CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: 2025 Artist Residency at Village Church, Beaverton, Oregon: “Village Church is seeking an Artist in Residence for 11 months of 2025, February to December, to create a lasting, creative impact on the wider community and church. The artist will create original work, lead art showcases, inspire future generations, and use art as a bridge between the tech culture surrounding the church, with the spiritual and theological. This residency offers the chance to create art that reflects God’s beauty, promotes worship, and connects people in meaningful ways.”
Applicants must have a minimum of five years of experience. If chosen, you will receive a monthly stipend, free housing, and studio space and will have the cost of all art supplies covered. The pastor tells me that the original application deadline of January 15 is being extended.
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NEW(ISH) ALBUM: The Hymnal by Life in Grooveland: Released last April. From World Music Central: “Life in Grooveland’s The Hymnal reimagines traditional hymns with dynamic, world music-influenced rhythms, creating an album that brings together spirituality and groove. Produced and arranged by Nashville session drummer and percussionist Justin Amaral, this fascinating instrumental collection features ten exquisitely crafted duets presenting some of Nashville’s most talented and inventive musicians, including Jeff Coffin (Dave Matthews Band, Béla Fleck), Fats Kaplin (Mitski, Jack White), Paul Niehaus (Lambchop), and Billy Contreras (Ricky Skaggs). Amaral’s versatile drumming, which ranges from subtle to explosive, provides the backbone for each track, layering rhythm to amplify each hymn.” Thanks to blog reader Ted Olsen for bringing this to my attention!
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PODCAST EPISODE: “The Hillbilly Thomists: Bourbon, Bluegrass, and the Bible,”No Small Endeavor: I really enjoyed this! “There aren’t many Billboard-charting bluegrass bands made up entirely of Dominican friars, who play their shows clad in white tunics and rosaries. In fact, there is precisely one such band: the Hillbilly Thomists. ‘A Thomist is someone who follows the thought and theological teaching of Saint Thomas Aquinas,’ they explain. ‘We combine it with a little bit of humor about our human condition.’ In this episode, they talk about their theology and vocation, as well as how they manage life on the road as priests who have taken a vow of poverty. Plus, they give live performances of some of their finest songs.”
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NEW POEM: “Jesus, Son of Gop” by Sarah M. Wells: Exposing the ridiculousness of followers of the nonviolent Christ sanctioning violence, this satirical poem is a response to a politician’s egregious misappropriation of the apostle Paul’s “armor of God” language. It’s an alternate history that rewrites how Jesus’s arrest in the garden went down. Listen to Wells discuss the poem on The Reformed Journal Podcast.
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EXHIBITION: Playing with Design: Gameboards, Art, and Culture, September 13, 2024–January 26, 2025, American Folk Art Museum, New York City: I saw this show last weekend and was absolutely delighted by it! Curated by Emelie Gevalt with Austin Losada, it features over one hundred handmade gameboards, mostly nineteenth century, from the exuberant collection of Bruce and Doranna Wendel. Many are of familiar games I used to play as a child—Parcheesi (which I learned originated in India, its name an adaptation of the Hindi word for “twenty-five”), checkers, Chutes and Ladders—and others are creative variations on the typical racing board game. There is also a fortune-telling game, in the vein of the Magic 8 Ball! The objects on display—hand-carved and hand-painted and from the imaginations of common folk—are interesting both culturally and aesthetically.
Two that made me chuckle contain religious references. “Gameplay, especially cards, was sometimes thought to encourage vice, in particular gambling or idleness,” the gallery label reads. So board makers sometimes incorporated spiritual aphorisms or precepts into the design to counteract the corrupting influence and remind players to uphold Christian virtues even in moments of leisure. A Parcheesi board instructs players to “Love God by loving each other”—and I can’t make out what the Chinese checkers board says, other than “The Lord . . . your . . . God . . .”
Possibly Ira M. Countryman or Jimmy Hall, Parcheesi Board, late 19th century. Paint on wood, 21 × 21 in. American Folk Art Museum, Gift of Doranna and Bruce Wendel, 2024.7.3. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.Possibly George Clark, Chinese Checkers Board, late 19th or early 20th century. Paint on wood, 17 1/2 × 15 in. Collection of Doranna and Bruce Wendel. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
The American Folk Art Museum is one of the few FREE museums in New York, and I’ve enjoyed it so much every time I’ve been there. (See the blog post “The biblical imagination of folk sculptor Annie Hooper,” documenting one of my previous visits.) It’s small—only three galleries. It’s on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, right off the Lincoln Center subway stop.
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Interested to see what books I read in 2024? Goodreads has put together a “My Year in Books” page! Follow me on Goodreads if you want to stay apprised of my latest reads, want-to-reads, and star ratings.
BLOG POST: “On the Twelfth Day of Christmas: 12+ ways to keep celebrating with the rest of the world (loads of links!)” (Watch & Do for Twelfth Night and Epiphanytide) by Tamara Hill Murphy: In this blog post from 2019, spiritual director and writer Tamara Hill Murphy has compiled a wonderful roundup of resources for Twelfth Night (January 5) and the Feast of Epiphany (January 6), on such things as chalking the door, stargazing, making origami Christmas stars, baking a Three Kings Cake, Three Kings Day parades, Christmas tree bonfires, and more. She shares several videos, including this one of Denis Adide reading “The Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot, shot in locations around Bristol:
I really love this unique rendition, which, with all its dissonance, is different from all the others I’m familiar with. James Johnson, one of the YouTube commenters on the video, writes: “I think this rendition is transporting. Listen to it. Close your eyes and you can feel the hot dry wind of the desert blowing in your face. You may wonder why make this trip at all, and then, that star. That amazing star. Yep, we can make it past a few more dunes, beyond Herod, and on to . . . ‘a manger’? And the rhythm section just pushes me on. . . . This earthly trinity, Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar, are the hippest trio in Jerusalem and I want to go where they go, know what they know.”
