HYMN FOR THE FEAST OF THE VISITATION: “Somewhere I hear the church bells ringing” by Gracia Grindal: There are many church songs on the Magnificat, the canticle Mary sings in Luke 1:46–55 when she greets her cousin Elizabeth at Elizabeth’s home in the hills of Judea, but very few hymns, at least in Protestantism, that narrate the Visitation event that occasions it, including Elizabeth’s glad affirmations. Gracia Grindal’s “Somewhere I hear the church bells ringing” is one example of the latter—a four-stanza hymn she wrote in 2010 for the Feast of the Visitation, celebrated every year on May 31, with Elizabeth as the poetic speaker. The hymn captures the excitement of the Messiah coming into the world, and references an Alfred Lord Tennyson poem along the way.
On her blog Hymn for the Day, Grindal provides the lyrics and a reflection on this hymn, as well as sheet music that uses a melody Daniel Charles Damon wrote specifically for the text, which is also available in Damon’s collection Garden of Joy (Hope Publishing, 2011). For public-domain tune alternatives, Grindal suggests DISTRESS or KEDRON from William Walker’s Southern Harmony (1835), or the Renaissance tune by Thomas Tallis known as TALLIS’ CANON—all three of which are commonly used with Fred Pratt Green’s twentieth-century hymn “O Christ, the Healer, We Have Come.”
A professor emerita at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, Gracia Grindal is a prolific writer and translator with expertise in Scandinavian hymns. She has served on several hymn committees and boards and is the author of A Treasury of Faith, a three-volume series of over seven hundred hymn texts on the lessons of the Revised Common Lectionary (Wayne Leupold Editions, 2006–9); Preaching from Home: The Stories of Seven Lutheran Women Hymn Writers (Eerdmans, 2011); an English translation of Hallgrímur Pétursson’s Icelandic Passíusálmar (Hymns of the Passion) (Hallgrím Church, 2020); and Jesus the Harmony: Gospel Sonnets for 366 Days (Fortress, 2021), among many other books.
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SUBSTACK POSTS:
>> “The Slow Way: On Being ‘at Peace and in Place’” by Micha Boyett, The Slow Way: When her third child was born with Down syndrome, Micha Boyett, an emerging writer, knew she needed to release herself from the anxiety of producing and focus on parenting; she decided to slow down in order to be faithful to her son. Drawing on themes in her new book, Blessed Are the Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole, Boyett reflects in this post on the slow, remarkable, intricate work God does when we “allow all that we are to nourish the place we find ourselves”; when we let go of plans and rest in the goodness of what God has for us at this moment. “Rest is something that nourishes our long-term lives. And rarely, if ever, does rest improve our influence, our finances, or our platforms,” she writes. “Rest is an invisible gift to ourselves that results in invisible growth, invisible peace, invisible relational wholeness.”
>> “Word Games with George Herbert” by Grace Hamman, Medievalish: This Herbert poem was new to me, and what a delight it is! It consists of five tercets, each with an end word that gradually diminishes through loss of a letter with each subsequent line—e.g., CHARM, HARM, ARM. Playing this word game, Herbert develops the conceit of himself as a tree in God’s enclosed garden-orchard.
“The Nuingetonn Peeche” from the Tradescants’ Orchard, 1620–29. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1461, fol. 105r.
I always enjoy the literary works, which are mostly medieval or early modern, that Dr. Grace Hamman explores through her newsletter and podcast—and the “Prayer from the Past” she curates for each newsletter sign-off, like the one in this edition, by Richard Brathwait (1588–1673).
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SONG: “Te Atua” (Dear Lord): I heard this popular New Zealand hīmene (hymn) in the Taika Waititi–directed movieBoy (2010) (such a great movie!). It’s a traditional Māori Christian text, set to the Appalachian folk tune NEW BRITAIN (best known for its pairing with “Amazing Grace”) and performed in 1997 by the St. Joseph’s Māori Girls’ College Choir, featuring soloist Maisey Rika. The arrangement is by the college’s principal, Georgina Kingi. Bearing echoes of Jesus’s parable of the sower, this song is particularly appropriate for the season of Ordinary Time that we’re now in, during which the seeds that were planted in us in the first half of the Christian year germinate, grow, and bear fruit.
