Josué Sánchez Cerrón (Peruvian, 1945–), Navidad en los Andes (Christmas in the Andes)
The Word, for our sake, became poverty clothed as the poor who live off the refuse heap.
The Word, for our sake, became agony in the shrunken breast of the woman grown old by the absence of her murdered husband.
The Word, for our sake, became a sob a thousand times stifled in the immovable mouth of the child who died from hunger.
The Word, for our sake, became rebellion before the lifeless body of Gaspar Sanchez Toma, “scientifically” murdered.
The Word, for our sake, became danger in the anguish of the mother who worries about her son growing into manhood.
The Word became an ever-present absence among the 70,000 families torn apart by death.
The Word, for our sake, became an inexorable accusation arising from the blazing craters which swallowed up their tortured bodies.
The word-knife cut us deeply in that place of shame: the painful reality of the poor.
The Word blew its spirit over the dried bones of the Mummified-Churches, guardians of silence.
The Word, that early-morning-bugle, awoke us from the lethargy which had robbed us of our Hope.
The Word became a path in the jungle, a decision on the farm, love in women, unity among workers, and a Star for those few who can inspire dreams.
The Word became Light, The Word became History, The Word became Conflict, The Word became Indomitable Spirit, and sowed its seeds upon the mountain, near the river, and in the valley,
and those-of-good-will heard the angels sing.
Tired knees were strengthened, trembling hands were stilled, and the people who wandered in darkness saw the light!
Then,
The Word became flesh in a nation-pregnant-with-freedom, The Spirit strengthened the arms which forged Hope, The Verb became flesh in the people who perceived a new day, and for our sake became life in Mary and Joseph who embrace Righteousness and bury the people’s ignominy.
The Word became the seed-of-justice and we conceived peace.
The Word cried out to the world the truth about the struggle against the anti-man.
The Word made justice to rain and peace came forth from the furrows in the land.
And we saw its glory in the eyes of the poor converted into true men and women.
Grace and Truth celebrated together in the laughter of the children rescued by life.
And those-who-saw-the-star opened up for us the path we now follow.
Meanwhile, Herod, slowly dying, is eaten by worms.
The Word became judgment and the anti-men ground their teeth.
The Word became forgiveness and human hearts learned to beat with love.
And the Word shall continue sowing futures in the furrows of Hope.
And on the horizon, the Word made light invited us to relive a thousand dawns toward the Kingdom that comes.
The Word will gather us round her table. And they will come from the East and the West, from the North and the South, and dressed in incorruption we-will-finally-be-happy.
Translated from the Spanish by Maria Elena Acevedo, René Calderón, Maria Elena Caracheo, Sister Caridad Inda, and Philip Wheaton in the bilingual Threatened with Resurrection / Amenazado de Resurreción: Prayers and Poems from an Exiled Guatemalan (The Brethren Press, 1982).
Julia Esquivel (1930–2019) was a Guatemalan poet, theologian, lay preacher, biblical studies teacher, social worker, and human rights activist. In 1953 she moved to Costa Rica to study at the Seminario Biblico Latinoamericano, returning to Guatemala to work at the Instituto Evangélico América Latina. After speaking out against the massacres, assassinations, torture, and forced disappearances being carried out by the Guatemalan military and police, she received death threats and survived two kidnapping attempts and thus went into forced exile in 1980, finding refuge in the monastic Communauté de Grandchamp in Switzerland. She studied at the Ecumenical Institute at Château de Bossey, run by the World Council of Churches. She returned to her home country in 1996 after the signing of the Peace Accords, helping document over two hundred thousand civilian deaths and disappearances for the Recovery of Historical Memory Project and working with women traumatized by violence. She is the author of several books, including the poetry collections Threatened with Resurrection (1982) and The Certainty of Spring (1993).
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.”
“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.
“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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Mark Cazalet, Advent Station 1: The Breath of God (closed), 2024
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).