This performance appears on the orchestra’s live album Big Band Holidays (2015) [previously].
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NEW ARTWORK: Christmas in the Air Raid Shelter by Olya Kravchenko: For Christmas 2024, with Russia still deploying cruise missiles and suicide drones against Ukraine, Ukrainian iconographer Olya Kravchenko constructed a three-dimensional painting that shows the Holy Family huddled in the basement of an apartment complex, hiding out from air raids. A large, bright star hovers overhead, showing the three magi to the spot where Jesus lies.
Olya Kravchenko (Ukrainian, 1985–), Christmas in the Air Raid Shelter, 2024. Plywood, tempera, and gilding, 67 × 40 × 25 cm.
This piece can be seen through January 26 at the eighty-fourth annual Krippenausstellung (Nativity Scene) exhibition at RELiGIO: Westfälisches Museum für religiöse Kultur (Westphalian Museum of Religious Culture) in Telgte, Germany, whose theme is “Heller Stern” (Bright Star).
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SONG: “Magi, Kings of Persia” by Michael Adamis, from the suite 4 Christmas Idiomela: Performed by Cappella Romana under the direction of Alexander Lingas, this choral piece by the Greek composer Michael Adamis (1929–2013) is a setting of an Eastern Orthodox liturgical text for Christmas that translates to:
The magi, kings of Persia, manifestly recognizing the King of heaven who was born on earth, arrived in Bethlehem, led by the radiant star, bearing choice gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh; and falling down, they offered worship, for they beheld the Timeless One lying in the cave as a babe.
The video is from Cappella Romana’s 2020 Christmas concert.
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BLOG POST: “‘So glorious a gleam, over dale and down’” by Eleanor Parker: Medievalist Eleanor Parker shares two medieval English carols (text only; the original music does not survive) about the visit of the magi, a popular theme in that era. She translates them into modern English and provides commentary.
Maryam and Isa (Mary and Jesus), miniature from a Falnama, Mughal India, 1550–1600. Opaque paint, gold, and silver on paper, 49 × 35 cm. Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam, Netherlands, Inv. 07180329.
This delicate painting is from an Islamic manuscript made in India during the Mughal era. It shows Mary sitting outside with her son, Jesus, on her lap, whose flaming halo identifies him as a prophet. Enclosed by a gate, they are seated on a mat, and Jesus hands his mother a fruit that looks to me like a pomegranate—though a date would cohere better with the Qur’an’s Nativity account (19:25–26). Verdant pink hills rise up behind them, as does a palm tree, under which sits a pitcher of water. From the left, an anthropomorphized sun gazes down on the sacred pair. The inscriptions are in Persian.
Like Christians, Muslims revere Jesus—his birth is recounted in the Qur’an 19:16–34 and 3:45–53, and in that book he is also described as the Messiah, the Word of God, and the Spirit of God—but unlike Christians, Muslims do not regard Jesus as divine.
Saint Joseph at the Nativity, ca. 1100, mosaic detail from Daphni Monastery, Haidari (outside Athens), Greece [ view full scene ]
After the Wise Men went, and the strange star Had faded out, Joseph the father sat Watching the sleeping Mother and the Babe, And thinking stern, sweet thoughts the long night through.
“Ah, what am I, that God has chosen me To bear this blessed burden, to endure Daily the presence of this loveliness, To guide this Glory that shall guide the world?
“Brawny these arms to win Him bread, and broad This bosom to sustain Her. But my heart Quivers in lonely pain before that Beauty It loves—and serves—and cannot understand!”
from The Frozen Grail and Other Poems by Elsa Barker (Duffield & Company, 1910)
Elsa Barker (1869–1954) was a novelist, short story writer, and poet from New England. She lived for extended periods in London and Paris and was a member of the Theosophical Society.
Jacob Riis (Danish American, 1849–1914), In the Home of an Italian Rag-Picker, Jersey Street, ca. 1890. Photograph, 7 15/16 × 9 3/4 in. (20.2 × 24.7 cm).
My soul magnifies the poor the sore the raw and my spirit rejoices in God my downcast my outcast my twig-bone wrong caste for He regards the low estate the no-go estate the empty plate and squats there with those generations.
For at Whose Name the cosmos shakes and canyons quake sought sanctuary within a womb a young girl’s chaste, unopened room a sparse, unblemished catacomb and holy is He amongst the lame.
His mercy is on those who fear Him hear Him those near Him in desert flapping bivouac or dehydrated barrio.
The night sky rolled out by His arm, the preening proud ignore His balm and slink towards the warlock charm of their small ambitions; and those on thrones end up alone replaced by fly-pecked innocents.
He only eats with the hungry, and if they don’t, He too refrains; and as for the rich – a table cannot be found for them.
My soul magnifies the poor the sore the raw and my spirit rejoices in God my outcast.