E te Atua kua ruia nei Ö purapura pai Hömai e koe he ngákau hou Kia tupu ake ai
E lhu kaua e tukua Kia whakangaromia Me whakatupu ake ia Kia kitea ai ngá hua
A má te Wairua Tapu rá Mátou e tiaki Kei hoki ki te mahi hé Ö mátou ngákau höu
Dear Lord, you have spread Your seeds of goodness Give us new hearts So that these seeds may grow
Dear Lord, do not allow These seeds to be lost But rather let them grow So that the results may be seen
May the Holy Spirit Guide us Lest our hearts should Return to our evil ways
>> Message Songs by the Porter’s Gate: For this album, the Porter’s Gate Worship Project partnered with the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary to set to music excerpts from Peterson’s best-selling translation of the Bible, The Message. Included are adaptations of Psalms 5, 16, 27, and 121, Matthew 11:28–30, Luke 15, and John 1—by a range of songwriters. The album release this month coincided with the publication of The Message Anniversary Edition, available from NavPress.
>> Volume 10 (Ordinary Time) of The Soil and The Seed Project: This double album—which is completely free!—features twenty-four songs by musicians of faith under the direction of Seth Thomas Crissman, a Mennonite pastor, educator, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist from Harrisonburg, Virginia. Here’s one of the songs, “The Way Your Kingdom Comes” by Lindsey FitzGerald Stine, sung by her and her sister Rachel FitzGerald:
The music is one element of a larger project that also includes liturgies and newly commissioned artworks. Learn about the project’s free summer concert series on their Events page, which will feature contributors to the most recent album and other friends.
Since the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church has celebrated May, a time of new growth, as “Mary’s month.” The calendrical placement of this celebration probably has to do in part with the fact that the ancient Greeks celebrated a festival to Artemis, the goddess of fecundity, in May; the ancient Romans, Flora, the goddess of flowers and spring. Because Mary, by the power of the Holy Spirit, conceived in her womb and brought to birth the life of the world, Jesus Christ, Christians see her as standing at the threshold of an eternal springtime.
POLL QUESTION: Before moving on to the six roundup items below, if you are a regular reader of this blog or other media like it, would you please help me out by answering the following poll question? (I’m trying out this WordPress feature for the first time!) Over the years I’ve gathered a lot of compelling poems and artworks on the Annunciation, encompassing a variety of eras, styles, and perspectives, and I’d like to pursue the idea of turning one or the other, or both, into a book. Which kind of Annunciation-themed book would you be most inclined to buy? Keep in mind that a book with art would cost significantly more because it would be in full color and probably a larger hardcover. Also note that a book that combines art and poetry would obviously have fewer selections of each than a book dedicated fully to one or the other.
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UPCYCLED MARY STATUETTES:Soasig Chamaillard is a French artist who, since 2006, has been acquiring small, damaged statues of the Virgin Mary—either from garage sales or received donations—and restoring and transforming them, often with reference to children’s toy lines and media franchises, comic book heroes, or other pop-culture icons. Some are silly or irreverent; others, merely quirky. Here are two I like, which both modernize Mary, by her dress or her reading material. Click on the images to view detail photos of the final product, and see here and here for blog posts that document the transformation process.
Before/After. Right: Soasig Chamaillard (French, 1976–), Jeans-Marie (Jeans Mary), 2015. Plaster, acrylic paint, resin, metal frame, height 48 cm.Before/After. Right: Soasig Chamaillard (French, 1976–), Nouvelle Bible (New Bible), 2008. Plaster, acrylic paint, resin, digital print, height 40 cm.
The first shows Mary in high-waisted jeans and red Converse high-tops with rosettes on the tongues. The second one, a Madonna del Parto, shows her pregnant and reading the book J’élève mon enfant (Raising My Child) by Laurence Pernoud, picking up tips on being a new mom.
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ESSAY: “Mary: Evolution of a Bookworm” by Joel J. Miller: “It’s unlikely the historical Mary could read at all, but medieval Christians transformed her into an icon of literacy,” often showing her with a book in hand, whether as a child learning to read from her mother, Saint Anne; at the Annunciation, with the book of Isaiah, the Psalter, or a book of hours splayed open on her lap; or teaching her own child, Jesus, how to read. Drawing on the research of Laura Saetveit Miles, author of The Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation: Reading, Interpretation, and Devotion in Medieval England [previously], Joel J. Miller discusses how images of Mary reading “rode a wave of rising female literacy and simultaneously encouraged its expansion.”
