In this celebratory painting with elements of the surreal, the birth of Christ is transplanted to Chimborazo province in the Andean highlands of Ecuador, where artist Pablo Sanaguano lives. Light spills from a giant overturned jug (which doubles as the cave of the Nativity), spotlighting the newborn child who is held aloft by his proud parents, Mary and Joseph. Summoned by a bocina (horn), villagers come bearing corn, potatoes, and other gifts from their harvest, while others play instruments—a bamboo panpipe, a quena (flute), a bomba (drum). The “angels” flying overhead are men in mythical bird costumes.
LISTEN:“Todos los días nace el Señor” by Juan Antonio Espinoza, 1976 | Performed by musicians at Iglesia Presbiteriana Comunidad de Esperanza (Community of Hope Presbyterian Church), Bogotá, Colombia, 2020
Para esta tierra sin luz, nace el Señor; para vencer las tinieblas, nace el Señor; para cambiar nuestro mundo, todos los días nace el Señor.
Para traer libertad, nace el Señor; nuestras cadenas rompiendo, nace el Señor; en la persona que es libre, todos los días nace el Señor.
Para quitar la opresión, nace el Señor; para borrar la injusticia, nace el Señor; en cada pueblo que gime, todos los días nace el Señor.
Para vencer la pobreza, nace el Señor; para los pobres que sufren, nace el Señor; por la igualdad de las gentes, todos los días nace el Señor.
Para traernos la paz, nace el Señor; para esta tierra que sangra, nace el Señor; en cada pueblo que lucha, todos los días nace el Señor.
Para traernos amor, nace el Señor; para vencer egoísmos, nace el Señor; al estrechar nuestras manos, todos los días nace el Señor.
Para este mundo dormido, nace el Señor; para inquietar nuestras vidas, nace el Señor; en cada nueva esperanza, todos los días nace el Señor.
English translation:
Into a world without light, Jesus Christ is born. Coming to conquer the darkness, Jesus Christ is born. He comes to bring us a new world. Jesus our Lord is born every day!
Freedom is coming to all, Jesus Christ is born. Chains of oppression are breaking, Jesus Christ is born. Liberating all of God’s children, Jesus our Lord is born every day!
Justice is coming to all, Jesus Christ is born. There will be no more oppression, Jesus Christ is born. He hears the cry of his people. Jesus our Lord is born every day!
He is the friend of the poor, Jesus Christ is born. He brings hope to all who suffer, Jesus Christ is born. Earth’s fruits are for all who labor. Jesus our Lord is born every day!
He comes to bring us his peace, Jesus Christ is born. Where there is strife, blood, and hatred, Jesus Christ is born. Wherever his people are struggling, Jesus our Lord is born every day!
He comes to teach us to love, Jesus Christ is born. Throw off the shackles of hatred, Jesus Christ is born. Join hands, sisters and brothers! Jesus our Lord is born every day!
He wakes the world from its sleep, Jesus Christ is born. He stirs and calls us to action, Jesus Christ is born. In every heart that is hopeful, Jesus our Lord is born every day! [1]
This contemporary Venezuelan carol is popular throughout Latin America. Its title and refrain translate to “Jesus our Lord is born every day!” This declaration does not dehistoricize the birth, but rather extends it. In what sense is Christ born every day? In the hearts and communities of those who embrace him.
The medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart once preached on Christmas Day,
Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says, “What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me? That it should happen in me is what matters.” We shall therefore speak of this birth, of how it may take place in us and be consummated in the virtuous soul, whenever God the Father speaks His eternal Word in the perfect soul. [2]
2. Meister Eckhart, Dum medium silentium, Sermon on Wisdom 18:14–15, in The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe, rev. Bernard McGinn (New York: Herder & Herder: 2009), 29. The quote by Augustine is untraced. (Eckhart’s quotations from authorities are often free, from memory, and thus difficult to verify.)
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.
What is the Christ of God?
It is his touch, his sign, his making known,
His coming forth from out the all-alone,
The stretching of a rod,
Abloom with his intent,
From the invisible. He made worlds so:
And souls, whose endless life should be to know
What the worlds meant.
Christ is the dear “I am,”
The voice that the cool garden-stillness brake.—
The human heart to human hearts that spake,
Long before Abraham.
The word, the thought, the breath,—
All chrism of God that in creation lay,—
Was born unto a life and name this day;
Jesus of Nazareth!
With man whom he had made
God came down side by side. Not from the skies
In thunders, but through brother lips and eyes,
His messages he said.