Stewart Henderson is a poet, song lyricist, and broadcaster. His children’s poems, taken from his three best-selling children’s collections (Poetry Emotion, All Things Weird and Wonderful, and Who Left Grandad at the Chip Shop?), are included in the UK’s national education curriculum. As a song lyricist, the music magazines Q and Mojo place his lyrics alongside those of Randy Newman and Radiohead. And as an award-winning presenter and producer of many documentaries for BBC network radio, he continues in the grand tradition, established by the likes of Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis, and others, of leading poets being commissioned to make primetime programs for Britain’s national broadcaster. Liverpool-born but long since residing on the southwest fringes of London, Henderson has been a regular participant, since its inception in 1974, in the Greenbelt Festival, an annual summer event in England dedicated to the arts, faith, and justice, for which Henderson served as a board director for twelve years.
This panting land hawks up roadblocks over ground hell-bent against the premise of a path. Desert of rock, not dunes. Hot wind rattling leaves of a distant, lone acacia tree, scraggly signpost pointing everyway into the craggy, cave- laden wilderness. Boulders big enough to cast a shadow one might shelter in, or try, in the sun-fried afternoon. The grade grows steep as the valleys deepen like the dark of death. Runnels of loosened smaller rocks where rain must once have rushed— rain, in such a place.
What wildness welcomes a road? What valley straightens its spine, what mountain stoops from its jeweled throne? But look: a path flat and straight through the jagged crags and ravines. A route between two backwaters— road enough for a man to walk beside a donkey, on which might ride a woman with child— from Nazareth away to Bethlehem. A way.
Brent Newsom is a poet from central Oklahoma. He is a recipient of the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award in poetry from the organization Poets & Writers and the Foley Poetry Prize from America magazine. He wrote the libretto for A Porcelain Doll, an opera based on the life of deaf-blind pioneer Laura Bridgman, and is the author of Love’s Labors (CavanKerry Press, 2015), which was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award in poetry. His poems have also appeared in the Southern Review, the Hopkins Review, Windhover, Relief, and other journals.
Carola Faller-Barris (German, 1964–), Bethlehem, 2009. Pencil on paper on MDF board, 100 × 180 cm. [HT]
LISTEN: “Peace” | Words by Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1879, and Wilfred Owen, 1917 | Music by Peter Bruun, 2017 | Performed by the Svanholm Singers, dir. Sofia Söderberg, on Exclusive, 2019
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut, Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs? When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death,— Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,— Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand. We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,— Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe. He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft, We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours! We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum. No soldier’s paid to kick against His powers. We laughed,—knowing that better men would come, And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite, That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo, He comes to brood and sit.
The text of this choral work by the Danish composer Peter Brunn combines two British poems: “Peace” by Gerard Manley Hopkins and “The Next War” by Wilfred Owen. Let’s look at each one separately, and then together.
“Peace” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut, Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs? When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite, That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo, He comes to brood and sit.
The Jesuit poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) wrote this curtal sonnet on October 2, 1879, after finding out he was reassigned from his role as curate at St. Aloysius’s church in Oxford to curate at St. Joseph’s in the industrial town of Bedford Leigh, near Manchester. He was apprehensive about this move to a place he described as “very gloomy” and unclean. The following decade, the last of his life, he would be plagued by melancholic dejection, which his later poems reflect. In addition to the internal disquiet he was experiencing in the fall of 1879, there was also an external lack of peace, as Great Britain was at war on three fronts—in southern Africa (against the Zulu kingdom), Afghanistan, and Ireland.
The speaker of the poem addresses Peace, an elusive dove, begging him to come settle down to nest, to incubate his eggs. “Brooding” here, writes J. Nathan Matias, is not a morose act but a generative, warmly creative one, birthing life.
Though the dove appears in scripture as a symbol of God the Spirit, in the last three lines of this poem he could be God the Son, the Prince of Peace. The people waited for generations upon generations for his arrival. And when he came, he was not all talk. He came with serious work to do; he came to hatch a newborn world.
This poem expresses yearning for peace in our hearts and in our lands—a permanent, holistic peace that only Christ can bring.
“The Next War” by Wilfred Owen
“War’s a joke for me and you, While we know such dreams are true.” —Siegfried Sassoon
Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death,— Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,— Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand. We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,— Our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe. He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed Shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft, We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours! We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum. No soldier’s paid to kick against His powers. We laughed,—knowing that better men would come, And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
One of the premier poets of World War I, Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) was a British soldier whose poems lament the horrors of trench and gas warfare. His cynicism and transparency about war stood in stark contrast to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets.
Owen wrote “The Next War” while being treated for “shell shock” (PTSD) at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh; he sent it in a letter to his mother dated September 25, 1917, writing the following week that he wanted her to show it to his youngest brother, Colin—for him “to read, mark, learn.” Owen was discharged from the hospital two months later and returned to the front lines of France, where he was killed in action on November 4, 1918, a week before the armistice, at age twenty-five.
He opens his ironic-toned sonnet with an epigraph from “A Letter Home” by Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow war poet he met at Craiglockhart, who became a friend and a mentor to him. (Bruun omits the epigraph in his choral work so that there’s a seamless transition between poems.) “Dreams will triumph, though the dark / Scowls above me,” Sassoon writes earlier in his poem, a poem that acknowledges the bleakness of war but, imagining the rebirth of a friend slain in battle, clings to the hope that it will soon be over and we can laugh it off.