Ivory plate of the Annunciation from the Brunswick Casket, made in Metz, France, ca. 860–70. Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, Germany. This is the earliest known representation of the Virgin Mary with a book at the Annunciation.Lorenzo Costa (Italian, 1460–1535), Annunciation (Mary Reading), first third of 16th century. Oil on panel, 62 × 60.5 cm. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Old Masters Picture Gallery), Dresden, Germany.
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CONVERSATION: “Sacra Conversazione” with Walter Hansen and Bruce Herman: In this written conversation from Image no. 62, artist Bruce Herman [previously] and patron Walter Hansen discuss the two large altarpieces Herman produced comprising six paintings on the life of the Virgin Mary: Miriam, Virgin Mother and Second Adam. The article is about the creative process and Herman’s collaboration with Hansen and with student apprentices in Orvieto, Italy, but it’s also about attempting to recover Mary’s image from a heap of the saccharine or overly exalted on the one hand, and ironic detachment on the other. Herman says,
I had vivid memories of Boston art critics and museum people back in the 1980s telling me that [religious] subject matter could only be approached ironically, but I had a persistent feeling that they were wrong. I’ve sensed for many years that the tradition of biblical imagery in art is far from exhausted—maybe simply stalled out due to loss of nerve or imagination. To me, much of the recent religious imagery we’ve inherited is fairly shallow. I know this might sound odd, given more than a thousand years of tradition, but I honestly believe that new insights are arrived at in every generation. Why can’t a contemporary artist paint the Virgin Mary without irony—and maybe even specifically attack the problematic nature of much Marian imagery? Why can’t a century of experimentation in painting yield something relevant to that tradition?
It’s an excellent conversation! You may have to subscribe to Image journal to access it, but it’s well worth it for all the wonderful content they put out quarterly and access to their archives.
Bruce Herman (American, 1953–), Miriam, Virgin Mother, 2007. Oil on wood with silver and gold leaf, 95 × 154 in. (241.3 × 391.2 cm).
Read more about the two altarpieces and view more photos at www.bruceherman.com/magnificat, and in the beautifully produced catalog magnificat, with a foreword by Hansen and essays by Rachel Hostetter Smith and John Skillen. The book also features four paintings from Herman’s related Woman series.
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ART VIDEOS:
What follows are my two favorite videos from the Visual Commentary on Scripture’s twelve-episode series “Unlocking Christian Art: The Virgin Mary,” in which theologian Ben Quash and art historian Jennifer Sliwka discuss religious artworks from museums in Berlin.
>> “Holy Kinship”: The subject of this video is a late medieval German limewood carving by Hans Thoman depicting Jesus’s extended family on his mother’s side. He and his mom, grandma, grandpa, step-grandpas, aunts, and cousins pose for this matriarchal family portrait that reflects a medieval legend (rejected by the Council of Trent) that Saint Anne was grandmother not just to Jesus but also, through two subsequent marriages, to five of the twelve apostles: James the Greater, Simon, Jude, James the Less, and John the Evangelist. Also included in this sculpture group are Elizabeth and Zechariah with their son, John the Baptist, and Emelia with her son Servatius of Tongeren, a fourth-century saint whom legends name a distant relative of Jesus. [view object record]
>> “Leave-Taking”: From the same period and general region as the above sculpture comes a painting by Bernhard Strigel (1460–1528) that shows Jesus taking leave of his mother just before his entry into Jerusalem the week of his death, a popular subject in northern Europe in the sixteenth century. The episode derives from a versified Marienleben (Life of Mary) from the early fourteenth century written by the Carthusian monk Philipp von Seitz, aka Bruder Philipp, from Middle Franconia. [view object record]
SONG: “Mary” by Patty Griffin: “Mary, you’re covered in roses, you’re covered in ashes, you’re covered in rain . . .” From the 1998 album Flaming Red by the country-folk artist Patty Griffin, the song “Mary” is a tribute to the woman who mothered Jesus and mothers us all. A compassionate presence who lives on in heaven at her son’s right hand, she feels the pain of other mothers who’ve lost their children. Griffin sings of Mary’s beautiful, big, humble, suffering, nurturing, pondering heart.
