Annunciation – Art & Theology

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

December 16, 2025December 16, 2025 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

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

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

I eagerly await the remaining five poems!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weichbrodt’s final Advent 2025 post, on love, will be published this Saturday.

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SONGS:

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

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

The refrain is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advent, Day 13: Bendita seas, María

December 12, 2025 Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

LOOK: Annunciation by Pablo Sanaguano

Sanaguano, Pablo_Annunciation — Pablo Sanaguano (Ecuadorian, 1964–), *Annunciation*, 1994. Acrylic on chipboard, 43 × 40 cm. © missio Aachen. [artist’s Facebook page]

In this outdoor Andean Annunciation scene, the angel Gabriel arrives with a gust of wind before Mary, who has a satchel of freshly harvested corn slung over her shoulders. He wears llama or alpaca pants, part of the traditional male dress in the highlands of Ecuador. With his right hand he gestures toward the heavens, and with his left he gestures toward her, as if to say, “Heaven’s coming down to earth—God wants to be made human in you.”

He smiles. She smiles. Her face is illumined by beams of divine grace. She extends her arms to embrace her new vocation as Mother of God.

LISTEN: “Bendita seas, María” (Blessed Are You, Mary) by Ariel Glaser, on Tercer Milenio, 1997 | Performed by Jimena Muñoz with Brother Alex, 2020

En un silencio profundo tejías plegarias
a un Dios que escuchaba tus simples palabras,
pequeña María entregada a su amor.
Y en una tarde tranquila rompiendo el silencio,
las alas de un ángel, sonaban al tiempo
que te saludaba de parte de Dios.

Estribillo 1:
¡Bendita seas, María, entre toda mujer!
¡Has encontrado gracia a los ojos de Dios!
María, Madre suplicante, ayúdame
también a escucharlo a Él.

Fue la palabra más dulce que tocó la tierra,
la que te propuso cumplir la promesa
de que nacería nuestro Salvador.
«Hágase en mí como has dicho;» respondiste al ángel,
y el Santo Espíritu descendió al instante.
Te habías convertido en Madre de Dios.

Estribillo 2:
Bendita seas María, hija del Padre,
Esposa del Espíritu, Madre del Emanuel.
María, Madre de Jesús, ayúdame,
también a decir amén.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION (my own):

In profound silence you wove prayers
to a God who heard your simple words,
little Mary, surrendered as you were to his love.
And on a quiet afternoon, breaking the silence,
the wings of an angel sounded
as he greeted you on behalf of God.

Refrain 1:
Blessed are you, Mary, among all women!
You have found favor in the eyes of God!
Mary, supplicating mother, help me
to listen to him too.

It was the sweetest word that touched the earth,
the one that offered you the promise
of the birth of our Savior.
“Let it be done to me according to your word,” you replied to the angel,
and the Holy Spirit descended instantly.
You had become the Mother of God.

Refrain 2:
Blessed are you, Mary, daughter of the Father,
wife of the Spirit, mother of Emmanuel.
Mary, mother of Jesus, help me
also to say amen.

This song marvels at Mary’s unique calling while recognizing that we, too, are called to say yes and amen (“let it be”) to God’s will in our lives, which includes being filled with Christ.

The first two lines of the first refrain combine Elizabeth’s exclamation to Mary in Luke 1:42 (“Blessed are you among women!”) with Gabriel’s declaration in Luke 1:30 (“You have found favor with God”).

The epithets in the second refrain highlight Mary’s relationship to the three persons of the Trinity. She is a child of God the Father, as we all are. But she was also wed to God’s Spirit, experiencing a unique and nonsexual union that resulted in the conception of Jesus, the Son of God. Jesus received his flesh from Mary, and she mothered him from his birth to his death. The title Theotokos—God-bearer, or Mother of God—was formally affirmed for Mary at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and is held true by all three branches of Christianity.

The songwriter, Ariel Glaser, is from Argentina. He describes himself as “a catechist who sings,” teaching Catholic doctrines in schools and churches through traditional methods and song. He and his wife are members of the Convivencia con Dios (CcD), a charismatic Catholic movement made up of both laypeople and religious, both men and women, responding to Jesus’s call in John 17: “Father, may they all be one as you and I are one!” Follow Glaser on Facebook.

The singer, Jimena Muñoz, has been singing and playing guitar since age twelve. In addition to making gospel-centered music, she is also a professor of sacred sciences (a field in Catholic institutions that includes theology, canon law, philosophy, biblical studies, church history, and liturgy), and a pastoral coordinator for CEF (Centro Educativo Franciscano) La Rioja.

Twelve Advent Stations by Mark Cazalet

December 11, 2025December 12, 2025 Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

Mark Cazalet (b. 1964) is a contemporary artist based in London whose work centers on color and balances empiricism and lyricism. He works across media—painting, drawing, printmaking, and (in collaboration with fabricators) stained glass, etched and engraved glass, printed enamel on glass, tapestries, and mosaics. A major part of his career has been fulfilling ecclesiastical commissions and making sacred art. But all of his work, regardless of subject matter, is shot through with a sacramental impulse.

Last year Cazalet made a series of twelve “Advent Stations” that move circuitously through the story of Jesus’s first coming, marked as it was by mystery, vulnerability, risk, and glory. These include modernized versions of scenes you’d find in traditional Infancy of Christ cycles, such as the Annunciation to Mary, the Annunciation to the Shepherds, the Dream of the Magi, and the Flight to Egypt, but also new ones, drawing us into the grand sweep—sometimes rushing, sometimes quiet—of gospel hope. “The overarching theme,” he told me, “is pregnancy, birth, nurturing, waiting, escape, migration, and finally, in the mistle thrush’s morning song, the greeting of the new day’s limitless potential.”

The artist’s choice of substrate is unique: He painted his stations in oil on domestic wooden objects, such as bread boards, meat and cheese boards, children’s lunch trays, washboards, chapati rolling boards, and a baker’s peel. By using these ordinary boards mainly from home kitchens, Cazalet further situates the biblical Advent story in the everyday. That many of the boards are used for preparing or serving bread underscores Jesus’s self-declaration as “the living bread that came down from heaven,” whose flesh Christians eat ritually as a means of interabiding (John 6).

Cazalet’s Advent Stations debuted last December at his home church, St Martin’s in Kensal Rise, London, where they were installed one per week from Advent through Candlemas. The project was a collaboration with fellow parishioners Richard Leaf, who wrote a poem for each station, and Pansy Cambell, who calligraphed the poems.

That exhibition spawned interest from Chelmsford Cathedral in Essex, where all the artworks and poems are on display from December 1, 2025, through February 2, 2026. The cathedral is already home to two commissioned works of Cazalet’s: the monumental multipanel painting The Tree of Life and an engraved and etched glass window depicting St. Cedd.

The word “station” in the title of Cazalet’s recent series refers to a stopping place along a route. In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church developed a devotional practice known as the Stations of the Cross, which breaks down the passion of Christ into fourteen distinct episodes fit for contemplation. The idea was that those who could not travel physically to Jerusalem for Lent to walk the Via Dolorosa (the processional route Jesus took to Golgotha) could at least walk the path in spirit, using a series of images as prompts to pause, pray, and reflect.

(Cazalet also made a set of twenty Stations of the Cross in 2024.)

Used by Christians in various denominations, this practice has been adapted for other seasons of the church year. While there are no official Advent Stations or Stations of the Nativity, Cazalet has come up with twelve.

All photos in this article are by the artist and are used with his permission.

Advent Station 1: The Breath of God

A mystical visualization of the Word becoming flesh, the first station has two configurations. In its closed form, it shows the mouth of God blowing through space, the divine breath coalescing around a woman’s uterus to form an embryo, the child who will be called Jesus. Wisps of blue swirl dynamically around this firstborn of new creation.

The triangular shape evokes the Trinity, as the Incarnation was an act involving Father (initiator), Son (enfleshed one), and Holy Spirit (overshadower / inseminating agent).

Advent Station 1. The Breath of God (open) — Mark Cazalet, *Advent Station 1: The Breath of God* (open), 2024

In the exhibition, an attached ribbon instructs viewers, “Lift me.” When you do, the bottom board flips up to reveal a pool of swimming sperm cells, as God created the male gamete needed to make a male child and supernaturally (nonsexually) deposited it into Mary, where it fertilized one of her eggs.