Owen undercuts the optimism and solace in these lines with what follows in his own poem. The speaker of “The Next War”—which it’s pretty clear is the poet himself—personifies Death as a comrade whose intimate presence is normal among soldiers. He spits bullets, coughs shrapnel, and breathes stinking odors, and yet they ally themselves with him, sing Death’s song, go with him into battle.
Soldiers only delude themselves if they think they fight against Death, Owen asserts; they fight with him. Their nations’ governments will say they’re heroes, taking up arms to save lives and secure peace, but Owen rejects the idea that there’s anything noble, glorious, or effective about war. Soldiers kill men “for flags”—merely serving national interests—and their doing so never puts an end to war but only leads to another.
By bringing together these two texts, sandwiching Owen between Hopkins, Bruun gives a more hopeful framing to Owen’s disillusioned reflections on war, ending with the final image of a brooding dove. I like how the two poems play off one another. For example, Hopkins’s rhetorical question of “What pure peace allows / . . . the death of [peace]?” stands in starker relief when read in conjunction with Owen’s criticism of the ostensible rationale for war.
Bruun still honors Owen’s experience of being made far too familiar with death, his endurance of mortar blasts and mustard gas and all-around carnage, to no apparent end. Owen’s text starts at 2:11 of the video, where a menacing, march-like cadence enters. We feel the anxiety and the darkness of battle. The specificity of the poem resists us metaphorizing war—that is, applying the poem to a situation of inner turmoil (battling inner demons) only. This is physical combat between nations, which, of course, has severe psychological repercussions on the participants.
But at 5:33 the hushed tones of Hopkins return. Bruun had been attracted to Hopkins’s poem “Peace” for some time. In 2010 he wrote a setting of it for solo voice and flute, clarinet, horn, percussion, glockenspiel, violin, violoncello, and contrabass, and in 2016 he published a new setting, with Owens now inserted, as the second in a five-song cycle called Wind Walks for mixed choir and accompaniment, all five texts taken from Hopkins. He then adapted the song for the male-voice chamber choir the Svanholm Singers from Sweden, which is what I feature here.
The pointed and repeated “When” at the opening of Bruun’s piece, a word that Hopkins repeats three times in his poem, is powerful, an echo of the familiar biblical refrain, “How long, O Lord?” If we read Peace as Christ, then the poem is a prayer, asking Christ to come home to us, to our world—to spread his wings over it and nurture it back to life.
In Hebrew thought, shalom, “peace,” is not a passive thing, merely the absence of war. It’s the active presence of God and an all-encompassing state of completeness, soundness, health, safety, and prosperity.
Shalom is what we long for, especially during Advent. It’s what scripture promises will come someday—but now, its lack is keenly felt. It may occasionally flit and hover nearby, but then it flies off again.
As the church, may we embrace “Patience exquisite, / That plumes to Peace thereafter,” as we await Christ’s return, in the meantime preparing his way through acts of righteousness and reconciliation.
This is the third installment of my annual “25 Poems for Christmas” series. Included too, on the front end, are poems for Advent, the four-week season of preparation, hope, and expectation leading up to Christmas.
1. “Advent (III)” by W. H. Auden, from For the Time Being: Voiced by the Chorus, who cry out from “a dreadful wood / Of conscious evil,” this is the third section of part 1 of Auden’s book-length Christmas poem in nine parts, For the Time Being—“the only direct treatment of sacred subjects I shall ever attempt,” he said. He wrote the poem in 1941–42. He had originally conceived it as the libretto of an oratorio that Benjamin Britten would write the music for, but the text turned out to be too complex, and Britten abandoned the project. The final two lines of this section set us up for the seemingly impossible feat of divine incarnation: “Nothing can save us that is possible: / We who must die demand a miracle.”
3. “O Orient Light” by James Ryman: Loosely influenced by the O Antiphons (a set of short chants used in medieval Advent liturgies), this Middle English lyric is by the fifteenth-century Franciscan friar James Ryman of Canterbury; it’s one of 166 sacred poems he published in a 1492 collection. Each stanza consists of one rhyme repeated six times, and the Latin refrain translates to “O Christ, king of the nations, / O life of the living.” The fourth stanza is a standout, connecting the salvation wrought by Christ to the healing properties of plants: “O Jesse root, most sweet and sote, / In rind and root most full of bote, / To us be bote, bound hand and foot, / O vita viventium.”
Source: Cambridge University Library, MS Ee. 1.12; compiled in The Early English Carols, ed. Richard Leighton Greene, 2nd ed., revised and enlarged (The Clarendon Press, 1977). Public Domain.
Henk Helmantel (Dutch, 1945–), Nieuw Leven II (New Life II), 1999 (after the 1972 original that was stolen). Oil on canvas, 27 × 24 cm.
4.“Merger Poem”by Judy Chicago: “Merger Poem” is an aspiration that artist Judy Chicago wrote to accompany her 1979 monumental artwork The Dinner Party, a celebration of the richness of women’s heritage, expressed as place settings around a table, that is housed at the Brooklyn Museum. Her vision in the poem is not theistic, at least not explicitly so, but she uses the language of “Eden,” and her descriptions evoke passages from Isaiah about a future harmony, a merging of heaven and earth, in which justice and equity are achieved at last—not to mention the strong eschatological tones that feasting has in Christianity. Each line begins with “And then,” cumulatively generating a longing in the reader for “then” to arrive.