Close to our sin he leant,
Whispering, “Be clean!” The high, the awful-holy,—
Utterly meek,—ah! infinitely lowly,—
Unto our burden bent
The might it waited for.
“Daughter, be comforted. Thou art made whole.
Son, be forgiven through all thy guilty soul.
Sin—suffer ye—no more!
“O dumb, deaf, blind, receive!
Shall he who shaped the ear not hear your cry?
Doth he not tenderly see, who made the eye?
Ask me, that I may give!
“O Bethany and Nain!
I show your hearts how safe they are with me.
I reach into my deep eternity
And bring your dead again!
“My kingdom cometh nigh.
Look up, and see the lightning from afar.
Over my Bethlehem behold the star
Quickening the eastward sky!
“From end to end, always,
The same Lord, I am with you. Down the night,
My visible steps make all the mystery bright.
Lo! it is Christmas-day!”
This poem was originally published in Pansies: “…for Thoughts” by Adeline T. Whitney (London: Strahan & Co., 1872) and is in the public domain.
Adeline Dutton Train Whitney (1824–1906) was an American writer of poems and juvenile fiction, living in Massachusetts.
Tapestry after: Tadesse Wolde Aregay (Ethiopian, 1953–), Joy in Heaven: Glory Be to God, 1985, painting on goatskin. Copyright of the original image belongs to Berliner Missionswerk and the Raad voor de Zending der NHK (Mission Council of the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands).
I don’t know the maker or whereabouts of this charming tapestry, but I did find that it is based on a painting made by the Ethiopian artist Tadesse Wolde Aregay, which you can view here, along with three of Aregay’s other Christmas paintings. In it, a trumpeting angel points to the newborn Christ, whose mother, Mary, wraps him warmly in a blanket. Joseph stands on the left with a staff. On the right is Salome, a midwife and disciple of Jesus who appears in the Nagara Maryam (History of Mary), an apocryphal book of Marian legends from Ethiopia, and who is often portrayed in Ethiopian paintings of the Nativity and the Flight to Egypt.
LISTEN: “Christ Is Born Today” | Original German and Latin words attributed to Heinrich Suso (ca. 1295–1366); English translation by John Mason Neale, 1853 | Music: German dance tune, 14th century | Arranged by Elbertina “Twinkie” Clark and performed by the Clark Sisters on New Dimensions of Christmas Carols, 1978
Good Christian men, rejoice With heart, and soul, and voice; Give ye heed to what we say: Good news! Jesus Christ is born today! Ox and ass before him bow; He is in the manger now. Christ is born today! Christ is born today! Christ is born today!
(Joy to the world) Christ is born today! (He’s in the manger now) Christ is born today! (Peace on earth, goodwill to men) Christ is born today! (Unto us)
And man is blessèd evermore. Christ is born today! (Christ is born today) Christ is born today! (Peace on earth, goodwill to men) Christ is born today! (Unto us a child is given) Christ is born today!
This Christmas carol has its origins in late medieval Germany. It’s attributed to the Dominican friar Henry Suso—a legend says he had a vision of angels singing and dancing with joy about the birth of Christ, and, caught up in the mystic celebration, he penned the song.
I love the quick-tempoed, 6/8 version I grew up singing in church—but I also love what the Clark Sisters have done with it!
Officially formed in 1973 and active ever since, the Grammy-winning Clark Sisters are Jacky Clark Chisholm, Elbernita “Twinkie” Clark, Dorinda Clark-Cole, and Karen Clark Sheard. They were born in Detroit to gospel musician and choral director Dr. Mattie Moss Clark, who got them started in their singing careers. The group is a pioneer of contemporary gospel music, and last year they were inducted into the Black Music & Entertainment Walk of Fame in Atlanta.
The soloist on “Christ Is Born Today” is Denise “Niecy” Clark-Bradford, who left the group in 1986. In the first verse she mistakenly sings “groan” instead of “bow.”
Note that in hymnals today it is common to replace the first line with “Good Christian friends, rejoice” or “Good Christian folk, rejoice” to avoid the gendered “men,” and likewise in a later verse to change “And man is blessèd evermore” to “And we are blessed forevermore.” I get that “men” is being used in the broad sense of “humankind,” but where small lyrical changes for gender inclusivity are nondisruptive, as they are here, I am in favor of them.
The carol is written in the voice of the angels who excitedly proclaimed Christ’s birth to the shepherds, and their proclamation is taken up by Christians around the globe who sing this song, spurring one another to rejoice in the good news.
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.