The virginal conception of Christ is a mystery beyond knowing; no amount of scientific head-scratching will bring us closer to understanding the mechanics, nor do we need to. But I like the reminder from this unusual artistic interpretation that all the necessary human genetic material was present—Mary supplying hers, and God supplying the rest. Jesus was not some kind of alien transplanted into a human womb, but rather was made up of all the human stuff we are, and grew by stages inside his mother over a period of nine months. And yet, while fully human, he’s also—marvel of marvels—fully God.

On the round board below, we see that the isolated uterus from the first view belongs to Mary, who lies in bed while Joseph serves as ultrasound technician, shining a light that discloses the still-developing Christ child on a video monitor.

Advent Station 2: John the Baptist on the Beach

The breath/wind motif is subtly carried over into this second Advent station, with sailboats lining the top of the center board.

This scene shows a young John the Baptist playing on the beach, with his parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, lounging in swimsuits under a nearby umbrella. John crouches in the sand, pouring water from a seashell (the implement he uses to baptize Jesus in many traditional paintings, most famously Piero della Francesca’s) onto toy figurines who have queued up for the affusion. The water cuts a mini river through the sand, alluding to the Jordan.

The two side panels, which show a close-up of an open ear and an open mouth, likely refer to, in his prophetic ministry as an adult, John’s hearing the word of God and proclaiming it. His is “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight’” (Mark 1:3). John is regarded as an Advent figure because, by preaching repentance from sin, he prepared the people for the coming of the Messiah.

Advent Station 3: The Annunciation

The Annunciation, portraying the angel Gabriel’s message to Mary that she has been chosen to bear God’s Son, is one of the most frequently depicted biblical scenes of all time. How could any artist possibly make it new?

Cazalet refreshes the encounter by showing Gabriel dipping down headfirst from the heavens, the unconventional orientation perhaps a playful allusion to the topsy-turvy nature of Christ’s kingdom. He reaches across the gap to touch the belly of Mary, a young Black woman in a polka-dot dress who is seated on the floor with her eyes closed, rapt in prayer. This consensual touch is what effects the Incarnation.

Mary wears blue and even exudes a blue aura, blue being her traditional color, associated with heaven (the sky realm) and hope. Gabriel’s skin has a golden sheen—the color of divinity, purity, holiness. The coming together of blue and yellow creates green, symbolizing life, growth, and renewal.

Advent Station 4: Bethlehem Motel

The innkeeper couple in Bethlehem are a cultural invention, biblical scholars tell us, spawned by a misleading English translation of Luke 2:7, which says “there was no room for them [Mary and Joseph] in the inn” (KJV). The Greek word translated “inn,” kataluma, more properly means “guest room”: Because the census had brought many out-of-towners to the area, the guest rooms of Joseph’s relatives were full, but they made space for the pregnant couple in the lower room of the house where animals were kept for the night.

Despite the lack of an innkeeper character in scripture, it has become a popular element in storytelling about the Nativity in art, song, and sermons, as it prompts us to consider whether we are making room for Christ in our busy, overcrowded lives. And not just Christ, but anyone in need—of shelter or other forms of care.

Cazalet shows Mary and Joseph approaching a motel door as the female owner, sympathetic, comes out to greet them. A niche above their heads, hovering like a thought bubble, shows what the couple desires: a place to give birth and to lay their son.

Advent Station 5: The Incarnation (A Blessing Conferred)

The fifth station features an unconventional combination of images. The left board shows Mary lying on her back, holding the wiggly infant Christ above her. She beams with maternal love.

On the right board, an adult Christ, similarly positioned, leans over the dead daughter of the synagogue leader Jairus. “Talitha koum,” Jesus gently instructs, cradling the girl’s head—Aramaic for “Little girl, get up” (Mark 5:41). With his words, she rises back to life.

The central image, a Head of Christ, is painted on a wooden bread plate from Germany—these plates were sometimes also used as church collection plates—whose rim reads, “Gib uns heute unser täglich brot” (Give us this day our daily bread). Carved sheaves of wheat poke out from under Jesus’s pink cloth collar.

“My intention is that Mary’s love for her son as she raised him taught him the care and compassion to want to help a child in extremis,” Cazalet told me. “The man is formed by the mother’s love, and our childhoods set the pattern of our response to others.”

Notice how, from behind the Christ head, the two adjoining boards emerge like wings, suggesting freedom.

Advent Station 6: The Shepherds See the Star

The sixth station portrays the glory of the Lord rippling across the night sky above three shepherds tending their flocks. Content and unassuming, they are gathered round a warm fire when suddenly, an angel appears to announce to them the birth of Christ. One of the shepherds cowers in fear while another gesticulates toward a brightly beaming star in the near distance—rendered with a Tunnock’s milk chocolate tea cake wrapper.

Advent Station 7: The Magi Dreaming

Having followed a star to Jerusalem from their home back east, the magi enter the court of Herod to inquire where they can find the newborn king of the Jews whom the star heralds, to pay him homage. Herod hadn’t heard of such a king, but immediately he feels threatened—“king of the Jews” is his title—and, unbeknown to the visiting dignitaries, decides to crush this young rival. After consulting with Jewish scholars, he discerns Bethlehem as the birthplace. He divulges this information to the magi and asks them to report back once they’ve found the child so that he, too, can honor him. He hides his true motive under a lie.

The magi have a transformative encounter with Jesus in Bethlehem. Falling asleep after that momentous day, they receive a warning from God not to return to Herod. So they avoid him on their way back home.

As in medieval visual treatments of the Dream of the Magi, Cazalet has the magi sharing a bed. (There’s nothing salacious about it—it’s just a compositional practicality, to show the three men in one space, having the same dream at the same time.) Their toes peep out from under the covers. That surface, by the way, is flat—Cazalet skillfully creates the illusion of convexity through painting, suggesting bodies underneath.

Beside the magi’s heads are three small personal objects: earbuds, glasses, and dentures, which allude to the proverbial principle “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” “I was musing if this trinity of pilgrim searchers were perhaps aspects of the one true pilgrim, parts of a single whole disciple,” the artist told me.

Advent Station 8: Herod Syndrome

Thwarted by the magi, Herod fumes with rage. He will not be dethroned by this so-called messiah. So he orders his soldiers to kill all the boys in Bethlehem aged two and under, thinking that Jesus will be among them. In his self-obsession, he cares nothing for the good of the people; he cares only for the consolidation of his own power.

Station 8 is Cazalet’s modern take on the Massacre of the Innocents. At the helm of a computer keyboard is a presidential figure launching a missile on whomever he has deemed the enemy, while other likeminded autocrats—I believe that’s Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and Adolf Hitler—look over his shoulder approvingly, their faces reflected endlessly in mirrors using a technique called mis en abyme (“put in the abyss”). This panel, the transferring surface of a baker’s peel, sits at a height to emphasize the pompousness of rulers like Herod, who see themselves as above others and above the law.

Such an attitude can have dire consequences. “Below we see the devastation of a civilian population, defenceless against the technological onslaught,” Cazalet describes, “and the perpetual streams of migrants fleeing who knows where to be vilified as more foreign mouths to feed.”

The power mania that gripped Herod, that led to his lashing out in violence, is still alive and well today in national and global politics.

Advent Station 9: The Flight to Egypt (Forced Migration)

To protect their son from Herod’s murder decree, Mary and Joseph flee with him across the border to Egypt. Cazalet reimagines their flight through the lens of today’s refugee crisis. In station 9, the Holy Family boards an inflatable raft, braving choppy seawaters in search of asylum. They’re bathed in a menacing red.

On the adjoining panel, border patrol officers, with flashlights and batons, stand on the shore, seeking to bar the entry of strangers into their land.

Advent Station 10: The Exiles Return

Egypt grants refuge to the Holy Family, and they settle there for an undisclosed period of time—until Joseph receives word from an angel that it’s safe to return to their homeland.