5.“truth”by Gwendolyn Brooks: “And if sun comes / How shall we greet him?” the speaker asks at the opening of this poem. The sun here represents truth, revelation, illumination, which we may seek with weeping and prayer but which can be dreadful when it actually comes. It’s often more comfortable to stay asleep in the dark than to confront the stark brightness of day. But oh, what we miss when we do! Gwendolyn Brooks uses the pronoun “him” for the sun, and it’s easy to read the poem Christologically: you can read it in the sense of any of Christ’s three comings—as a baby in Bethlehem, in personal, inner ways (he reveals himself, and seeks entrance, to human hearts), or as a king and judge at the end of time. Did you catch the reference to Revelation 3:20?
Source: Annie Allen (Harper & Row, 1949); compiled in Blacks (Third World Press, 1987)
P. Solomon Raj (Indian, 1921–2019), Waiting for My Lord, batik, published in Living Flame and Springing Fountain (ISPCK, 1993)
6. “Advent” by Mary Jo Salter: In this poem a mother and daughter are building a gingerbread house when a wintry gust tears a shutter on their actual house off its hinges, the shock of the thud causing, inside, a gingerbread wall to split. I think “house,” here, could be a metaphor for a faith structure; a house of belief. Shutters are doing a lot of work in the text: one falls off in a storm, and the daughter’s Advent calendar consists of twenty-five shutters, one opened each day until Christmas to reveal a Bible verse or narrative scene.
I’m not quite sure how to interpret the poem overall, but it seems to be addressing themes of (in)stability, brokenness and repair, the desire to believe versus the impulse to shut out belief, openness (“The house cannot be closed”), (dis)enchantment, the mother-child bond, and safety and danger (the Christmas story, like faith itself, characterized by both). I can’t decide if the “blank” in the final tercet sounds hopeful or bleak: does it connote possibility or lack? And is the mother suggesting in the final line (a repurposing of the final line from stanza 15) that what’s most real to her is not Mary and the baby Jesus but herself and her own child, right there in that moment?—or is she finding a point of kinship with Mother Mary in the love she feels for her offspring?
7. “Nativity”by Li-Young Lee: “What is the world?” asks a little boy in the darkness; and again as an adult. A poem of spiritual questing, Li-Young Lee’s “Nativity” deals with existential questions, ending with a tercet that evokes Isaac Watts’s famous carol line “Let every heart prepare him room.” Within us we must make a manger, a “safe place,” to receive the wild God.
8.“Nazareth” by Drew Jackson: Ancient Nazareth, where Jesus grew up, was an insignificant village that many believed no good could come out of (see John 1:46). This poem by public theologian Drew Jackson accentuates Jesus’s origins there, his identity as a “southsider” (Nazareth is in southern Galilee). Today some urban neighborhoods on the “South Side” are disparaged, their residents dismissed as poor and lacking education and potential. God chose to incarnate in a rural neighborhood with a similar reputation, not simply dropping in and then leaving but, as the second person of the Trinity, being formed and nurtured in that environment. “Nazareth” is from Jackson’s debut poetry collection, in which he works his way through the first eight chapters of Luke’s Gospel, drawing out the theme of liberation and making contemporary connections.
9. “The Visitation”by Calvin B. LeCompte Jr.: The poet imagines the fields that Mary passes on her way to her cousin Elizabeth’s house joining in the Magnificat, praising the Savior in her womb.
10.“My Darling” by Alexandra Barylski: Mary and Joseph are cuddling in bed as she reflects on the divine interventions that brought and kept them together. The poem references the legend, originating in the second-century Protoevangelium of James and repeated in the seventh-century Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, that Joseph was chosen to wed Mary when from his staff, submitted to the high priest along with those of other single men, there miraculously emerged a dove. Mary expresses appreciation for Joseph’s “visionary love,” patience, and courage in their relationship, his spiritual leadership and support.
Source: Reformed Journal, May 11, 2021
Nicholas Mynheer (British, 1958–), Annunciation, 2017. Oil on handmade paper, 20 × 20 cm.
11. “A Blessing for the New Baby” by Luci Shaw: The speakers of this poem give a lovely benediction over Christ—preincarnate and then embryonic in the first stanza, then out of the womb in the second and third.
12.“Love’s Delights” by Meister Eckhart, rendered by Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows: The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart didn’t write poetry, but many of his sermons have a poetic quality to them, so contemporary poet Mark S. Burrows and writer Jon M. Sweeney, working from an English translation of the Middle High German by Frank Tobin, reworked select excerpts into verse. Adapted from a sermon Meister Eckhart preached on Isaiah 60:1, this poem meditates on the downward movement of love that raises up.
13. “Word Become Flesh” by Seth Wieck: Pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing take a toll on the body. Voiced by Mary, this poem highlights the bodily realities of Jesus’s first coming—Mary swollen, bruised, cracked, and bleeding. She was wounded for our transgressions, in the sense that she endured kicks to the ribs, postpartum hemorrhoids, etc., in order to bring forth our Savior, and by these wounds, because they gave life to Jesus, our healing was made possible. The last sentence is a zinger. Mary gives (physical) birth to Jesus, and he gives (spiritual) birth to her.
14.“Prince of Peace” by Brian Volck: The poet provides his own introduction to this poem on his website: “Octavian Augustus, first emperor of Rome, was known by many titles, including Divi Filius (Son of God) and Princeps Pacis (Prince of Peace). An inscription in Asia Minor states that Augustus’s birth ‘has been for the whole world the beginning of the gospel (εύαγγέλιον) concerning him.’ How strange, then, to use the same names for a contemporaneous but obscure Palestinian Jew, whose understanding of peace, politics, and power was so radically different. How strange to have so long diluted the scandal of the gospel (good news) with accommodations to an Augustan vision of a peace built on the use or threat of lethal violence. Here’s a Christmas poem calling attention to that contrast in a conscious act against forgetting.”