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POEM: “Christ’s Mother Reflects: His Childhood”by Micha Boyett: This is the last in a series of five Advent poems written from the perspective of Mary for John Knox Presbyterian Church in Seattle in 2010, the other four being on the subjects of the Annunciation, the boy who is snatched away by a dragon in Revelation 12, the Visitation, and the Nativity. Here, after Jesus’s death, Mary reflects back on his life—an early heartbreak of his, his contemplative nature, a question he once asked, his delight in scripture study, the hard choices he made, her own unfulfilled hope for normalcy on his behalf, the tearing of his flesh that mends us.
Following the popularity of last year’s “25 Poems for Christmas,” I’ve decided to publish a brand-new installment, and will perhaps make this a yearly tradition! All the selections can be read online—just follow the links.
Despite the pithy title of this post, not all the poems are “Christmas” poems, strictly speaking, but rather they encompass the season of Advent too, as well as Epiphany. Advent is a four-week season leading up to Christmas that is characterized by a mood of longing and expectation; it is oriented not only toward Jesus’s first coming but also toward his second. Christmas, of course, celebrates the birth of Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. And Epiphany, on January 6, commemorates the visit of the magi to the crib, representing God’s self-revelation to the wider world.
Each poem is accompanied by a micro-commentary or short descriptive blurb, which I suggest you read after reading the poem itself. There’s a benefit to first entering a poem without having any context—then after registering your initial impressions and questions, to consider another person’s framing or analysis or highlights, and reread. And then a third time! Each reading can potentially reveal new meaning.
Stone Nativity by Juan Manuel Cisneros, Ventura, California, December 2016 [learn more]
1.“Haiku for an Advent Calendar” by Richard Bauckham: Church services during Advent tend to focus on messianic prophecies from the Hebrew Bible, rumblings of a coming savior. In this sequence of twenty-four haiku, Richard Bauckham pulls a detail from each book of the Jewish scriptures, finding anticipations of Christ. For example, Isaiah: “In the wilderness / a voice cries for centuries / seeking an echo.” Or Job: “God answered Job but / not his question. Maybe he / will do that again.”
2. “How Christ Shall Come” (anonymous): The cosmological Christ blew in from the four cardinal directions, coming as lover, knight, merchant, and pilgrim. So says this fourteenth-century Middle English lyric, rich in metaphor, compiled in a book of preaching aids and sermons by John Sheppey (d. 1360), bishop of Rochester. (It is unclear whether he is the author of the poem.) The great medieval literature scholar Carleton Brown gave it the title “How Christ Shall Come” in his landmark Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century (1924), and Grace Hamman brought it to my attention recently in her wonderful monthly Substack, Medievalish, providing a modern English translation and commentary.
3.“Hawk Lies Down with Rabbit” by Seth Wieck: What would it look like for death to no longer have dominion in the animal world? Grappling with Isaiah’s end-time vision of a peaceable kingdom void of predation, this poem describes in graphic terms a bird of prey making its kill, feeding on flesh, and wonders how a hawk could still be itself with rewired impulses. Hear the author read and provide context for the poem on the Reformed Journal Podcast.
4.“john” by Lucille Clifton: Written in the voice of John the Baptist, this poem is part of an extraordinary sixteen-poem sequence titled “some jesus,” which features a range of biblical characters. In her retelling of his ministry as forerunner to the Messiah, Lucille Clifton casts John as a Black Baptist preacher, preparing his listeners to receive the one who “com[es] in blackness / like a star.” Clifton’s larger body of work would suggest that “blackness” here is multivalent, describing what Jesus comes into and as: the word suggests the darkness of the world that Christ entered, on the one hand, but also functions as a positive racial identifier. In Clifton’s revisioning, Christ comes as a Black man, wearing “a great bush / on his head”—which, again, could be read as an Afro, and/or as a mystical reference to the site at which God revealed himself to Moses in the Sinai desert. Luminous with truth, Christ comes, “calling the people brother.”
Pablo Gargallo (Spanish, 1881–1934), The Prophet (St. John the Baptist) (detail), 1933. Bronze, 91 3/4 × 29 1/2 × 19 in. Wurtzburger Sculpture Garden, Baltimore Museum of Art. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
5. “Christmas Mail” by Ted Kooser: Every December the story of an ancient birth comes alive again in couriers’ mailbags, in tin boxes at the ends of driveways, on mantels and fridges. This poem honors those postal workers who deliver good tidings in the form of Christmas cards, the magic spilling out the envelopes to make even the most tiresome routes sparkle a bit.