Station 10 shows the family arriving at sunset in their beloved Nazareth, all their belongings reduced to what could fit in a single backpack. As they approach a tree-lined boulevard, Jesus clings to his mother’s back, looking behind at where they’ve come from. He has not yet known this town but will come to love it. He will call it home until his ministry beckons him beyond it more than two decades later.

Advent Station 11: Faithful Waiting and Watching (Anna and Simeon)

This is my favorite of all the stations. While the Presentation of Christ in the Temple is standard fare in Christian art—showing Mary handing Jesus to Simeon, a devout Jew interpreted by most artists as a priest, forty days after Jesus’s birth, with Joseph and the prophet Anna standing off to the side—Cazalet isolates the elderly Anna and Simeon, zeroing in on their faithful act of waiting for the Messiah.

Illuminated by candlelight, Anna knits a scarf, communing with God in the solitude, while Simeon fingers a string of prayer beads. Their eyes are weary and downcast, and yet they possess a steadfast hope that their Savior is on his way.

Linking their two spaces is the ark of the covenant, a sacred wooden storage chest plated in gold and topped by two hammered-gold cherubim. Containing the tablets of the law, Aaron’s rod, and a pot of manna, the ark was kept in the holy of holies, the innermost sanctum of the temple, where it signified God’s presence.

Waiting can often feel useless—like nothing’s happening or will ever happen. But Anna and Simeon continued to wait on the Lord, to count on his promise. And finally, before they died, they were granted the grace to see and to hold the One they had so fervently longed for: the Christ, Emmanuel, “God with us.”

Advent Station 12: The Mistle Thrush Greets the New Day

The Advent path we’ve just walked has included an unplanned pregnancy, persecution, and displacement but also miracles, play, and surprise.

Cazalet’s Advent Stations end with a bird in a tree, singing its heart out as a pink and yellow dawn spreads across the sky. The twisted branches become streamers, blowing as if in celebration. (There’s that breath of God again!) Out of the bird’s beak shoots light.

The board that forms the grassy ground is incised with knife marks, perhaps suggesting woundedness—although maybe it’s a turning over of the soil to promote new growth.

The flame-like hues in and around the tree evoke the burning bush of Exodus 3, from which God spoke his name: I AM THAT I AM.

This Advent tree, bare yet lively, calls us to embrace each new day as a gift from the One who is and was and is to come, remembering how Christ came to show us who God is and to feel and heal our brokenness, and he will come again to make all things new.

The Advent Stations by Mark Cazalet, with accompanying poems by Richard Leaf rendered in calligraphy by Pansy Cambell, are on display at Chelmsford Cathedral in eastern England through February 2, 2026. They are available for sale, but until they’re purchased, Cazalet wants to show them in other churches and cathedrals. They’re tentatively scheduled for exhibition in Southwark Cathedral in London during Advent 2026.

25 Poems for Christmas, vol. 4

November 29, 2025December 3, 2025 Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

“One of poetry’s great gifts is to slow us down,” writes Peggy Rosenthal in Praying the Gospels through Poetry. “We’re used to racing ahead as we read, whether it’s a newspaper or an email memo or even an essay: language in these forms propels us forward, urging us to grab up its main points. But poetry doesn’t press ahead so much as hold us still—in the wonder of words crafted to open into another dimension.”

Below are twenty-five poems to “hold us still” this holiday season.

I’ve collected hundreds of Advent and Christmas poems over the past decade, but for this feature one of the selection criteria was that the poem must be freely available online. I chose the number twenty-five because that is standard in most Advent calendars—tools for counting down the days to Christmas. This way, you can choose, if you wish, to bookmark this page and read just one poem a day from December 1 to 25, each one a little treat.

The order progresses, in general, from Advent longing and anticipation to Christmas joy and wonder to post-nativity moments like the presentation in the temple and the visit of the magi.

For previous years’ installments, see volume 1, volume 2, and volume 3.

1. “Advent Madrigal” by Lisa Russ Spaar: I’m not sure I understand this poem, but I like it. A madrigal is a part-song, and this is a song of waiting in simultaneous belief and doubt, of being irresistibly attracted to God’s story while also skeptical of aspects. The speaker compares the moon to a flashlight that a theater usher shines down the aisle to escort folks to their seats. What does it mean that “the treetops sough // & seize with” escape? Escape from what? And that the earth has been purloined? I don’t know, but the final couplet really lands for me—about how in the dark night of our not-knowing, we make our Advent wreaths, decking them with evergreens, their round shape an O of lament and awe before the yet-to-be-seen.

Source: University of Virginia Office of Engagement

2. “Prayer” by John Frederick Nims: The first in a sequence of five poems, “Prayer” expresses a sense of emptiness and desire, beckoning an unnamed one whom I read as Christ to come and fill. “Come to us, conceiver, / You who are all things, held and holder. / . . . / Come, infinite answer to our infinite want.”

Source: Five Young American Poets, vol. 3 (New Directions, 1944); compiled in The Powers of Heaven and Earth: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2022)

3. “how he is coming then” by Lucille Clifton: This poem is part of a sequence on the life of Mary; it appears between “mary’s dream” (on the Annunciation) and “holy night” (on Mary’s ecstatic birthing experience). In answer to the title, Clifton gives three similes.

Source: Two-Headed Woman (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); compiled in The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions, 2012)

4. “Advent 2” by Anna A. Friedrich: This poem is the second in a series of Advent villanelles commissioned by the poet’s church in Boston last year to converse with one or more of the lectionary readings for each week of the season. Malachi 3:1–4 is the primary touchstone here, a formidable prophetic passage that compares God in the day of his coming to a blazing fire that refines metal. Stanza 3 references the fiery repentance-preaching of John the Baptist from Luke 3:1–6, and then Friedrich draws in another, unexpected “fire” text: Daniel 3, in which three young Hebrew men are thrown into a furnace by a Babylonian king for their refusal to worship his gods but are preserved from harm when a mysterious fourth person appears with them in the flames. Friedrich connects this story to the promise that the earth and its inhabitants will not be wholly consumed in the fire of God’s judgment—only the impurities, the dross, will be destroyed, so that all may be restored to their truest selves. Hence why, in Friedrich’s words, “We pray for His fire. We trust this flame.”

Source: Monafolkspeak, December 11, 2024 | https://annaafriedrich.substack.com/

5. “Desert Blossoming” by Amit Majmudar: A reflection on the messianic promise of Isaiah 35:1–2, this poem celebrates how, through the deserts of Israel, Jesus “scattered his verses on the secretly gravid ground,” causing the wilderness to blossom. Majmudar mentions red, the color of fire (an image he connects to the light of faith), rhyming it with “bled.” Although he uses this final word in the sense of spreading into or through—oases bleeding into one another as dry land becomes water—one can’t help but think of Jesus’s sacrificial death, his blood extraordinarily fertile, producing life.

Source: Heaven and Earth (Story Line, 2011) | http://www.amitmajmudar.com/

Stella, Joseph_Tree, Cactus, Moon — Joseph Stella (American, 1877–1946), *Tree, Cactus, Moon*, ca. 1928. Gouache on paper, 104.1 × 68.6 cm. Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

6. “Name One Thing New” by Seth Wieck: This six-line poem takes the Teacher of Ecclesiastes to task, responding to his cynical claim that “there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccles. 1:9) with a counterexample.

Source: Ekstasis, December 6, 2021 | https://www.sethwieck.com/

7. “For My Mother at Advent” by Brian Volck: The poet recalls a simple Advent tradition his mother established in his childhood and reflects on her spiritual legacy, her lifetime of Christ-inspired kindnesses that continue to pillow him. How might we soften the hardness of the world for others?

Source: Flesh Becomes Word (Dos Madres, 2013) | https://brianvolck.com/

8. “Advent” by Suzanne Underwood Rhodes: This stunning poem makes unlikely intertextual connections, bringing Matthew 19:24 (one of Jesus’s hard sayings regarding wealth) to bear on John 1. Its unique angle on the Incarnation and its evocative imagery have inspired an experimental jazz composition and several paintings.