15.“The Burning Babe” by Robert Southwell: Consisting of sixteen lines in iambic heptameter, this poem by the Jesuit martyr-saint Robert Southwell [previously] relates a mystical vision of the Christ child, who appears to the narrator on a cold winter’s night, enflamed and hovering in midair. The poem develops the metaphor of the love of Christ as a fiery furnace that both warms and purifies.
Source: St Peter’s Complaint, and Other Poems (London, 1595). Public Domain.
William Hart McNichols (American, 1949–), Holy Poet-Martyr St. Robert Southwell and the Burning Babe, 2015. Acrylic on wood. [purchase reproduction]
16.“Advent 1966” by Denise Levertov: This poem is shocking in its horror. Written in 1966, it picks up Southwell’s image of the Burning Babe and transposes it to the napalmed villages of Vietnam, where children were being physically (not symbolically or ethereally, as in Southwell’s poem) set on fire by chemical weapons deployed by the US military. Denise Levertov [previously], who was an antiwar activist as well as a poet, uses repetition to strong effect, conveying a sense of the seemingly relentless carnage (the war produced an estimated two million civilian casualties, more than half the total number). Though addressing a specific historical event, this elegy for the innocent provokes us to consider where similar atrocities are happening today.
Source: To Stay Alive (New Directions, 1971); compiled in Making Peace, ed. Peggy Rosenthal (New Directions, 2006)
17.“Christmas Eve”by Christina Rossetti: The Victorian poet Christina Rossetti [previously] opens this lyric with two paradoxes that characterize Christmas—bright darkness and chilly warmth—referencing the general mood of cheer and comfort that coexists with the bleak English midwinter. Why this mirth? Because “Christmas bringeth Jesus, / Brought for us so low.” Jesus was brought down from heaven in the Incarnation, but he would be brought lower still: his spirits sunken in Gethsemane, his body buried in a grave. The second stanza evokes a wedding: dressed in a bridal gown of gauzy snow, earth receives her heavenly Bridegroom.
Source: Time Flies: A Reading Diary (London, 1885); compiled in The Complete Poems (Penguin, 2001). Public Domain.
18. “Hill Christmas” by R. S. Thomas: In a poor rural Welsh village, parishioners make their way across snowy fields, weather-beaten, on Christmas to feed their bodies and souls with a snow-white bread loaf and crimson wine. In the celebration of the Eucharist, they hear love cry “in their heart’s manger.” Then they return to the day’s chores. I think the last line refers to a wayside crucifix.
Source: Laboratories of the Spirit (Macmillan, 1975); compiled in Collected Poems, 1945–1990 (Dent, 1993)
19.“back in the day” by Carl Winderl: In a practice known as “settinglambs on,” when a baby lamb dies in birth, sheep farmers will often take a live lamb (an orphan, or a twin or triplet from another ewe) and cover it in the skin of the deceased one so that, when the grieving mother smells the familiar scent of her deceased offspring, she accepts the lamb as her own. In Carl Winderl’s poem, Mother Mary reflects on that practice and has a premonition of a dead lamb.
Source: Christian Century, December 27, 2023
20.“Hymn 4 on the Nativity of Christ” by Ephrem the Syrian: St. Ephrem, a church father from the fourth century, wrote his theology in verse and is one of the most significant Early Christian hymnists. His Nativity hymns are my favorite; I’m particularly struck in Hymn IV by his meditation on how the Christ who suckles at Mary’s breast also gives suck to the whole world. “He is the Living Breast of living breath,” as Kathleen E. McVey translates the Syriac.
Source: Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns, trans. Kathleen E. McVey (Classics of Western Spirituality) (Paulist Press, 1989)
Maria lactans, late 18th century. Fresco, Church of Narga Selassie, Dek Island, Lake Tana, Ethiopia. Photo: Alan Davey.
21. “Nativity” by Scott Cairns: This is the first in a pair of ekphrastic poems called “Two Icons,” in which the poet, who is Greek Orthodox, describes an icon from his home prayer corner. The first three stanzas engage in constructive wordplay: Jesus is wrapped in swaddling bands by his mother, and she is rapt—enraptured, wholly absorbed—by him. She holds him in her gaze and in her hands, and is beholden to him. Icons are about just that: beholding Christ and the sacred mysteries and deepening our affection for the One who holds us in affection. In Nativity icons our gaze is directed to “the core / where all the journeys meet, appalling crux and hallowed cave and womb,” where we are beckoned, like the magi, to bow before the incarnate God.
22.“Star of the Nativity” by Joseph Brodsky: The Nobel Prize–winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was born into a Jewish family, but he was captivated by the story of Jesus’s birth and wrote many poems about it. The final stanza of this one gives us the unique perspective of the Star of Bethlehem, looking down—the Father’s beaming pride.
Source: Nativity Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001)
23. “Wise Women Also Came” by Jan Richardson: The Gospel of Matthew tells us that when Jesus was born, wise men came from the east to worship him. But wise women came too, Jan Richardson surmises. They came during Mary’s labor—midwives assisting with the birth. They came with lamps, fresh water, and blankets.