LISTEN: “Joseph mon cher fidèle” (Joseph, My Dear Faithful One), traditional carol from the French West Indies | Performed by Robert Mavounza on Bakwa Nwel (2005)
Marie: Joseph, mon cher fidèle, Cherchons un logement, Le temps presse et m’appelle A mon accouchement. Je sens le fruit de vie, Ce cher enfant des cieux, Qui d’une sainte vie, Va paraître à nos yeux.
Joseph: Dans ce triste équipage, Marie allons chercher, Par tout le voisinage, Un endroit pour loger. Ouvrez, voisin la porte, Ayez compassion D’une vierge qui porte Votre rédemption.
Les voisins de Bethléem: Dans toute la bourgade, On craint trop les dangers, Pour donner le passage A des gens étrangers, Au logis de la lune, Vous n’avez qu’à loger, Le chef de la commune Pourrait bien se venger.
Marie: Ah! Changez de langage, Peuple de Bethléem, Dieu vient chez nous pour gage, Hélas! Ne craignez rien. Mettez-vous aux fenêtres, Ecoutez ce destin, Votre Dieu, votre Maître, Va sortir de mon sein.
Les voisins de Bethléem: C’est quelque stratagème On peut faire la nuit, Quelque tour de bohème, Quand le soleil ne luit. Sans voir ni clair, ni lune, Les méchants font leurs coups, Gardez votre infortune, Passants, retirez-vous!
Joseph: O ciel quelle aventure, Sans trouver un endroit, Dans ce temps de froidure, Pour coucher sous le toit. Créature barbare, Ta rigueur te fait tort, Ton coeur déjà s’égare En ne plaignant mon sort.
Marie: Puisque la nuit s’approche Pour nous mettre à couvert, Ah! Fuyons ce reproche, J’aperçois au désert Une vieille cabane, Allons mon cher époux, J’entends le boeuf et l’âne Qui nous seront plus doux.
Joseph: Que ferons-nous Marie, Dans un si méchant lieu, Pour conserver la vie Au petit Enfant-Dieu? Le monarque des anges Naîtra dans un bercail Sans feu, sans drap, sans langes Et sans palais royal.
Marie: Le ciel, je vous assure, Pourrait nous secourir, Je porte bon augure, Sans crainte de périr. J’entends déjà les anges Qui font d’un ton joyeux, Retentir les louanges, Sous la voûte des Cieux.
Joseph: Trop heureuse retraite, Plus noble mille fois, Plus riche et plus parfaite Que le louvre des rois! Logeant un Dieu fait homme, L’auteur du paradis, Que le prophète nomme Le Messie promis.
Marie: J’entends le coq qui chante, C’est l’heure de minuit, O ciel! Un dieu m’enchante, Je vois mon sacré fruit, Je pâme, je meurs d’aise, Venez mon bien-aimé! Que je vous serre et baise! Mon coeur est tout charmé.
Joseph: Vers Joseph votre père Nourrisson plein d’appas, Du sein de votre mère Venez entre mes bras! Ah! Que je vous caresse, Victime des pêcheurs, Mêlons, mêlons sans cesse, Nos soupirs et nos pleurs.
Mary: Joseph, my dear faithful one, Let us search for lodging; Time is pressing and calling me To give birth. I feel the fruit of life, This dear child from heaven Who, with a holy life, Will appear before our eyes.
Joseph: In this sad predicament, Let us search, Mary, Throughout the neighborhood For a place to stay. Open the door, neighbor; Have compassion For a virgin who carries Your redemption.
The people of Bethlehem: Throughout the town, There is too much fear of danger To offer shelter To strangers. Under the moonlight Is where you can go lodge; The town’s ruler Might seek revenge [on us].
Mary: Ah! Change your words, People of Bethlehem; God comes to us as a pledge. Alas! Do not fear. Stand by your windows, Listen to this destiny: Your God, your Master, Will come forth from within me.
The people of Bethlehem: It’s some kind of ploy, Which they can work at night, Some vagabond trick, When the sun isn’t shining. Without seeing clearly, without the moon, The wicked carry out their deeds. Keep your misfortune; Passersby, be gone!
Joseph: Oh heavens, what a hardship, To not find a place In this cold weather, A roof to sleep under. Barbaric creatures, Your harshness does you wrong; Your heart is gone astray, Not sympathizing with my fate.
Mary: As the night draws near To wrap us with its cover, Ah! let us escape this reproach. I see in the desert An old shed. Come, my dear husband: I hear the ox and the donkey Who will be kinder to us.
Joseph: What shall we do, Mary, In such a wretched place, To preserve the life Of the little Child of God? The king of angels Will be born in a manger, Without fire, without sheets, And without a royal palace.