Source: What a Light Thing, This Stone (Sow’s Ear, 1999) | https://www.suzanneunderwoodrhodes.com/

9. “An Hymn to Humanity” by Phillis Wheatley: “Lo! for this dark terrestrial ball / Forsakes his azure-pavèd hall / A prince of heav’nly birth!” So begins this poem on the Incarnation by Phillis Wheatley (ca. 1753–1784), the first African American to publish a book of poetry. In stanzas 2 and 3, God the Father dispatches the Son to establish his throne on earth, “enlarg[ing] the close contracted mind, / And fill[ing] it with thy fire.” The “languid muse” in stanza 5 refers to Wheatley herself, whereas the “celestial nine” are the ancient Greek inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. The “smiling Graces” is another classical reference.

Source: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773). Public Domain.

Michael Wolgemut (German, 1434–1519), *The Father sending the Son into the world*, 1491. Hand-colored woodcut from the *Schatzbehalter* (published by Anton Koberger, Nuremberg), 43.7 × 27.5 cm. British Museum, London.

10. “In My Hand” by Sarah Robsdottir: Mary remembers the moment she conceived Jesus, one ordinary day when sitting down to a bowl of lentil stew.

Source: Aleteia, April 9, 2018

11. “The Risk of Birth, Christmas, 1973” by Madeleine L’Engle: Best known for her children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle was also a poet. Here she compares our era to the one in which Jesus was born—both are characterized by violence and hate, and yet Jesus, the embodiment of divine love, willingly entered the peril.

Source: The Weather of the Heart (Doubleday, 1978); compiled in The Ordering of Love (Crosswicks, 2005) | https://www.madeleinelengle.com/

12. “On Another’s Sorrow” by William Blake: Through the Incarnation, God lovingly, humanly, entered the world of human woe to experience it firsthand. “He doth give His joy to all,” Blake writes: “He becomes an infant small, / He becomes a man of woe, / He doth feel the sorrow too.” I featured this poem about Emmanuel, God-with-us, in a musical setting by singer-songwriter David Benjamin Blower in 2023 but was surprised that Blower omitted Blake’s final stanza, whose closing couplet I find striking, as it conveys Jesus’s continued identification with and compassion for humanity, how he moans alongside us in our suffering. For a different musical interpretation, also in an acoustic indie folk mode, see the one by Portland-based artist Michael Blake, from his 2021 album Songs of Innocence and Experience:

Source: Songs of Innocence and Experience (London, 1794). Public Domain.

13. “Missing the Goat” by Lorna Goodison: An immigrant from Kingston, Jamaica, to Toronto, Ontario, Goodison writes of the heightened feeling of exile but also of creative adaptations during the holidays as she tries to carry out the food traditions of her native country on a foreign soil where some of the ingredients are in more limited supply. For the sorrel wine, traditionally made with roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa) petals, tropically grown, she has to make do with redbuds. And the local shops have run out of goat meat—“the host of yardies” (people of Jamaican origin) who’ve moved to the area have already bought it all up—so “we’ll feast then on curried some-other-flesh.” Despite the differences from home, Christmas is still Christmas, and she raises her “hybridized wassail cup” to her new place, her new neighbors (many of them, like her, also recent arrivals from the Caribbean), and the creation of new rituals in multicultural Toronto.

Source: Controlling the Silver (University of Illinois Press, 2010); compiled in Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2017)

14. “Word Made Flesh” by Kathleen Raine: Awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for her significant contributions to literature and culture, Raine has been described as a mystical and visionary poet. Here is her revoicing of John 1. What a powerful last two lines!

Source: The Pythoness (Hamish Hamilton, 1949); compiled in The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine (Golgonooza, 2000)

15. “Nativity” by Barbara Crooker: In the heavy dark, in the windy cold, “love is born in the world again” every December when we retell the story of Christ’s birth.

Source: Small Rain (Purple Flag, 2014) | https://www.barbaracrooker.com/

Kuehn, Gary_Straw Pillow — Gary Kuehn (American, 1939–), *Straw Pillow*, 1963. Straw, plaster. Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany, Inv. ML/SK 5185. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.

16. “First Miracle” by A. E. Stallings: The first miracle Jesus performed, according to the Gospel of John, was turning water into wine. Stallings reflects on an earlier miracle performed by his mother’s body, and all birth-giving mothers’: turning nutrients from her blood into milk.

Source: Like: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018)

17. “What Sweeter Music Can We Bring” (or “A Christmas Carol, sung to the King in the Presence at Whitehall”) by Robert Herrick: “The Darling of the world is come”! Originally written as a song for soloists (each number corresponds to a different singer) and chorus, this poem reverses the typical seasonal imagery of Christmas, remarking how, at Jesus’s birth, “chilling Winter’s morn / Smile[s] like a field beset with corn” and “all the patient ground [is turned] to flowers.” The original music by Henry Lawes is lost, but many contemporary composers have written settings of the text, most famously John Rutter.

Source: Hesperides: Or, Works Both Human and Divine (London, 1648). Public Domain.

18. “Sharon’s Christmas Prayer” by John Shea: A five-year-old recounts the Christmas story, and when she reaches the clincher, she can’t hold back her glee.

Source: The Hour of the Unexpected (Argus Communications, 1977); also in Seeing Haloes: Christmas Poems to Open the Heart (Liturgical Press, 2017)

19. “God” by D. A. Cooper: Riffing on Williams Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” this spare poem attends to the birth and death of the incarnate God, upon which so much depends.

Source: Reformed Journal, September 3, 2024

Malinowska, Katarzyna_Juxtapose — Katarzyna Malinowska (Polish, 1989–), *Juxtapose* (diptych), 2021. Digital painting, 20 × 30 cm.

20. “Lullaby after Christmas” by Vassar Miller: The speaker wishes sweet sleep for the newborn Christ child, wishes to keep him innocent of his fate for as long as possible—for “even God has right to / Peace before His pain.” Consisting of four sestets whose second, fourth, and sixth lines rhyme, the poem has a sing-songy quality that is jarring for the juxtaposition of words like “soft,” “warm,” and “tinkling” with the likes of “blood,” “gore,” and “die.”

Source: Onions and Roses (Wesleyan University Press, 1968); compiled in If I Had Wheels or Love: Collected Poems of Vassar Miller (Southern Methodist University Press, 1991)

21. “Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot: Eliot wrote this poem shortly after his conversion to Christianity in 1927. Opening with a passage from a Christmas sermon by the seventeenth-century Anglican bishop Lancelot Andrewes, it is from the perspective of one of the magi, who made a long, toilsome journey in search of the meaning of a mysterious guiding star. After the magi’s encounter with the Christ child, they would never be the same; their paganism would no longer satisfy. The poem is about the transformative impact Christ has on those with humility enough to see him for who he is (having followed the light of revelation) and to worship him accordingly. And that transformation is in some ways painful, as it involves giving up some of the things one once held dear.

“Were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?” the magus asks. Jesus’s wasn’t the only birth they witnessed; they, too, were (re)born in Bethlehem. But spiritual rebirth is also a sort of death—the magi died to their old selves and false loves and loyalties. Thus, when they returned to Babylon, they felt like strangers in a strange land. They were now citizens of a different kingdom, and filled with a longing for its consummation.

Source: Journey of the Magi (Ariel Poems) (Faber & Gwyer, 1927). Public Domain.

Länger, Jörg_The Three Kings — Jörg Länger (German, 1964–), *The Three Kings*, 2013. Linocut and gesso on aluminum dibond, 38 × 38 cm. The linocut is after a 12th-century illumination from the St Albans Psalter, held at the Dombibliothek, Hildesheim, Germany.

22. “Twelfth Night” by Sally Thomas: (Scroll to second poem.) As the Christmas season draws to a close, holly berries shrivel and drop, the “candles drown themselves in waxen lakes,” “the tree’s a staring corpse,” and a spider has built a web across the mantel nativity. Thomas uses the passing of the season to reflect more broadly on the passing of time and our own dustiness and desiccation—and by contrast, the unchangeability of God.

Source: Pulsebeat Poetry Journal no. 2 (May 2022) | http://www.sally-thomas.com/

23. Untitled poem by S. E. Reid: Most reflections on the New Year are full of enthusiastic goal-setting and go-getting, but Reid, gardening in her greenhouse in the crisp cold of January, describes a “fall[ing] backwards,” “dropping into the dark,” “shivering,” herself a seed, latent in the soil, trusting God that growth will come.