6. “December 25” by George MacDonald: Through the mid-nineteenth century, denominations influenced by the Reformed tradition, including the Church of Scotland in which George MacDonald was raised, typically did not observe Christmas, the rationale being that no one day should be thought of as holier than any other. But in his book-length dramatic poem Within and Without, MacDonald refers to December 25 as “this one day that blesses all the year”—and in this seven-liner from his Diary of an Old Soul, he describes Christmas as a gleaming blue sapphire, a structural center, around which all the other jewels of the church calendar are oriented.
7. “On a Cardinal Climbing Down a Manhole to Restore Power to 400 Homeless People” by Michael Stalcup: On May 11, 2019, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the papal almoner (Pope Francis’s special appointee to distribute charity), crawled into a manhole and broke a police seal to personally restore power to a homeless shelter in Rome whose electricity had been shut off due to its failure to pay its bills. The shelter was occupied by some 450 people at the time, 100 of them children, who had been without electric light, hot water, and refrigeration for nearly a week. In this poem, which can be read Christologically, Michael Stalcup celebrates this defiant humanitarian act that brought light to a people living in darkness.
8. “Incarnation” by Amit Majmudar: “Inheart yourself, immensity. Immarrow, / Embone, enrib yourself.” So begins the five-poem sequence “Seventeens.” Musical and witty, this first poem is a plea to the great I AM to take on a body and “be all we are, and all we aren’t.”
9.“The Lord Is with Thee” by Micha Boyett: Written in 2010 as the third in a five-poem sequence commissioned by John Knox Presbyterian Church in Seattle, this poem centers on the Visitation episode described in Luke 1:39–58. It’s about Mary finding belonging in God’s story, especially through the companionship of her elder cousin Elizabeth, who has nurtured Mary’s faith since infancy and continues to do so in this her moment of crisis. “How easily she spoke of God, / as if he were a neighbor, a fish vendor on the street,” Mary admires. Elizabeth supports Mary physically, emotionally, and spiritually, holding her hair back as she vomits, protecting her from vicious rumors, affirming the work of God in her life, and accompanying her at the start of this wild path God has set them both on.
Odilon Redon (French, 1840–1916), Mystical Conversation, ca. 1896. Oil on canvas, 65 × 46 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu, Japan.
10.“Our Lady” by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge: The great-grandniece of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861–1907) grew up in a home visited by family friends Alfred Lord Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, and Robert Browning, among others. In this poem she marvels at how God chose the common-born Mary for such a task as mothering the Christ, singing along with Mary’s Magnificat about how God raises up the lowly.
Source: Fancy’s Following (privately published, 1896). Public Domain.
11. “Traveling Man”by Marjorie Maddox: With his pregnant wife alongside, Joseph plods down south to Bethlehem, “convinced of the predestined / roll of dice chrismated with Miracle.” An epigraph from a Leonard Cohen song sets the tone.
12.“Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree” by George Starbuck: This charming shape poem contrasts the extravagance of our popular celebrations of Christmas with the poverty of the first-century event it marks. The first half describes the furious wind of decorative activity that uproots evergreens from their natural habitats to bring them indoors and deck them with baubles and ribbon. I don’t know how to interpret “no scapegrace of a sect,” but “Daughter-in-Law Elect” refers to a duet from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Mikado. The turn comes with “a son born / now / now,” the latter two lines styled as the visible trunk of the tree; here the scene shifts to the simple stable of old, where Mary lies “spent” next to her newborn along with a cow and donkey, a sole “firework” guiding the magi and us all to the spot.
13.“Christmas (I and II)” by George Herbert: George Herbert (1593–1633) is one of the most celebrated poets of the English language. In part 1, a sonnet, of this two-part poem, he imagines himself a weary traveler who chances upon a humble inn where he unexpectedly finds his Lord, the infant Christ. It’s the inn of Bethlehem. Having then received rest from Christ his host, in the closing couplet he expresses his desire to reciprocate—to offer his own soul, lowly though it is, as a residence for Christ, praying that God first adorn it to make it hospitable. In the second part of the poem, Herbert uses a metaphysical conceit (extended metaphor) comparing his soul to a shepherd whose flock of thoughts, words, and deeds pastures on God’s word and who, like the shepherds of Bethlehem, sings glory to God. His shepherd-soul seeks eternal daylight, which he finds in the Son/sun, whose beams so intertwine with his song that the beams sing and his song shines.