Mary: Heaven, I assure you, Will come to our aid; I carry good omens, And no fear of perishing. I already hear the angels, In a joyful tone, Resounding with praises Under the vault of heaven.
Joseph: What a blessed retreat, A thousand times nobler, Richer, and more perfect Than the abode of kings! Lodging a God made man, The author of paradise, Whom the prophet calls The promised Messiah.
Mary: I hear the rooster singing; It’s the hour of midnight. Oh heavens! A god enchants me. I see my sacred fruit; I faint, and am overcome with joy. Come, my beloved [son]! Let me hold you and kiss you! My heart is completely charmed.
Joseph: Come to Joseph, your father, Darling boy; Come into my arms From your mother’s breast! Ah! Let me caress you, Sacrifice for sinners! Let’s mingle, let’s mingle without ceasing, Our sighs and our tears.
* This English translation by Djasra Ratébaye was commissioned in 2023 by Art & Theology.
Written as a dialogue between Mary, Joseph, and the people of Bethlehem as the couple first arrives in town, this traditional Christmas carol is from the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique. As for its approximate date of origin, I found several of its verses appearing as far back as 1703, with a complete version showing up in an 1817 carol collection, but it very well could have circulated prior to that.
The song was famously recorded by Manuela Pioche, Henri Debs, and Guy Alcindor in 1969 on Noël Aux Antilles (reissued on CD in 1993), but overall, I prefer Robert Mavounza’s recording from 2005. In Mavounza’s version, a chorus of voices sings what sounds like “waylo” after every line. The person who translated the song for me is neither Guadeloupean nor Martinican and wasn’t sure of the meaning of the word; he suggested that it’s either a wordless vocable used for embellishment, or else a creole word.
“Joseph mon cher fidèle” is part of the popular repertoire of the Chanté Nwel, the tradition of communal carol singing (with live percussion accompaniment!) that takes place throughout December in Guadeloupe and Martinique. It’s one of the most convivial times of the year.
The Holy Couple’s anxious search for lodging as Mary’s labor pangs begin is a feature of many retellings of the Christmas story, though it’s not present in either of the two Gospel narratives of Christ’s birth. Luke simply says that Joseph “went to be registered [in Bethlehem for the census] with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no place in the guest room” (Luke 2:5–7 NRSV).
Centuries of misinterpretation of the Greek word kataluma as “inn” (instead of the more accurate “guest room”) has led to the invention of an innkeeper character who coldly refuses the needy parents the accommodations they seek. By extension, the whole of Bethlehem is often characterized as inhospitable, for how dare they let the King of the universe be born in a lowly stable? In all historical likelihood, Mary and Joseph were welcomed by family when they got to Bethlehem, but the house where they were staying was full because of the large number of out-of-towners present for the census registration. Adapting to space limitations, Mary and Joseph stayed with their baby in the room where the animals were kept, which would have been attached to the family’s living quarters. Mary most likely would have been assisted by one or more midwives in giving birth and surrounded by family afterward.
Nevertheless, “Joseph mon cher fidèle” is a part of the tradition that imagines a more tense and harrowing birth narrative. When Joseph and Mary arrive in Bethlehem and, hurried by Mary’s increasingly regular contractions, desperately knock on doors to ask for lodging, they are turned away again and again. The townspeople know how suspicious Herod is of strangers, how easily threatened, and they don’t want to risk his ire by harboring one, so they tell the strange couple to go sleep outside somewhere. When Mary tells them she is about to give birth to God, they accuse the couple of trickery and lies; if “God” comes forth from this woman, they chide, it would be some kind of wicked conjuration they produced under the dark cover of shadows.
Joseph reprimands the people of Bethlehem for their rejection and mistrust while Mary resourcefully sets her sights on a distant stable. Joseph laments its unsuitability for such a son as theirs, but Mary reassures him that it will suit Jesus just fine and that God will protect them all through the night. The humble shelter, Joseph concedes, will be made magnificent and holy by the Holy One who inhabits it.
At the hour of midnight, Jesus starts to crown. Mary is ecstatic to meet her son at last, and Joseph sweeps him up into her arms to be showered with love and kisses.
I love that Joseph gets more treatment in this carol than in most others. He gets the last word—the final stanza is in his voice—which is full of such fatherly affection. He and Mary sigh together in relief for a safe delivery and cry together tears of joy, which mingle with the wails of their newborn.
Despite the conflict and stress in the narrative, the music is bright and upbeat throughout. This is, after all, a party carol! Mary maintains a steadfast faith in the God who called and empowered her for the task of bringing God-in-flesh into the world.