Source: The Wildroot Parables, January 8, 2024 | https://sereid.substack.com/

24. “Anna the Prophetess” by Tania Runyan: Forty days after Jesus’s birth, Maryand Joseph presented him in the Jerusalem temple. Runyan imagines this event from the perspective of Anna, a woman who was widowed young and thenceforth lived at the temple into old age, devoted to prayer, fasting, praise, and prophecy.

Source: Simple Weight (FutureCycle, 2010) | https://taniarunyan.com/

25. “The Work of Christmas” by Howard Thurman: Drawing on Jesus’s mission statement in Luke 4, the great African American theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman urges us to continue the work of Christmas—finding, healing, feeding, etc.—throughout the year. Listen to the simple yet vigorous choral setting by Elizabeth Alexander.

Source: The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations (Friends United, 1985)

Bone chapel, anti-Nazi martyrs’ memorial, and contemporary stained glass at the Basilica of St. Ursula, Cologne

October 21, 2025October 23, 2025 Victoria Emily Jones4 Comments

(All photos in this article are my own, taken either by me or my husband.)

I knew very little about the virgin martyr St. Ursula before visiting the basilica dedicated to her in Cologne, Germany, last month. She’s the patron saint of the city, where, according to hagiography, she was murdered sometime in the fourth century.

There’s no historical veracity to her story, which is why her name was removed from the Catholic calendar of saints when it was revised in 1969. But her feast day is still observed by many on October 21.

St. Ursula alabaster — Johann T.W. Lentz, *St. Ursula* (detail), 1659. Alabaster. North transept, Basilica of St. Ursula, Cologne. This reclining figure of the saint lies over her Baroque tomb made of black marble.

As legend has it, Ursula was a Romano-British princess and a Christian. She was engaged to be married to a pagan prince. To delay the wedding, she successfully requested that she first be allowed to take a three-year pilgrimage to Rome, and that she be accompanied by eleven thousand virgins (a ridiculous number that was likely embellished from what was originally eleven). On their voyage, she converted all eleven thousand to the faith.

On their way back to Britain from Rome, they were traveling through Cologne when it was besieged by the Huns, a group of nomadic warriors from Central Asia. Ursula and her companions refused the soldiers’ sexual advances and were slaughtered as a result. One version of the legend says the women’s souls then formed a celestial army that drove out the Huns, saving Cologne.

The earliest possible reference to Ursula and company—though they are unnamed and unnumbered—is a stone plaque dated to 400. Now incorporated into the choir wall of the present Basilica of St. Ursula, it mentions a basilica restored on this site by the Roman senator Clematius to commemorate the “martyred virgins coming from the east, in fulfillment of a vow, . . . holy virgins [who] spilled their blood in the name of Christ.” This inscription not only provides the seed of what would become the Ursula legend; it’s also the earliest evidence of Christianity in Cologne, attesting to the presence of a church there in the fourth century.

It wasn’t until the tenth century that the name Ursula emerged, identified as the leader of the group of virgins, and that their number, which had previously ranged from two to thousands, became fixed at eleven thousand. The women were never officially canonized, but their veneration as saints grew immensely in the twelfth century after a large, late antique Roman cemetery was discovered in 1106 near the aforementioned Church of the Holy Virgins in Cologne during an excavation project to expand the city’s fortifications. The skeletal remains in the hundreds of graves were purported to be those of the martyred women (notwithstanding the presence of many men’s and children’s bones among them).

The discovery of these putative relics called for the rebuilding of the predecessor church to house them. Construction began in the second quarter of the twelfth century, and it’s that structure, with later renovations, refurbishments, additions, and (post–World War II) restorations and repairs, that stands today. The church was elevated to the status of minor basilica in 1920.

The nave and the main tower of the Basilica of St. Ursula are Romanesque, but the choir was rebuilt in the Gothic style.

Shrine altar in the choir apse, containing the relics of Ursula, Etherius, and Hippolytus. Behind it are grilled reliquary niches and paintings of the Legend of St. Ursula from from the “long cycle” of 1456.

Chancel windows by Francis William Dixon, 1892. Left: St. James the Greater, St. Andrew, and St. Peter, accompanied by angels; lower register: Isaiah, Isaac, and Abraham. Center: Christ enthroned, with Mary and St. John the Baptist (Deesis) at his side; lower register: St. Ursula of Cologne with her companions. Right: St. James the Lesser, St. Matthew, and St. Thomas, accompanied by angels; lower register: Daniel, Malachi, and Joel.

The reason the Basilica of St. Ursula was on my list of stops was I wanted to see its so-called Golden Chamber.

The Golden Chamber

The largest ossuary north of the Alps, the Goldene Kammer (Golden Chamber) is decorated with the bones of, allegedly, St. Ursula and her eleven thousand travel mates, which are artfully arranged across the walls in geometric patterns, rosettes, and even words! Unlike most other relic displays I had seen before, where the relics are kept in some kind of encasement and usually only partially visible, this one puts many of the bones right out in the open, making the whole room a walk-in reliquary.

A Baroque marvel, the Golden Chamber was established on the south side of the church in 1643 through a donation by the imperial court councilor of the Holy Roman Empire Johann von Crane and his wife, Verena Hegemihler. It replaced a smaller medieval camera aurea (treasury and relic chamber), where the bones had previously been displayed. Crane and Hegemihler oversaw the design and construction of the space, with its ribbed, star-studded, sky-blue vault, and the arrangement of the bones into their present form.

Above the altar, tibias, fibulas, femurs, humeri, and other bones spell out “Sancta Ursula Ora Pro Nobis” (Saint Ursula, pray for us). Also rendered in bones are the name Etherius—Ursula’s fiancé, who converted to Christianity at her insistence and met her in Cologne to die with her—and a mention of the holy virgins.

Other sections of the wall use vertebrae, pelvic bones, ribs, shoulder blades, and so on to create ornamental designs like hearts, spirals, webs, flowers, and crosses.

Similar visual displays of bones in charnel houses, writes art historian Jackie Mann, had become increasingly common in Europe by the late fourteenth century.

The shelving cabinets below the bone decor belong to the second phase of furnishings around 1700. They contain niches that house 112 reliquary busts (most of them produced between 1260 and 1400 and made of polychromed wood), as well as gilded acanthus tendrils that encompass some 600 skulls. Out of reverence, many of the skulls are at least partially wrapped in red velvet with gold and silver embroidery made by the nuns of the nearby Ursuline convent.

Occasionally, where the wrapping has slipped, you’ll see an eye hole staring back at you.

To account for the presence of men’s bones in the ancient Roman churchyard, the legend of St. Ursula was adapted in the twelfth century to include male martyrs—namely, Etherius and his retinue. That’s why the Golden Chamber contains several male busts alongside the female.

To the average person, the Golden Chamber is a weird, macabre spectacle. But for Catholics, displaying human bones is not meant to be creepy or horror-inducing. Rather, by bringing remnants of the dead into spaces of the living, we are reminded of: (1) our own mortality, (2) the community of saints that transcends time, and (3) the promise of universal, bodily resurrection (dem bones gonna rise again!).

Memento mori (“remember you will die”) was a common trope in seventeenth-century art and devotion, meant to increase one’s awareness of the fleetingness of life and to encourage one to live in light of heaven. Mann calls the Golden Chamber an “immersive memento mori.” Again, the traditional Christian summons to remember our mortality is not meant to frighten. It’s meant to inspire us to live whole and holy lives.

While death is an ending in one sense, it’s also an entry into life immortal. The Golden Chamber gathers together the fragments of local saints that had been scattered in ancient burial ruins, preserving them for the saints of later generations as a witness that our bodies will never be finally lost; they will be raised and renewed by God on the last day and reunited with our souls. Christians treat the remains of the deceased with honor in recognition that our bodies—including the framework of bones that support our soft tissues, protect our organs, enable our movement, store minerals for our use, and produce our blood cells—are not just temporary shells encasing who we really are, but rather are a part of who we are. Hence why we proclaim, in the Apostles’ Creed, that “we believe . . . in the resurrection of the body.”