Jan Richardson (American, 1967–), Wise Women Also Came, 1995. Collage. [purchase reproduction]
24.“Green River Christmas” by John Shea: Theologian and storyteller John Shea reflects on how, after experiencing something scary or unpleasant (like getting a shot or a teeth cleaning), mothers often give their child a treat. Christmas is a kind of supreme treat after the penitential season of Advent, during which we confronted the state of our spiritual health and remedied any shortfalls. Think, too, of the liturgy of (somber) confession and (sweet) pardon every Sunday at church, a prelude to the feast of bread and wine. At the Lord’s Table, we are fed—the gifts of God for the people of God. The Eucharist is the subtext of the final stanza, where Shea describes the presentation of Jesus in the temple forty days after his birth. There he is received by “the long-starved arms / of Simeon and Anna.” They had hungered for salvation, endured a long period of waiting; now they are filled.
25.“Taking Down the Tree” by Jane Kenyon: “Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.” This poem is about the passing of time—the death of another year—and the glumness that often sets in after the holidays are over, but it’s also about the storage of memories. In many households, Christmas ornaments are a multigenerational collection of memories. As with hanging them on the tree, taking them off and packing them away is a ritual that may prompt us to revisit certain past experiences or periods in our life. After we unplug the stringed lights and wrap up the baubles for safekeeping, then what? How will we inhabit the twelve months until next Christmas?
VIDEO MEDITATION: “Yearning and Promise (Advent),” dir. Lauralee Farrer (2017): The first in the seven-part Liturgical Meditations series produced by Fuller Studio (a resource center affiliated with Fuller Theological Seminary), this four-minute video features Advent scripture readings by Fuller alum Paul Mpishi (MDiv, ’17) in his native Swahili, set to beautiful cinematography by Lindsey Sheets, Timothy Kay, and Jordan McMahon.
“Yearning and Promise” explores Advent and the expectant longing for the birth of Christ through cityscapes, wilderness, and water from Chicago and Malibu, with scriptures drawn from Isaiah 40 and Matthew 1. The audio for this video is in Swahili with subtitles in English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Korean—a poetic way to represent the primary tongues of our community. . . .
The liturgical calendar spans the life of Christ in a single year—from anticipation (Advent), to hope (Christmas), to transcendence (Epiphany), to lament (Lent), to redemption (Easter), to the birth of the church (Pentecost), and through long, numbered days (Ordinary Time) back to Advent. The liturgical meditation series to which this video belongs relies on nature to tell the story of God, accompanied by scriptures traditional to each season.
Piero della Francesca (Italian, ca. 1415–1492), Madonna del Parto, after 1457. Detached fresco, 100 × 80 in. (260 × 203 cm). Musei Civici Madonna del Parto, Monterchi, Italy.
>> “Lord, Remind Me” by Jon and Valerie Guerra: From their album It’s Almost Christmas! Jon Guerra writes in the YouTube video description about how most days, hope feels naive; about the narratives in which we misplace our trust; about how Jesus, in his coming, tells a different narrative and brings our hope to fruition.
At Christmastime, Guerra writes,
Christians . . . celebrat[e] the arrival of a “shoot from Jesse’s stump.” It’s a transgressive celebration of fragility and vulnerability. We wanted a fully matured tree—God gave us a shoot coming from a stump. We wanted a strong leader—God gave us a vulnerable baby. We wanted a strength that dominates—God gave us a weakness that submits. We wanted victory—God gave us defeat, destitution, death.
How is this defying of our expectations hopeful? Well, theology at its atomic level says this: God is love. God doesn’t love as a decisive action, as though tomorrow the decision could be reversed. God is, always, love.
That love is not only towards humanity—it becomes humanity. It is not only compassionate towards the broken—it becomes the broken. It is unconditional love that becomes death—and in so doing, defeats it. It defies our expectations only to exceed to them.
So here’s to remembering hope in God’s unconditional love towards the desolate stumpiness of ourselves and the world this season—and to believing that this is not the end of the story. Lord, remind me.
>> “His Name Is Jesus” by Keiko Ying: Released this month on YouTube, this children’s Advent song by Keiko Ying celebrates Jesus as Emmanuel, “God with us.” Here is the lead sheet. The drawings and animation in the music video are by the songwriter’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Clara. [HT: Global Christian Worship]
The RFP is open to interested individual artists, artist collaboratives, church leaders, scholars/theologians, arts-affiliated organizations, faith-based nonprofit organizations, or institutions who reside or operate in the United States. Eligible applicants may submit proposals with requests ranging from $50,000 to $250,000 that may be used over one year. Chosen applications will then be requested to submit a full grant proposal for the competitive 2025 Spring Grant Program.
The 2025 grant-seeking theme is “Performing Shalom.” Applicants are invited to reflect the theme in their project or program, but it is not a requirement when applying for a grant. Please click here for more information.
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SUBSTACK POST: “On Artists, Kings, and Mending the Multiverse” by Houston Coley: A wise and rousing reflection after the US presidential election. Houston Coley is an Atlanta-based documentary filmmaker, video essayist (YouTube @houston-coley), podcaster, and writer on TV and film, who “cultivat[es] spiritual imagination around art and pop culture,” as one person put it.