This post is part of a daily Advent series from December 2 to 24, 2023 (with Christmas to follow through January 6, 2024). View all the posts here, and the accompanying Spotify playlist here.
>> “How Asian Artists Picture Jesus’ Birth from 1240 to Today” by Victoria Emily Jones, December 18, 2023, Christianity Today: My first CT article was published this week! I was asked to curate and introduce a sampling of Nativity art from across Asia. By representing Jesus as Japanese, Indonesian, or what have you, these artists convey a sense of God’s immanence, his “with-us–ness,” for their own communities—and for everyone else, the universality of Christ’s birth.
I Wayan Turun (Indonesian, 1935–1986), In Bethlehem, 1958. Acrylic on canvas, 46 × 64 cm. Collection of Stichting Zendingserfgoed (Missionary Heritage Foundation), Zuidland, Netherlands.
>> “The Story of Christ in Chinese Art: Scholars at Peking University Make a Christmas Portfolio for LIFE,”Life, December 22, 1941, pp. 40–49: In doing research for my Christianity Today article, I found this old article from Life magazine that features eight Chinese watercolors on silk from the collection of Dr. William Bacon Pettus (1880–1959), an American educator and president of the California College of Chinese Studies in Peking (Beijing) in the 1920s and ’30s, which were being exhibited at New York’s American Bible Society at the time. With the ordination of six Chinese bishops by Pope Pius XI in 1926, the Chinese Catholic Church was transitioning from a mission church to an indigenous local church, and Chinese-style religious art—much of it coming out of the art department of the new Catholic University of Peking (Beiping Furen Daxue)—was part of that localization. Productivity seems to have continued at Furen during the Japanese occupation, as this article attests. Many of the students and faculty were recent converts to Christianity, though the article reports that non-Christians also enrolled and taught in the art program.
Lu Hongnian (Lu Hung-nien) ( 陸鴻年) (Chinese, 1914–1989), The Birth of Jesus, ca. 1941. Chinese watercolor on silk.
Here is one of the paintings by Lu Hongnian, who sometime after this article was published, in part through his having engaged the New Testament as inspiration for his paintings, became a Christian and took the name John. It shows the Holy Family in a mountainside cave, Mary gazing adoringly at her newborn son as Joseph brings more straw to cushion him. Beside them, an angel holds up a lantern for light, while two shepherd children approach from the entrance, eager to meet their Savior.
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SONGS:
>> “Philippians 2:5–11” by HARK Music: This song takes a traditional Thai melody, arranged by Tirasip Kraitirangul, and puts it to a Thai translation of the famous Christ Hymn from Philippians 2. It’s performed by the HARK Duriya Tasana Singers (feat. Somchairak Sriket and Damrongsak Monprasit) and Dancers, filmed on location at Chaloem Kanchanaphisek Park in Bangkok. The song is from HARK’s Thai Hymns Album (2014), which can be downloaded for free at https://harkpublications.com/?product=thai-hymns-album-2. The two-stringed bowed instrument you see at 3:21 is a saw u.
The Duriya Tasana (“Curators of the Arts”) ensemble was formed in 2012 under the commission of the Thai-Psalms Project, an endeavor to create Thai traditional and classical music settings for the psalms of the Bible. Many of the members are affiliated with the Bunditpatanasilpa Institute of Fine Arts in Bangkok. Thanks to my friend Janet, whose sister is preparing a move to Thailand, for alerting me to this group!
>> “Jesus You Come” by Tenielle Neda, performed with Jon Guerra: This song by the Australian singer-songwriter Tenielle Neda [previously], which she sings with Jon Guerra, makes a nice complement to the Thai song above. The performance is from “Songs for Hope: A TGC Advent Concert” on December 6, 2020.
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MIDDLE ENGLISH LULLABY: “As I lay upon a night”: Medievalist Eleanor Parker introduces a charming Christmas lullaby from fourteenth-century England, a dialogue between Mary and the Christ child, and provides a modern English translation of its thirty-seven stanzas. In the Middle Ages, says Rosemary Woolf, the subject matter of lullabies was often a prophecy of the baby’s future—presumably a romantic promise of great and happy achievements. But here it is the child who relates the future to his mother, thus providing the material for his own lullaby.
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ART VIDEO: “Third Sunday of Advent: Ethiopian Art: Gospel Book” by James Romaine: Every December, my friend James Romaine, an art historian who teaches at Lander University, publishes four videos on his Seeing Art History YouTube channel related to the themes of the season, part of his annual Art for Advent series. This year he’s chosen to focus on Ethiopian art, covering illuminations from two different manuscripts, a diptych icon, and a rock-hewn church.