Memorial for the Martyrs of Today

While the Golden Chamber is the primary draw for visitors to the Basilica of St. Ursula, there are other sights in the church worth spending time with, ones I was not expecting. One of them is the Gedenkstätte für die Märtyrer der Gegenwart (Memorial for the Martyrs of Today), a chapel in the south transept that commemorates the Christians in Cologne, both religious and lay, who were killed for resisting the Nazi regime—or, in the case of Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and Elvira Sanders-Platz, for being ethnically Jewish.

Made by the architectural and design firm Kister Scheithauer Gross, the chapel consists of a double-shelled, slightly transparent canvas construction printed on the inside with the names and dates of the martyrs, as well as quotes they gave before their deaths. Sunlight enters from the window to the right of the chapel, causing the space to glow. There’s a small bench on each of the three sides, for people to sit and pray or reflect.

In the center is a life-size wood crucifix. The gaunt Christ figure is pierced all over and bears a deep wound in his side where the centurion’s spear went through. Like those whose names surround him, Jesus preached and pursued love and justice, ultimately laying down his life—a loss that God turned to gain in the Resurrection and in the redemption of the world.

A language barrier prevented me from effectively asking the staff person, or understanding the answer, whether the crucifix was carved in the early 2000s specifically for the chapel, or if it’s medieval. There’s no info inside the church about this chapel.

The Memorial for the Martyrs of Today is an example of what Christian martyrdom looked like in Cologne in the twentieth century. Fr. Otto Müller, Br. Norbert Maria Kubiak, writer Heinrich Ruster, medical student Willi Graf, Catholic Youth leader Adalbert Probst . . . The stories of the many individuals who were executed for subverting Hitler, for calling out his evils, in the name of Christ are far more compelling to me than the fabulous and convoluted story of an ancient princess killed in a land invasion and then heroized—for her virginity?

Contemporary Stained Glass

I also liked the contemporary stained glass in the church. In the choir, there’s a set of eight windows by Wilhelm Buschulte—abstract compositions in yellow, white, and gray.

In the south aisle are two round-arched windows by Will Thonett, also abstract: a grid of blues, grays, and lavender, with yellow circles and thin vertical bands.

To the right of these are three Mary-themed windows by Hermann Gottfried. The primary scene of the first one is the Annunciation. A giant red rose appears in the background, probably a reference to Mary as the Rosa Mystica. Below this scene, to the left, is the Creation of Adam and Eve, and to the right, the Expulsion from Paradise; these contextualize Christ’s conception in the greater narrative of scripture. The peripheral scenes in the middle register show the magi following the star to Bethlehem.

Hermann Gottfried_Annunciation — Stained glass window by Hermann Gottfried (German, 1929–), 1984, south aisle, Basilica of St. Ursula, Cologne

The central window portrays the Coronation of Mary. I believe both figures in the left lancet are Christ—crowning his mother as Queen of Heaven, and at the bottom, crushing the serpent, as the protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15 prophesied. Beneath the enthroned Mary on the right is a smaller vignette, which I think may be Mary again, also stepping on the serpent’s head, since by her cooperation with God’s plan, she shares in the victory over Satan. This imagery is also related to Woman of the Apocalypse described in Revelation 12, whom Catholics interpret as Mary. The hand of God dispenses blessing from above.

Hermann Gottfried_Coronation of the Virgin — Stained glass window by Hermann Gottfried (German, 1929–), 1984, south aisle, Basilica of St. Ursula, Cologne

The final window in this trio portrays the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The two quadrants at the bottom right show Moses before the burning bush, in which Mary appears; Catholic teaching compares Mary to the burning bush of Exodus because for nine months she held the fire of divinity within her womb (God incarnate) and was not consumed. On the left Moses is receiving the tablets of the law on Mount Sinai, an event often read in parallel with the story of Pentecost in Acts 2, where God writes his word not on stone but on people’s hearts by giving his Spirit to dwell within them.

Hermann Gottfried_Pentecost — Stained glass window by Hermann Gottfried (German, 1929–), 1984, south aisle, Basilica of St. Ursula, Cologne

If you’re ever in Cologne, I encourage you to include the Basilica of St. Ursula on your itinerary. Entry to the church is free, but the Golden Chamber costs €2 (only cash is accepted, I believe). There are six large standing posters in the narthex that provide a timeline, in German, of the church’s history, and when I was there, there were two attendants who were available to answer questions, one of whom spoke some English.

For more comprehensive photos of the church’s art and architecture, see https://www.sakrale-bauten.de/kirche_koeln_st_ursula.html and https://www.winckelmann-akademie.de/wp-content/uploads/Koeln_St._Ursula.pdf.

“Mary pleads with Jah-Jah for guidance” by Pamela Mordecai (poem)

March 25, 2025 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

Dingwall, Justin_Blue and Red Mary — Justin Dingwall (South African, 1983–), *Blue and Red Mary*, 2013. Photographic giclée print on 100% cotton fine art paper, 90 × 70 cm.

Baby-father, Jah-Jah,
don’t abandon me now!
Dis is very rough waters. Steer me

as I go. I have company here
in my womb, no two ways about dat.
As Archangel take off, as him reel

out him wings, my whole body swim in
to de plenty of tings, for it hug
up de world, sky and sun,

lake and sea, fish, fowl, sheep,
goat and cow, crawling thing,
bush, flower, tree—

is like all creation living inside me.
And is not only dat, for it singing a song
and each spurt of my blood,

every breath I breathe—
it drumming in time to dat tune.
What growing inside me is not just a baby,

is every last ting! How me going to recount
dat to Ma? Or to Pa? Or Joseph?
Never mind how me try?

How me going to explain dat same time
my body is transported wid joy
is choking wid dread?

from de book of Mary: a performance poem (Mawenzi House, 2015)

Pamela Mordecai (born 1942) is a Jamaican poet, novelist, short story writer, and scholar of Caribbean literature and culture, living in Toronto. Born and raised in Kingston, she earned a PhD in English from the University of the West Indies and has taught language arts at secondary and postsecondary levels. She often writes in Jamaican Creole, such as for de Man (1995)—a verse play about the crucifixion of Jesus—and the two follow-up collections of narrative poems about Jesus’s parents: de book of Mary (2015) and de book of Joseph (2022).

Roundup: Upcoming webinars and conferences

January 25, 2025January 27, 2025 Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

ONLINE LECTURES organized by the Centre for Marian Studies at St Mary’s University in Twickenham:

If you’d like to register for either of these (they’re free), email Catherine O’Brien at info@marianstudies.ac.uk. View additional online lecture offerings at https://www.marianstudies.ac.uk/post/research-seminar-schedule.

>> Annual Candlemas Lecture by Ayla Lepine, February 3, 2025, 7 p.m. GMT (2 p.m. ET): Rev. Dr. Ayla Lepine, who is the associate rector at St James’s Piccadilly in London and an art historian and theologian, “will explore two works of art featured in her forthcoming book, Women, Art, God. In the series entitled The Annunciation (A Study), Julia Margaret Cameron reimagined and reconfigured paintings by Renaissance artists including Perugino and Lippi. In her photography, blurred and hazy aspects of the image are suggestive of the Holy Spirit in this new technology.

“A century later, the American nun Sister Corita Kent produced a groundbreaking silkscreen print, The Juiciest Tomato of All. This artwork compared the Virgin Mary to a ripe fruit, with a title inspired by Del Monte tinned fruit and vegetable slogans from her local supermarket. By considering these two artworks by women from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a pair, new ways of encountering Mary in art history, theology, and prayer can emerge with unexpected resonance for the twenty-first century.”

Cameron, Julia Margaret_Annunciation — Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815–1879), *After Perugino / The Annunciation*, 1865. Albumen print from wet collodion glass negative, 19 1/2 × 15 in. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Kent, Corita_the juiciest tomato of all — Corita Kent (American, 1918–1986), *the juiciest tomato of all*, 1964. Serigraph, 29 3/4 × 36 in. © Estate of Corita Kent / Immaculate Heart Community.