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POEM: “What to Do After Voting” by James A. Pearson: The poet James Pearson shared this poem from his collection The Wilderness That Bears Your Name (Goat Tail Press, 2024) on Instagram on Election Day last Tuesday. He writes, “What’s driving [all our voting] are two things: Our common needs for love, safety, and belonging. And our often conflicting attempts to meet them. Rumi wrote: ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.’ History is offering us a fork in the road. Let’s turn towards what we can do—vote. Then let’s find each other in that field and do the long, slow work of building a world where everyone has access to the love, safety, and belonging they need.” [HT: Amy Peterson]
He writes further on his website, “This poem doesn’t pretend to be a full prescription for what our country needs. It’s just my way of acknowledging that all electoral choices are imperfect. Because even more important is what happens between elections—the long, slow work of building a culture of love and justice for our politicians to live up to. And the better we do that work, the better our options will be next time elections come around.”
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SONG: “Apsáalooke Praise Song,” sung by Sarah Redwolf (née Bullchief):Sarah Redwolf is a member of Crow Nation in Montana and a follower of the Jesus Way whose Apsáalooke name is Baawaalatbaaxpesh (Holy Word). Here she sings a praise song by her grandmother Xáxxeáakinnee (Rides the Painted Horse). The Apsáalooke lyrics are below; I couldn’t find an English translation, and the artist has not yet returned a message I sent ten days ago, but I believe the song was written with Christian intent, as Christianity has been in Sarah’s family for generations. Her father, Duane Bull Chief, is a traveling Pentecostal preacher and the leader, with his wife, Anita, of Bull Chief Ministries, and Sarah has often led worship for church services and other Christian gatherings. What a beautiful voice!
In conversation with Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, Milliner explores contact points between Christianity and Indigenous North American art, symbol, ritual, and history. The discussion touches on pre-contact petroglyphs carved into Teaching Rocks near Peterborough, Ontario (one of them, a sun figure, quite possibly representing Gitchie Manitou, the Great Spirit—Christ incarnate?), the Sun Dance (which many Native Christians interpret as a prophecy of the Crucifixion), the Ghost Dance (about resurrection and renewal), the Mishipeshu (an underwater panther often representing death, which some Native Americans used to characterize white settlers), the Thunderbird, Black Elk’s vision of a mysterious figure with holes in the palms of his hands, and the cross as an axial tree conjoining the above and below worlds. Just as ancient Hebrew culture contained pointers to Christ, so too, Milliner argues, do the Indigenous cultures of North America. Artists, preachers, and visionaries from among the Ojibwe, Kiowa, Lakota, and other peoples are “our North American Virgils,” he says—Virgil being a Latin poet whose Fourth Eclogue, written around 40 BCE, prophesied the birth of a divine savior who would usher in a golden age.
Sun Dance Scene, Teton Lakota, Central Plains or Northern Plains, Wyoming, ca. 1885. Muslin cloth with watercolor paint, 36 × 91 1/2 in. (91.5 × 232.5 cm). Art Institute of Chicago. See 32:55 of Milliner’s lecture.Vision of a Kiowa man named Fiqi (Eater), received during the revived Ghost Dance, of Christ blessing the ceremony, collected by ethnologist James Mooney, ca. 1890. Pencil and crayon drawing from MS 2538, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. See 38:49 of Milliner’s lecture and pages 11–12, 130, 142–44 of his book The Everlasting People.See 59:24 of Milliner’s lecture and page 8 of his book The Everlasting People
There’s much more I could say, as there’s certainly more nuance and complexity to this, but instead let me simply refer you to Milliner’s lecture and finely footnoted book. There’s also a great audio interview with Milliner about The Everlasting People from November 2021, conducted by Jason Micheli for the Crackers and Grape Juice podcast.
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VIDEO: Chapel service led by Terry Wildman, November 6, 2023, Azusa Pacific University, California: Earlier this year I got to have dinner with Terry Wildman [previously] and his wife, Darlene, who form the Nammy Award–winning musical duo RainSong. It was exciting to hear all about their work with Native InterVarsity and other projects. They live in Maricopa, Arizona, on the traditional lands of the Pima and Tohono O’odham peoples. Wildman, who has both Ojibwe and Yaqui ancestry, was the lead translator, general editor, and project manager of the First Nations Version: An Indigenous Bible Translation of the New Testament. (The nativity narrative from the FNV translation of the Gospel of Luke, you may be interested to know, was adapted into an illustrated book titled Birth of the Chosen One: A First Nations Retelling of the Christmas Story, which just released this fall.)
Last November Wildman led a worship service for Azusa Pacific University students. Here are the key elements:
The opening three minutes are an animated video of the gospel story, narrated by Terry Wildman to a flute accompaniment by Darlene Wildman
8:12: Blessing of the Gabrielino-Tongva people
9:38: The Lord’s Prayer (FNV)
10:57: Sermon: “Worship in Spirit and in Truth” (John 4:1–42)
21:17: Reading of Psalm 8 (FNV)
23:48: Song: “Lift Up Your Heads” by Terry and Darlene Wildman, based on Psalm 24
28:40: Song: “Hoop of Life” by Terry Wildman – Native American powwows often feature hoop dancers, who dance a prayer that Creator will bring harmony and goodwill to all the gathered people. Wildman says, “I look at Jesus and I call him the Great Hooper Dancer. Because he’s the one who ever lives to pray for us, to make intercession for us, and when he dances his prayer, he is bringing harmony and balance to the whole world, to the whole universe. And if we follow him, if we give our hearts to him, he will produce that harmony and balance in us and with each other.”
35:56: Song: “Nia:wen” (Mohawk for “Thank You”) by Jonathan Maracle of Broken Walls
Art & Theology 