In this video Romaine discusses the formal qualities of two paintings from a sixteenth-century Ethiopian Gospel-book, the identity of the figures, and the liturgical context of the book, including the use of the red veil that’s attached at the top, which, Romaine says, “both protects and sanctifies the icon,” creating a sense of anticipation for the Orthodox believer who, in faith, lifts the veil to see what is revealed.
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903), Be Be (The Nativity), 1896. Oil on canvas, 67 × 76.5 cm. State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. A midwife holds the newborn Christ as his mother rests in the upper left corner.
O child of man,
Wombed in dark waters you retell
Millenniums, image the terrestrial span
From an unwitting cell
To the new soul within her intricate shell,
O child of man.
O child of man,
Whose infant eyes and groping mind
Meet chaos and create the world again,
You for yourself must find
The toils we know, the truths we have divined –
Yes, child of man.
O child of man,
You come to justify and bless
The animal throes wherein your life began,
And gently draw from us
The milk of love, the most of tenderness,
Dear child of man.
So, child of man,
Remind us what we have blindly willed –
A slaughter of all innocents! You can
Yet make this madness yield
And lift the load of our stock-piling guilt,
O child of man.
“Agnus Dei” is the seventh of nine titled sections of the poem “Requiem for the Living” by Cecil Day-Lewis, originally published in The Gate, and Other Poems (J. Cape, 1962) and compiled in The Complete Poems of C. Day Lewis (Stanford University Press, 1992).
Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (1904–1972) was one of the leading British poets of the 1930s, closely associated with W. H. Auden. He was born in Ireland of Anglo-Irish parents, his father a Church of Ireland clergyman, and was educated at Oxford, where he taught poetry from 1951 to 1956. In the 1940s he “turned from poetry of left-wing political statement to an individual lyricism expressed in more traditional forms” (Britannica) and served as poet laureate of England from 1968 until his death in 1972. In addition to writing poetry, he also wrote crime novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, sixteen of which feature detective Nigel Strangeways. One of Day-Lewis’s four children is the actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
It shows the baby Jesus wrapped in a black-and-white checkered keffiyeh (Palestinian headdress) and lying in a pile of rubble while Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the wise men, and the animals search for him. It is situated at the side of the altar in Bethlehem’s Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, which Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, a prominent Palestinian Christian peacemaker, pastors. He said he wants the world to know that this is what Christmas looks like in Palestine this year, and for his own congregation to know the solidarity of Christ with the oppressed. Al Jazeera ran a news segment on the crèche on Tuesday, which features an interview with Isaac:
Since October 7, over 16,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, and almost 1.9 million Palestinians (over 80 percent of the population) have been displaced. Morgues and hospital halls are overflowing in Gaza, and many people remain trapped under buildings felled by air strikes.
“In Gaza today, God is under the rubble. He is in the operating room,” Isaac wrote on Instagram. “If Christ were to be born today, he would be born under the rubble. We see his image in every child killed and pulled from under the rubble. In every child in incubators.” He expanded on these sentiments in a sermon preached October 22, titled “God Is Under the Rubble in Gaza,” reproduced in Sojourners. See also this video clip of Isaac explaining why his church chose to display such a scene in their sanctuary.
BLOG POST: “When a Dragon Tried to Eat Jesus: The Nativity Story We Don’t Talk About” by Chad Bird: “I’m still searching for a Christmas card with a red dragon in the nativity, lurking amidst the cows and lambs, waiting to devour the baby in the manger,” writes Bible scholar Chad Bird [previously]. “None of the Gospels mention this unwelcome visitor to Bethlehem, but the Apocalypse does. John paints a seven-headed, ten-horned red dragon onto the peaceful Christmas canvas. You can read all about it in Revelation 12. It’s the nativity story we don’t talk about. A dragon trying to eat our Lord . . .”
I’ve been wanting to write a long-form essay on this topic for some time—the dragon as a character in the Christmas story; a cosmic battle underlying our cozy little crèches. I would pull in iconography of the Woman of the Apocalypse and the treading of the beasts, as well as some Christmas songs and poems that reference the dragon. I won’t get around to it this season . . . but it’s coming sometime!