>> “The Annunciation in Theology and Art: Shedding New Light on an Old Doctrine” by Tina Beattie, March 26, 2025, 3 p.m. GMT (10 a.m. ET): No details other than the title have been given about this lecture. But the speaker is a leading Marian theologian and writer whom I’ve been familiar with for some time, and an emerita professor of Catholic studies at the University of Roehampton. Her research is in the areas of gender, sexuality, and reproductive ethics; Catholic social teaching and women’s rights; theology and the visual arts, especially images of Mary; and the relationship between medieval mysticism, sacramental theology, and psychoanalytic theory.

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WEBINAR with Drew Jackson, Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination, February 4, 2025, 7 p.m. ET: A conversation on the intersection of poetry, ministry, and Christian imagination. Registration is free. “Drew Jackson is a poet, speaker, and public theologian. He is author of God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming and Touch the Earth: Poems on the Way. . . . Drew received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and his M.A. in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. He currently works as the Managing Director of Mission Integration for the Center for Action and Contemplation, and lives in Brooklyn, NY, with his wife and daughters.”

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CONFERENCES/SYMPOSIA:

>> Calvin Symposium on Worship, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, Michigan, February 5–7, 2025: “An ecumenical conference dedicated to worship and learning, bringing together people in a variety of roles in worship and leadership from across the country and around the world.”

>> Contemporary Art as/in Pilgrimage, Columbia University, New York, February 11, 2025: Organized by the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art, this one-day symposium “will explore such questions as: Are galleries, museums, art expos, and art installations the new ‘slow spaces’ for spiritual sustenance and transcendent experiences? How are temples, churches and other ‘religious’ sites transformed by artist installations intended to invoke deep spiritual encounter and healing? And how is the art of contemporary artists working in a diversity of media and practice seen through the lens of pilgrimage?”

The keynote speaker is Kathryn R. Barush, author of Imaging Pilgrimage: Art as Embodied Experience (Bloomsbury, 2021). She will be joined by eleven other presenters. Plus, Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt, author of Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art, will lead attendees in the practice of intentional looking at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.

Our Lady of Ferguson — Mark Doox (American, 1958–), *Our Lady, Mother of Ferguson and All Those Killed by Gun Violence*, 2016. Acrylic and gold leaf on wood, 48 × 36 in. Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones, 2022.

Bergmann, Meredith_September 11th — Meredith Bergmann (American, 1955–), *September 11th: A Memorial*, 2012. Bronze on pedestal of steel and glass, containing reinforced concrete and brick from the rubble of the World Trade Towers, 78 × 22 × 24 in. Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones, 2022.

>> Square Halo Conference, Trust Performing Arts Center, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, March 7–8, 2025: “The Square Halo conferences have offered times not only of fascinating and inspiring ideas in a high caliber of wide and varied presentations, but also of rich, meaningful interactions, dialogue, and (in a deep sense of this word) fellowship. Creativity, collaboration, and community . . . an apt description of what [takes] place” (Matthew Dickerson).

The keynote speaker is Diana Pavlac Glyer, who teaches literature, history, theology, and philosophy in an integrated Great Books curriculum at Azusa Pacific University, and the Saturday-night concert will feature Thomas Austin and Skye Peterson.

>> The Breath and the Clay, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, March 21–23, 2025: “This year we will explore how the light gets in through the fragments of our stories, our lives and our art. We are each built of broken pieces, a mosaic of joys and sorrows, of mundane and miraculous happenings. When we surrender the full spectrum of our human experience, even our pain, doubts and sorrows can heal into art. Through our workshops, keynote talks, immersive gallery and performances, we will explore various facets of the creative life and how everything from inspiration to the everyday, from family to vocation and community coalesce to reveal a hidden wholeness.”

Presenters include Sho Baraka, Vesper Stamper, Justin McRoberts, Cheryl Bridges Johns, Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt, and more.

>> Illuminate: Art and Faith, Southern Adventist University, Collegedale, Tennessee, March 31–April 1, 2025: “Author and theologian Frederick Buechner famously wrote, ‘Pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.’ Paintings, poetry, music, and other creative mediums hold strong potential to do just that—to indirectly communicate powerful truths, many of which have eternal consequences. Are we open to what they’re telling us? Will we utilize these tools to share important stories (including The Story) with others? Join us for two rich days of education, inspiration, and community! . . .

“This year’s conference will include a variety of hands-on workshops (flash fiction, drawing, songwriting), as well as sessions exploring fascinating figures, including C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Eugene Peterson, Kurt Vonnegut, Dorothy Sayers, Vincent van Gogh, Norman Rockwell, Ludwig van Beethoven, Duke Ellington, and many more.”

Among the session leaders and performers are art historian Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt (Redeeming Vision), writer Douglas McKelvey (Every Moment Holy), film and literature scholar Mary McCampbell (Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves), pastor Russ Ramsey (Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart; Rembrandt Is in the Wind), illustrator John Hendrix (The Mythmakers; Go and Do Likewise!), and singer-songwriter Andy Gullahorn.

>> Visible and Invisible: Surprising Encounters in Theology and the Arts (DITA 2025), Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, September 4–7, 2025: I’ll be attending this one! Organized by Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts. “How can the arts help us open up the very heart of the Christian faith, celebrated at the Council of Nicaea in 325, that Jesus Christ is ‘one in being’ with God? Featuring world-class academics, artists, musicians, and clergy from around the globe and a robust range of programming, DITA2025 is a four-day symposium at Duke University celebrating Nicaea and the myriad surprises the Creed holds in store for artists, academics, clergy, and parishioners today. . . .

“By pairing theologians with poets, clergy with novelists, dancers with liturgists, musicians with scholars, the symposium will generate a series of meetings rarely offered in academic and artistic settings. Including interactive keynotes, plenary presentations, seminar lectures, applied workshops, an evening concert, and more, DITA2025 is a unique opportunity to experience the arts and the academy in action.”

Dancer and choreographer Leah Glenn performs an original work, *The Youngest of Nine*, at DITA 2019.

Speakers include Rowan Williams, Chigozie Obioma, Natalie Carnes, Sandra McCracken, James K.A. Smith, Malcolm Guite, Amy Peeler, and Josh Rodriguez. Early-bird registration ends February 15.

Advent, Day 14: Spinning

December 14, 2024September 21, 2025 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

LOOK: Pyxis with the Annunciation

Annunciation pyxis (Late Antique) — Pyxis with the Annunciation, Byzantine Empire (Minden?), 5th or 6th century. Ivory, height 7.9 cm, diameter 11.8 cm. Museum für Byzantinische Kunst, Bode-Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. [object record]

According to the Protoevangelium of James, an apocryphal infancy gospel from the second century, the Virgin Mary was raised in the Jerusalem temple from age three and was tasked with weaving the purple and scarlet thread of the veil that shrouded the holy of holies, the temple’s innermost sanctuary. One day while taking a break from this sacred labor to collect water from a well, the angel Gabriel approached her with a greeting: “Hail, favored one. The Lord is with you.” She looked around and saw no one, so she returned to her work indoors.

As she was engaged in her spinning, Gabriel reappeared and delivered the message he had been sent with: that Mary was chosen to bear the Son of God.

This account of the Annunciation gained special traction in the East, where the Virgin Annunciate is almost always shown with a spindle of scarlet thread in her hand, or less frequently, standing at a well—unlike in Western depictions, where she is typically shown holding a book.

The Byzantine art object pictured above is an ivory-carved pyxis (pl. pyxides), a cylindrical container used to store small items, such as jewelry or cosmetics. The Annunciation is one of three scenes represented, the other two being the Journey to Bethlehem and the Nativity (including Salome with her withered hand; see Prot. 19–20). The square to Mary’s left is where the lock case was originally mounted.