14. “Descending Theology: The Nativity” by Mary Karr: The physicality of childbirth, from the contractions (which pierce the Virgin like a star, Karr writes) to the bodily fluids, is heavily featured in this poem. Jesus emerges from his mother “a sticky grub” with a “lolling head” and “sloppy mouth” that seeks out her breast for food. And as she feeds him physically, he feeds her spiritually. Then he falls asleep. His first nap, Karr writes, is a foretaste of the sleep of death he will eventually come to taste. But for now, he wakes up crying—as all babies do.
Scott Erickson (American, 1977–), With Us, Face to Face, 2016. Digital art. [available for purchase]
15.“from spiralling ecstatically this”by E. E. Cummings: What a fantastic opening line! The heavenly spheres whirling, twirling, down into the “proud nowhere”—Bethlehem—“of earth’s most prodigious night.” Heretofore living in mundanity, the domestic animals, hungry for miracle, for newness, are vouchsafed to be witnesses of this supernatural event, before which they kneel “humbly in their imagined bodies.” Overhead floats the “perhapsless mystery of paradise,” a phrase suggesting that heaven is beyond human understanding but not without certainty; it’s a declarative reality, not subjunctive, even if it can’t quite be put into words. Mary herself has no words—she silently, knowingly smiles, while the created world erupts in song around her. The “mind without soul” is a reference to Herod, who seeks to snuff out this new life, but to no avail.
The omission of spaces after punctuation marks (e.g., “a newborn babe:around him,eyes”) is not a mistake; that’s how E. E. Cummings liked it. Scholars say it’s to create a faster rhythm, but in this poem I don’t think that choice is as effective, as pauses and slow savoring seem more appropriate to its contemplative mood.
16.“How the Natal Star Was Born”by Violet Nesdoly: Narrated by the angel Gabriel, this poem imaginatively describes heaven’s nervously awaiting the birth of Jesus during the nine months following Gabriel’s dispatch to Mary, and then busting out in celebration when at last they hear his infant-cry. When his Son is born, instead of cigars, the Father passes out trumpets to his company of friends, who sound them all the way to Bethlehem’s fields, and pops open a bottle of champagne whose bubbles spray far and wide.
17. Sections 9–10 of “The Child” by Rabindranath Tagore: Hinduism was the religion of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth and upbringing, but he also held deep respect for Jesus Christ. (For more on the influence of Christianity on Tagore’s thought and writing, see chapter 4 of Rabindranath Tagore and Interfaith Dialogue by Manas Kumar Ghosh [DMin thesis, Charles Sturt University, 2010].) “The Child” is a free-verse poem that Tagore wrote in English in 1930 after seeing a passion play in Germany and then translated into Bengali in 1932 with the title “Sishutirtha” (Pilgrimage to Childhood). In it a “Man of faith” gathers people from all walks of life to join him on a “pilgrimage of fulfilment,” to “struggle [through the dark] into the Kingdom of living light.” Initially met with enthusiasm, the Man later becomes a target of the people’s anger and distrust, and they kill him. Disorientation ensues. But a man in the crowd is able to rally the others to repent and resume their quest, following the spirit of “the Victim.”
The final two sections, 9 and 10, are the selection I’ve chosen. (Scroll right to read the last.) At “the first flush of dawn,” when the time is ripe, the pilgrims arrive at a thatched hut in a palm grove, where they finally meet the eternal Light they’ve been seeking: “the mother . . . seated on a straw bed with the babe on her lap, / . . . the morning star.” Here is the Child of the title, humanity’s redeemer.
Source: The Child (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931)
Jyoti Sahi (Indian, 1944–), Adoration of the Shepherds, 1983. Oil and acrylic on canvas.