For now, I simply offer Chad Bird’s wonderful blog post to get you thinking about it. Since it was published in 2016, I’ve started seeing more people bringing it up. In 2019, Glen Scrivener, a minister in the Church of England, released the kids’ video “There’s a Dragon in My Nativity,” with illustrations by Alex Webb-Peploe and animation by Diego M. Celestino:
In 2020, Rev. Yohanna Katanacho, a Bible professor in Nazareth, wrote “The Christmas Dragon” for Radix, a retelling of the Nativity story through the lens of Revelation 12. And in a Christianity Today article published last December, Julie Canlis recommended adding a red dragon to your nativity set! Apparently some families have been doing this for years, such as the Gowins and the Palpants:
This year I bought a little plastic dragon myself to add to my household nativity! Below are some photos my husband and I took. The clay figurines and adobe-style backdrop were made by Barbara Boyd, an artisan from New Mexico. (I bought them in 2016 at a festival in Albuquerque.)
The dragon was part of a cheap multipack from Amazon, and there are twenty-three other dragons that I don’t know what to do with—so if you live in the US and you want one, shoot me an email at victoria.emily.jones@gmail.com and your physical mailing address and I’ll send you one! The first three respondents get a red one. None of them are seven-headed or horned per Revelation (a gap in the Christmas market, perhaps?!), but they still convey the gist.
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LECTURE: “What Is God’s Future for the World?: An Eschatological Vision for the Kingdom on Earth” by N. T. Wright: This talk on inaugurated eschatology, on heaven and earth coming together redemptively and new-creatively, was delivered at the Fuller Forum at Fuller Theological Seminary on May 3, 2014. Any time we talk, sing, or preach about the return of Christ and the end, Wright says, we’re really using signposts that point into a bright mist. But we need those signposts. Wright seeks to dispel the popular belief that humans’ ultimate destination is some disembodied existence “up there” and instead have us embrace the ancient vision of this world as the site of the Messiah’s eternal reign and these bodies as participants, a vision of creation made new from the old. To believe that God will eventually abandon the world to the forces of human wickedness or entropy and decay instead of claiming it as his own undermines the entire narrative of scripture. Wright makes his case by way of the books of Genesis, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, the Psalms, the Gospels, Romans, and Revelation—the whole gamut.
“The Jewish vision of God’s ultimate future was never that people would leave this world and end up somewhere else called heaven in the company of God. . . . When eschatology comes into full focus, . . . it is all about God’s kingdom being set up on earth as in heaven, and indeed on earth by means of heaven.” He continues, “Heaven is the place where God’s future purposes are stored. And the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven to earth so that the dwelling of God is with humans.”
There’s so much more I could say—but instead of reading my takeaways, listen to the talk itself! It ends at 1:04:45 and is followed by an hour of Q&A. Here is a list of the questions with time stamps:
1:05:33: What is your reading of 2 Peter 3:10–12, which says that the earth will be burned up?
1:08:18: What does Paul mean in 1 Thessalonians 4:17: “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever”?
1:13:05: Where do you land on premillennialism, amillennialism, postmillennialism?
1:15:42: If earth is already crowded, how will everyone fit in the renewed creation after the resurrection?
1:21:42: If this world is going to be renewed, why should we make economic and lifestyle sacrifices now to protect endangered species and such?
1:24:18: How do you interpret John 14:3: “I go and prepare a place for you; I will come again and take you to myself”?
1:27:48: How do you understand hell? What are your thoughts on the teaching of universal restoration, the idea that everyone will eventually be saved?
1:33:48: Since you take issue with Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, what would you have painted at the east end of the Sistine Chapel instead?
1:34:17: How does Paul’s “now and not yet” correlate with Jesus’s teaching that “this generation will not have passed away before all this has happened” (Matt. 24:34; Mark 13:30; Luke 21:32)?
1:36:59: What is the role of departed saints (the “cloud of witnesses”)? What are your thoughts on the intercession of the saints?
1:41:17: What are your words of advice for preaching on these subjects and for pastorally caring for congregants who come with certain stock images of and language about heaven?
1:44:30: Since we believe in Jesus’s bodily resurrection, where is Jesus now?
1:46:28: Please give us some guidance on Paul’s view on homosexuality and how to address this complex issue in the church.
1:52:16: Is there any sense in which the State of Israel founded in 1948 could be the fulfillment of biblical prophecy?
1:56:40: What impact do you hope your work has on Christian discipleship?
2:10:34: What’s the relationship between faith and action?
Oh, and at 1:18:58, Wright offers this rousing sidebar on Christian art:
We are starved imaginatively as Christians. Christian art easily collapses into sentimentalism, just as contemporary postmodern art easily collapses into brutalism. Both of those are ways of seeing something but not the whole picture. Sentimentalism is what you get when you’re determined to smile even if the whole world is falling apart; it becomes inane, this sort of silly grin, and sadly, there’s a lot of Christian art like that.