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
Mark Cazalet, Advent Station 2: John the Baptist on the Beach, 2024
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
Mark Cazalet, Advent Station 3: The Annunciation, 2024
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
Mark Cazalet, Advent Station 4: Bethlehem Motel, 2024
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)
Mark Cazalet, Advent Station 5: The Incarnation (A Blessing Conferred), 2024
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
Mark Cazalet, Advent Station 6: The Shepherds See the Star, 2024
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
Mark Cazalet, Advent Station 7: The Magi Dreaming, 2024
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
Mark Cazalet, Advent Station 8: Herod Syndrome, 2024
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)
Mark Cazalet, Advent Station 9: The Flight to Egypt (Forced Migration), 2024
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
Mark Cazalet, Advent Station 10: The Exiles Return, 2024
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)
Mark Cazalet, Advent Station 11: Faithful Waiting and Watching (Anna and Simeon), 2024
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
Mark Cazalet, Advent Station 12: The Mistle Thrush Greets the New Day, 2024
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.
Natalya Rusetska (Ukrainian, 1984–), Nativity, 2016. Tempera on gessoed wood, 17.5 × 15.5 cm.
Gravity’s maker, spinner of spheres and spiraling matter, made into weight, to sweat. His own feet vulnerable, drawn flat and close against the punishing ground.
Star-strayed infant, wrapped in weight, heavy heaven. In the hollow of the years, long and narrow as a well, he waits suspended, bucket-drawn, clapper in a bell.
Ringing and ringing in the heatfolds of gravity, lines and lines of weight leaning us into each other, caught up, tumbled open-face roses in a blue bolt of thorn-pricked cloth.
God made known, fleshly God, Godlight bodied, bleeding out into wood, over stone. God from God, telluric God, shadowcast God, lightstricken God, bloodwritten. The pull
electric of low, deep center. God flesh, corpus God, Verbum corpse, light-riven. Inscribed, blooded, God-heft falling death- bitten into weighted rising, made and given; the miracle of leaven.
LeighAnna Schesser is a Catholic writer from south-central Kansas whose poetry collections include Struck Dumb with Singing (2020) and Heartland (2016).
“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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.”
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.
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.
23. Untitled poemby 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.
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.
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.
LOOK: Incipit to the Gospel of John from the Book of Kells
Incipit to the Gospel of John, Book of Kells, ca. 800. Trinity College Dublin MS 58, fol. 292r.
Made by Celtic monks in a Columban monastery around the year 800, the Book of Kells—an illuminated Gospel book named after the monastery of Kells in County Meath, Ireland, where it spent eight centuries—is one of the most beautiful manuscripts ever created. Pictured here is the lavishly decorated opening page of the Gospel of John, which bears the words “In p/rinci/pio erat ver/bum [et] ver[b]um” (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word . . .”). The passage continues on the following page.
Bernard Meehan, the former head of research collections and keeper of manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, describes the lettering on folio 292r:
The letters IN P, filled with interlacing snakes, crosses and abstract ornament, dominate the composition. Snakes form the letters RIN and C, with C taking the form of a harp, played by the man who forms the letter I. The urge of the artist to decorate has taken precedence over legibility, to the extent that the letters ET and B are missing from the last line. [1]
Because some of the letters are difficult to discern, I’ve done my best to trace them in red in this graphic:
The text unfolds in four rows. The column on the left forms the I and doubles as the left stem of the N. The diagonal stroke of the N passes through the cross-shape, and its right stem is formed by another blue column, which also doubles as the stem of the P.
The following R, I, N, and C are beige and blue serpentine figures, tangled together, the latter shaped like a harp and being “played” by a seated man whose torso forms an I.
The remaining text is organized in two rows and is black. As Meehan mentioned, the artist-monk unintentionally omitted the ET and B in “et verbum.” And the final M is upside down, an artistic variation.