18. “Love’s Bitten Tongue (11)”by Vassar Miller: This poem, “You, my God, lonesome man, Love’s bitten tongue,” is from a crown of twenty-two sonnets, a type of sequence in which the last line of each sonnet is repeated as the first line of the next, but each time with a new twist of syntax and sense. The crown as a whole expresses the poet-speaker’s struggle against her ego, and her desire for Christ (whom she gives such an evocative name in the title!). In this particular sonnet she describes waiting at the edge of her bed every Christmas Eve as a child in anticipation of both Santa’s arrival with gifts and the holy mystery of Christ’s birth, an admixture of sacred and profane longings that fill her still as an adult.
19. “Gloria in Profundis” by G. K. Chesterton: G. K. Chesterton’s poems are of variable quality, but this one is brilliant, emphasizing God’s descent from the rich heights of heaven into an obscure cave in a simple town. “Glory to God in the lowest!” it exclaims, a clever inversion of the angels’ song to the shepherds in Luke 2:14. The poem was originally published in a 1927 Christmas pamphlet with wood engravings by Eric Gill. The Latin title translates to “Glory in the Depths.”
Source: Gloria in Profundis by G. K. Chesterton (Ariel series pamphlet) (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1927); compiled in The Spirit of Christmas (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985)
20.“Silent Night” by Bonnie Bowman Thurston: Rev. Dr. Bonnie Thurston invokes a tradition that says the night of Christ’s birth, there was a whole hour in which time stood still and all was silent. What a fascinating legend! Thurston told me its origin is northern European, said she remembers reading it in some scholarly Celtic studies; I wasn’t able to locate any such mentions, but the second-century Protoevangelium of James, chapter 18, probably written in Egypt or Syria, does describe everything momentarily freezing in place around Joseph as he steps out to find a midwife for Mary. Anyway, the poem ends with a striking metaphor! Word, flesh: fire. (Reminds me of this digital artwork by Scott Erickson.)
21. “After Luke 2:19” by Michelle Ortega: When the shepherds recounted to Mary what the angels had told them in the fields about Jesus being the promised Messiah, “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart,” Luke narrates in his Gospel. Poet Michelle Ortega expounds on this verse, emphasizing the relationship of Mary’s body to her son’s from conception to birth and now postpartum—an intimacy known well by mothers across the centuries. As wondrous as it was to be part of a cosmic story writ large in the skies, Ortega suggests that Mary treasured just as much as the grand pronouncements those small moments of being just an ordinary mama.
22. “Christmas: 1924”by Thomas Hardy: “We the civilized world have given Christianity a fair trial for nearly 2000 years, & it has not yet taught countries the rudimentary virtue of keeping peace,” lamented the British novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) in a letter to Florence Henniker dated February 25, 1900, during the Boer War. World War I only increased his cynicism, which is on display in this sour little epigram that opens with an ironic quotation of the angels’ proclamation to the shepherds the night of Jesus’s birth.
Francis Hoyland (British, 1930–), Nativity, 1961. Oil on canvas, 90 × 120 cm. Methodist Modern Art Collection, HOY/1963/1.
23. “Eating Baklava on New Year’s Eve” by Anya Krugovoy Silver: Poet Anya Silver (1968–2018) reads a spiritual benediction in her piece of baklava, layered and sweet and consumed on the eve of a new year.
Source: Second Bloom (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017)
24. “A Ballad of Wise Men”by George M. P. Baird: Jesus so often confounds the wisdom of the wise, starting with his birth. With gentle humor and in iambic rhythm and rhyme, this poem celebrates the simple access we all have to Christ.
Source: Rune and Rann (Pittsburgh: Aldine Press, 1916). Public Domain.
25. “Excrucielsis”by Hannah Main-van der Kamp: Originally published at ArtWay.eu as a response to the contemporary Romanian sculpture The Spring by Liviu Mocan, this poem alternates between the weary journeying toward truth of one of the biblical magi and that of a modern-day seeker similarly “longing for / the something more.” It can be a trudge, finding the Light—it involves risk, a willingness to follow the signs, and the tenacity to hold on to your “vision burden,” “clutch[ing] the weight” of it all the way over rough and varied terrain. But the epiphanic moment awaits, to sound like a trumpet blast. The title of the poem is a neologism combining the words “excruciating” and “excelsis” (Latin for “the heights”); “every excelsis contains something excruciating, that’s how we get to genuine excelsis,” the poet told me in an email. Read a related prose reflection by Main-van der Kamp here.
Source: The Slough at Albion (Victoria, BC: Ekstasis Editions, forthcoming)
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Art & Theology 