In the early fifth century, the prominent Byzantine theologian Proclus of Constantinople (ca. 390–446) developed Mary’s weaving into an extended theological metaphor of the Incarnation. He preached on Mary’s womb as a “workshop” containing the “awesome loom of the divine economy” on which the flesh of God was woven together, providing the bodiless divinity with form and texture. [1] “In the workshop of Mary’s womb, the vertical warp thread of divinity was bound to a weft of virgin flesh,” writes Fr. Maximos Constas (b. 1961), paraphrasing Proclus. [2]

Jesus’s flesh is a kind of clothing—the same we wear—made during Mary’s nine months of pregnancy:

The one who redeemed us was not a mere man. May this never be! But neither was he God denuded of humanity, for he had a body. And if he had not clothed himself with me, he could not have saved me, but in the womb of a virgin the one who pronounced the sentence against Adam clothed himself with me, who stood condemned, and there in her womb was transacted that awesome exchange, for taking my flesh, he gave me his spirit. [3]

Notes:

Nicholas Constas, “The Purple Thread and the Veil of Flesh: Symbols of Weaving in the Sermons of Proclus,” chap. 6 of Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 317. The quotations are from Proclus’s Homily 1.I.21–25.
Constas, 357.
Proclus of Constantinople, Homily 1.VIII.122–27, qtd. Constas, 354.

LISTEN: “The Virgin, Spinning” by Katy Wehr, on And All the Marys (2018)

I’m spinning the scarlet and purple—woman’s work
But God is spinning the gold, I see
Weaving a tiny thread like me
Into the grand design to be
The saving of the world

Chosen as the roving fiber—clean and combed
Then dropped and spun and quickly wound
Upon the spindle tightly bound
To serve the One I’m wound around:
The Savior of the world

Refrain:
Son of the Most High, let it be, let it be
Son of God, let it be, let it be to me

In the hands of the Master, I marvel at his ways
He brings me into his weaving room
My heart is stretched upon the loom
The God-man knitted within my womb
The Savior of the world [Refrain]

Bridge:
First to hear, first to hear and believe
First to love, first to love and receive
The Son of God

Will they believe me? I wonder, who can say?
But I will always answer yes
Though a sword may pierce my breast
The Father of my son knows best
The Savior of the world [Refrain]

In “The Virgin, Spinning,” singer-songwriter Katy Wehr takes the weaving metaphor in a different direction than Proclus. Voiced by Mary, the song reflects on how God is weaving a grand tapestry of salvation, in which Mary is a thread.

Advent, Day 13: There Sprang a Flower

December 13, 2024 Victoria Emily JonesLeave a comment

LOOK: Lily Among the Thistles by Laura Lasworth

Lasworth, Laura_Lily Among the Thistles — Laura Lasworth (American, 1954–), *Lily Among the Thistles*, 2001. Oil on wood panel. From the Love’s Lyric series, based on the Song of Songs.

This still-life painting by Seattle-based artist Laura Lasworth shows a beautiful cut lily sharing a vase with a bouquet of twelve thorny, withered stems. The water in which they sit is red. The work’s title is taken from the Song of Songs 2:1–2: in Latin, “Ego flos campi, et lilium convallium. Sicut lilium inter spinas, sic amica mea inter filias,” or from the New Revised Standard Version:

I am a rose of Sharon,
a lily of the valleys.

As a lily among brambles,
so is my love among maidens.

While the Song of Songs, written in the wisdom tradition of Solomon, is first and foremost a collection of poems exploring the human experience of love and sexual desire, most Christians also interpret it as an allegory of the love between Christ and his church, or God and the individual soul. In that reading, Christ is the “lily of the valley” who speaks here.

Early Christian writers such as Origen, Hippolytus, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine associated the lily of Song of Songs 2:1 with Christ; in the Middle Ages, Venantius Fortunatus (ca. 530–610), Peter Damian (1007–1072), and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), among others, followed suit. I’m familiar with this floral metaphor for Jesus from a gospel song I grew up singing!

From the fourteenth century onward, in images of the Annunciation, Western artists commonly portrayed either a lily vase on a table, or the angel Gabriel presenting a lily to Mary. The lily became a symbol both Christological and Mariological, signifying the flowering of the Incarnation: God’s pure Son emerging from the virginal stem of Mary.

On December 10, Jonathan A. Anderson, a professor of theology and the arts at Regent College in Vancouver, gave the homily in chapel, using Luke 1:26–38 as his scripture text and exploring Lasworth’s Lily Among the Thistles in relation to it.

Thorns and thistles are an image of cursedness throughout scripture, starting in Genesis 3:17–18, Anderson points out. But in Lasworth’s painting, a lily rises up from the center of that cursedness. “If the thistles visually articulate the groaning of creation and the sorrows of humanity, the lily symbolically inaugurates a newness of life, somehow flowering right in the midst of this,” Anderson says. “The audacious proclamation of Advent is that the Son of God—the Creator and Healer of all things, our tree of life—was born into the brambles of human history and into the bloody heritages that still cry out daily from the ground.”

Anderson considers the polyvalence of Lily Among the Thistles:

In one sense, this is an icon of Christ’s appearance in human history. In another sense, this vase is also an individual heart—my heart, your heart—that has heard the Annunciation for itself amidst its own sorrows and deathliness. . . . Or we might also see this as an icon of creation, simultaneously groaning for the reconciliation of all things and blooming with new creation. And surely, it is an icon of the church, in which we harbor various fertility altars overgrown with thorns and thistles, and yet in which we are a people of the incarnation, people in whom new creation has begun, people through whom the light of the Spirit is already casting the shadows of the redemption of all things.

LISTEN: “There sprang a Flower from out a thorn” | Traditional English carol compiled in Richard Hill’s Commonplace Book (Balliol College MS 354, fol. 222v), early 16th century; translated from Middle English by Jessie L. Weston, 1911 | Music by Dominic Veall, 2017

1. There sprang a Flower from out a thorn,
To save mankind that was forlorn,
As prophets spake before that morn:
Deo Patri sit Gloria!

2. There sprang a well at Maid Mary’s foot,
That turned all this world to good,
Of her took Jesu flesh and blood:
Deo Patri sit Gloria!

. . .

4. From diverse lands three kings were brought,
For each one thought a wondrous thought,
A King to find and thank they sought:
Deo Patri sit Gloria!

5. Richly laden with gifts they fare,
Myrrh, frankincense, and gold they bear,
As clerks in sequence still declare:
Deo Patri sit Gloria!

. . .

9. There shone a star in heaven bright,
That the men of earth might read aright
That this Child was Jesu, King of Might:
Deo Patri sit Gloria!

This song is a choral setting by London-based composer Dominic Veall of a late medieval lyric that begins, “Ther ys a blossum sprong of a thorn”—or, as Jessie L. Weston modernizes it, “There sprang a Flower from out a thorn.” The recording omits stanzas 3, 6, 7, and 8, but you can read the full lyrics here. The Latin refrain translates to “Glory be to God the Father!”

25 Poems for Christmas, vol. 3

November 29, 2024December 13, 2025 Victoria Emily Jones4 Comments

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.

[Read volume 1] [Read volume 2]

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.”

Source: For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio (Princeton University Press, 2013)

2. “Advent” by R. A. (Robert Alan) Rife: Ten sensory metaphors for Advent, conveying its mood of anticipation.

Source: https://innerwoven.me/ (author’s website)

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.

Helmantel, Henk_New Life II — 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.

Source: The Dinner Party, exh. cat. (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1979) | https://judychicago.com/

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)

Raj, Solomon_Waiting for My Lord — 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?

Source: Open Shutters (Knopf, 2003)

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.

Source: Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001)

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.

Source: God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming (InterVarsity, 2021) | https://drewejackson.com/

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.

Source: I Sing of a Maiden: The Mary Book of Verse, ed. Sister M. Thérèse (Macmillan, 1947)

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

Mynheer, Nicholas_Annunciation — 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.

Source: Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation (Eerdmans, 2006) | https://lucishaw.com/

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.

Source: Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows, Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart: Meditations for the Restless Soul (Hampton Roads, 2017)

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.

Source: Fathom, December 21, 2017 | https://www.sethwieck.com/

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.”

Source: Flesh Becomes Word (Dos Madres, 2013) | https://brianvolck.com/

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.

McNichols, William Hart_Robert Southwell and the Burning Babe — 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 “setting lambs 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 (Ethiopian) — 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.

Source: Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected (Paraclete, 2006)

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.

Source: Night Visions (Wanton Gospeller, 2010)

Richardson, Jan_Wise Women Also Came — 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.

Source: Seeing Haloes: Christmas Poems to Open the Heart (Liturgical Press, 2017)

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?

Source: Collected Poems (Graywolf, 2005)