Scholars disagree on who the curly-haired figure at the top is, holding a book: some suppose it’s John the Evangelist, the author of the fourth Gospel, while others think it’s Christ the Logos. I’m in the latter camp. Christ is often shown in art sitting on a throne holding a book, representing the gospel—as on folio 32v of this very manuscript. And a full-page portrait of John already appears on the opposite page, folio 291v; granted, the iconography is similar, but it would be an unusual choice to repeat a person in the same pose on a single page spread. Also, as art historian Heather Pulliam points out, the yellow and red striations that encompass the figure resemble flame—a “throne of light,” writes Françoise Henry—an attribute more befitting of the figure of Christ than of John. [2]
The identity of the smaller figure on the right who’s drinking from a red chalice is also debated. Again, it could be either John or Christ. According to an apocryphal legend that first appeared in the second-century Acts of John and that was popularized in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend, a pagan priest challenged John to drink a cup of poisoned wine to test whether his God was truly powerful enough to protect him. John blessed the cup, downed the wine, and suffered no harm. That’s why in art one of John’s attributes is a chalice with a serpent in it, representing the poison rising out and the triumph of Christian faith.
On the other hand, the drinking figure may be Christ drinking the cup of suffering (John 18:11). The monstrous head to the right supports either interpretation—it could be Satan tormenting Christ in Gethsemane, or in John’s case, the threat of death by poison, or the evil intent of the pagan priest who sought to discredit him.
Additional possibilities have also been posited. Małgorzata Krasnodębska-D’Aughton argues that the man is meant to be a generic Christian partaking of the Eucharist, [3] whereas Pulliam suggests that the cup represents not the blood of Christ but “the chalice of wisdom received from the breast of Christ.” [4] She cites Augustine’s first tractate on the Gospel of John:
Thence John, who said these things, received them, brothers, he who lay on the Lord’s breast, and from the breast of the Lord drank in what he might give us to drink. But he gave us words; you ought then to receive understanding from the source, from that which he drank who gave to you; so that you may lift up your eyes to the mountains from where shall come your aid, so that from there you may receive, as it were, the cup, that is, the word, given you to drink; and yet, since your help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth, you may fill your breast, from the source. [5]
In Pulliam’s interpretation, the man imbibes the words of God—that is, scripture—providing a model for us to emulate.
Bernard Meehan, The Book of Kells: An Illustrated Introduction to the Manuscript in Trinity College Dublin (Thames & Hudson, 1994, 2008), 34.
Heather Pulliam, Word and Image in the Book of Kells (Four Courts Press, 2006), 180–83; cf. Françoise Henry, The Book of Kells: Reproductions from the Manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin (Thames & Hudson, 1974).
Małgorzata Krasnodębska-D’Aughton, “Decoration of the In principio initials in early Insular manuscripts: Christ as a visible image of the invisible God,” Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 18, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 117.
Pulliam, Word and Image, 185.
Augustine, In Joannis Evangelium 1.1, PL 35: 1382.
LISTEN: “The Word Was God” by Rosephanye Powell, 1996 | Performed by the University of Pretoria Camerata, dir. Michael Barrett, 2022
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made that have been made. Nothing was made he has not made.
While this choral anthem is not a Christmas song per se, it is a setting of John 1:1–3, the opening of the great prologue of the Incarnation. These first three verses are about Christ’s eternal being, his oneness with the Father, and his active role in creation. I can’t hear them without anticipating verse 14: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . .”
“The Word Was God” is by Dr. Rosephanye Powell (pronounced ro-SEH-fuh-nee) (born 1962), an African American composer, singer, professor, and researcher. One of her most popular and widely recorded works, it is full of rhythmic energy and drive. Read detailed notes by Powell here, where she explains her musical choices and their theological significance.
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.
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!”
Tim Joyner (American, 1987–), Incarnation, 2021. Foraged pigment on board-mounted paper, 4 × 4 in.
Tim Joyner is an artist who works primarily with natural pigments and inks derived from locally foraged materials, such as stone, lichen, and seaweed. He is also the worship director at Trinity Church Congregational in Bolton, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and four kids.
