature and textbooks on English literature and poetry. Born Joseph Charles Kennedy in Dover, New Jersey, he adopted the nom de plume X. J. Kennedy in 1957 to avoid being mistaken for the better-known Joseph Kennedy, then US ambassador to England and father of future president John F. Kennedy. His award-winning poetry collections include Nude Descending a Staircase (1961) and Cross Ties (1985). He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Art & Theology 