Incarnation is a painting he made during Advent 2021. He describes its makeup and meaning in a Rabbit Room blog post:
The painting . . . is pretty dark for an Advent piece. It’s primarily Lamp Black (a pigment that I associate with longing and prayer because I make it from the discarded stubs of vigil candles), with some even darker Jet Black. There’s some white from Jingle Shells and a bit of Verdigris, but those are there mostly to make the black pigment look even blacker. Even the orb of gold leaf in the very center of the painting is obscured enough that it mostly just draws attention to the rising movement of dark pigment.
This painting is a reminder to myself that, yes, at the end of all this waiting there is an arrival. But it’s not me arriving at the other end of darkness or doubt, brokenness or betrayal. It is the Christ Child who arrives. He meets us here. And rather than chasing away all that it means to be human—including the pain and the longing unfulfilled—and banishing it forever, He wraps Himself in it. We find Christ not on the other side of our longing, but within it.
asks for Christ to be born into the aches of our world and the longing of our hearts.
Although the Son of God came into our world to joyfully dwell with us, the Christmas season, for many, is often painful, lonely, and despairing as the realities of broken families, stinging disappointments, personal addictions, and profound grief confront us in a poignant way.
Our desire in writing this song is to connect the birth of Christ to these very real, dark areas of our everyday lives. It is a prayer for the hope of the Messiah to be “born” into the places where no light seems to exist.
Out of the living word Come flower, serpent and bird.
All things that swim or fly Or go upon the ground, All shapes that breath can cry Into the sinews of sound, That growth can make abound In the river of the eye Till speech is three-ply And the truth triply wound.
Out of the living word Come flower, serpent and bird.
Howard Nemerov (1920–1991) was a major figure in midcentury American poetry, whose Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize. He served as US poet laureate from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990, and he also wrote fiction and essays. “Romantic, realist, comedian, satirist, relentless and indefatigable brooder upon the most ancient mysteries—Nemerov is not to be classified,” Joyce Carol Oates remarked in the New Republic. From an artistic family, Nemerov was the older brother of the photographer Diane Arbus.
The exuberantly decorated Book of Kells is widely agreed to be the most beautiful book ever made. The crown jewel of Celtic art, it is a manuscript copy of the Four Holy Gospels in Latin, with ten surviving full-page illuminations and many more marginal illuminations and decorated initials throughout the other 670 pages—the work of three artists and four scribes.
Most art historians believe the book was created on the Scottish island of Iona by a group of monks sometime around 800. Viking raids at that time forced the monks to flee to the monastery of Kells in Ireland; they were able to save the book, but it was left unfinished.
The most famous page from the Book of Kells is folio 34r, often referred to as the Christi autem or Chi-Rho page.
The Chi-Rho page from the Book of Kells, ca. 800. Trinity College Dublin MS 58, fol. 34r.
The page illuminates the “second beginning” of the Gospel of Matthew, following the genealogy and opening the narrative of the life of Christ: Christi autem generatio (“Now the birth of Christ . . .”) (Matt. 1:18). The anonymous artist represents the Holy Name of Jesus with a monogram, enlarged and embellished, consisting of the Greek letters chi (Χ) (pronounced “kai”), rho (ρ), and iota (ι), the first three letters in the word Χριστός, Christos. H generatio (where h is shorthand for autem) is written in Latin in Insular majuscule script at the bottom right of the page.
The chi-rho monogram is accorded special dignity in Christian art. Here the chi takes up nearly the whole page, its arms and legs extending to the four corners, exuding a kinetic energy. It reaches, it leaps; it blossoms and enfolds. It is beautified with intricate interlaces, spirals, and lozenges, and it’s teeming with life! Creatures of the land, air, and sea dwell within and around—cats and mice (nibbling on a eucharistic wafer!), birds and moths, an otter and a fish, humans and angels. There are vines and flowers too, and the whirling gears of the cosmos—all of it spilling out of the precious name of Christ.
Peering out from the inner tip of the rho is a red-haired man. Might this represent Jesus? Scholars tend to think so.
This illuminated page combines word (speech) and Word (Logos) with glorious liveliness. “The decoration of the text of Christ’s birth suggests the identification of Christ incarnate with Christ the Creator-Logos,” writes art historian Jennifer O’Reilly. “Christ as the divine Word is here revealed in a word, a single letter, concealed within the design. Similarly, commentators meditating on the name at this point in Matthew’s gospel, described his divinity as lying hidden in his creation, beneath his human flesh at his Incarnation and beneath the literal letter of the scriptural text.”
In his ekphrastic poem “The Book of Kells,” Howard Nemerov subtly draws out this theology—Christ as the Creator of the universe in and by whom all things consist (Col. 1:17). Bearing a rhyme scheme of aa bcbccbbc aa, the poem opens and closes with the same couplet: “Out of the living word / Come flower, serpent and bird.” Again, the word “word” is multivalent, referring to the written word “Christ” that fills the Book of Kells page in the form of a stylized monogram, as well as to Christ the person, the living Word of God, the source of all life. It can also refer to the Bible, which is “living and active” (Heb. 4:12) and which reveals Christ.
Nemerov alludes to the Chi-Rho page’s knotwork, its geometric shapes, its zoomorphic interlaces, and its triskeles (triple spirals), glorying in the sacred beauty and abundance they signify, which some unnamed early medieval monk laboriously sketched and painted over the course of who knows how long, to honor the story of the birth of Jesus Christ.
The Book of Kells’ Chi-Rho page is a phenomenal work of art. The symbol of Christ is all-encompassing, and all of creation is united in harmony with it.
The 2009 animated fantasy drama The Secret of Kells, made by the Irish studio Cartoon Salon, features a wondrous animation of the Chi-Rho page at the end, bringing to life some of its many details:
Ihor Paneyko (Ukrainian, 1957–), Я родився (I Am Born), 1986. Oil on canvas.
LISTEN: “The Infinite a Sudden Guest” by Josh Rodriguez, 2015 | Performed by New City Music on Songs from Engedi, 2015
The Infinite a sudden guest—
Awake, mankind! For your sake God has become man. Awake, you who sleep: God has become man. Awake, rise up from the dead, And Christ will enlighten you. For your sake, God became man.
You would have suffered eternal death, Never freed from sinful flesh, Had he not taken on himself The likeness of sinful flesh; Lost from everlasting unhappiness, Had it not been for this mercy. You would never have returned to life, Had he not shared your death.
Let us celebrate the coming of salvation and redemption! Let us celebrate the day who is the great and eternal day, Came from the great and endless day of eternity Into our own short day of time.
Christ, born of Mary. Eternity entered time. Truth has arisen from the earth: Christ who said, “I am the Truth.” And Justice looked down from heaven: Because believing in this newborn child, Man is justified not by himself but by God.
Truth has arisen from the earth: Because the Word was made flesh, And Justice looked down from heaven. Justified by faith, let us be at peace with God. For Peace and Justice have embraced in Jesus Christ.
The Infinite a sudden guest— God In time In God In time In God In time In God In time In God In time In God In time In God.
In 2015 Josh Rodriguez[previously here and here] composed this piece for SATB choir, violin, and percussion forNew City Presbyterian Church in Royal Oak, Michigan, where he served as music director at the time.
Its striking title and first line come from a short poem by Emily Dickinson, and the rest of the text is taken from a Christmas sermon by Augustine of Hippo (cataloged as Sermon 185 by scholars), which centers on Psalm 85:11: “Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall look down from heaven.” Augustine sees this prophecy as fulfilled in Christ. The full sermon can be read in St. Augustine, Sermons on the Liturgical Seasons, trans. Mary Sarah Muldowney, RSM (vol. 38 of the Fathers of the Church series) (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1959), 6–9. Section 1 can be read for free here.
Celebrating the entrance of God into human history, this choral work alternates between vigorous, exuberant passages and ones that are slower and more introspective. In the opening, there’s a wonderful crescendo on “guest”—an expansion that reflects the possibility opened up by the Incarnation. The final passage alternates between the phrases “in God” and “in time.” God is in time and time is in God, the infinite contracted to a span.
This post is part of a daily Christmas series that goes through January 6. View all the posts here, and the accompanying Spotify playlist here.
Art & Theology 