But actually, Christians ought to be at the forefront of the art and the music, because that creates the imaginative world within which it’s possible to think differently about things. I think the secular world has done a pretty good job, and we’ve colluded with that, of keeping our imaginative levels down to the level of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Epicureanism or deism, so that heaven is just this odd place, etc., etc. We need the new art and the new music which will create a world in which it makes sense to think of these things.
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BLOG POST: “Advent Love and Anselm Kiefer’s Alchemist” by Alexandra Davison: I grew up, and my parents and sibling still live, in a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, so I’m a somewhat frequent visitor to the North Carolina Museum of Art. Their untitled triptych by Anselm Kiefer is one of my favorite pieces in their collection—it transfixes me every time—so I was delighted to see that Alexandra Davison [previously], a creative director of Artists in Christian Testimony International whom I bump into at arts conferences now and again, wrote about it a few years ago. She describes it as an image of “cosmic drama that waits for resolution,” conveying “an unflinching Advent longing.” I sense that too when I stand in front of it.
Anselm Kiefer (German, 1945–), Untitled, 1980–86. Oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, lead, charcoal, and straw on photograph, mounted on canvas, with stones, lead, and steel cable, overall 130 1/4 × 218 1/2 in. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Kiefer is the subject of an acclaimed new documentary by Wim Wenders (which I’m eager to see when it comes to streaming!). He was born in Germany at the tail end of World War II, and his art, which often incorporates materials such as lead, ash, and straw, is inextricably connected to the ravaged landscapes and haunted history of his country.
Every warrior’s boot used in battle and every garment rolled in blood will be destined for burning, will be fuel for the fire. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
—Isaiah 9:5–6 NIV
LOOK: Nativity by Irenaeus Yurchuk
Irenaeus Yurchuk (Іриней Юрчук), Nativity, 2022. Mixed media on canvas. Used with permission.
Irenaeus Yurchuk was born in Ukraine during World War II and raised in central New York, where he still resides. He worked professionally as an urban planner until 2010, when he turned to art full-time.
“Over the years my work has evolved to combine multiple-image photography with drawing and painting, using a variety of digital editing and physical montage techniques,” Yurchuk says. “This includes adjusting inkjet images by applying acrylics, watercolors, pastels, markers, colored pencils together with selected collage materials to achieve a desired effect.”
Yurchuk’s Nativity is a response to Russia’s 2022 military invasion of Ukraine. This is no facile depiction of that historic birth, no cozy winter idyll. It is a war-zone Nativity. It shows the Holy Family, rendered in iconic style, sheltering at night in the rubble of a bombed-out apartment complex. Surrounded by fallen steel beams, concrete, and broken glass, Mother Mary holds the newborn Jesus while a downcast Joseph sits beside them with head in hands. Though their circumstances are dire, through the building’s shell shines one particularly bright star, signifying hope in the horror.
One of the biblical names for Jesus is Emmanuel, Hebrew for “God with us.” By showing the Christ child being born amid the ruins of a contemporary Ukrainian city, Yurchuk reinforces the ongoing relevance of the Incarnation, meditating on God’s descent into our world of woe to dwell with and to deliver. Jesus is “God with us” in our suffering. When everything around us is crumbling, God is there too, hurting alongside and calling all oppressors to account.
Do you recall the famous Christmas text from Isaiah, further immortalized by Handel, that begins “Unto us a child is born . . .”? Well, it is immediately preceded by a prophecy of war’s final demise, of soldiers’ uniforms and accoutrements and all their bloody violence being consigned to one great big burning trash heap. In the new world government established by Christ, the Prince of Peace, tyrants will be overthrown (Luke 1:51–52), and the nations will study war no more (Isa. 2:4).
May this artwork and the song below prompt you to intercede for those suffering under war today, in Ukraine and elsewhere.
LISTEN: “Drive Out the Darkness” by Paul Zach, Isaac Wardell, Dan Marotta, and John Swinton, on Lament Songs by the Porter’s Gate (2020)
Refrain: Come, O come Be our light Drive out the darkness Come, Jesus, come
Every year under the thorn Every wrong that we have known Every valley will be raised Ancient ruins will be remade [Refrain]
Every weapon made for war Every gun and every sword Will be melted in the flame To be used for gardening [Refrain]
In the emptiness of grief Through the night of suffering In the loss and in the tears God of comfort, O be near [Refrain]
Coda: Come, and end all the violence Come, do not be silent Come, we cling to your promise Come, you’ll break all injustice Come, Jesus, come
For my review of the Lament Songs album by the Porter’s Gate, see here.
In addition to these words that the Porter’s Gate has given us to pray, I commend to you this prayer by Rev. Kenneth Tanner, which he posted October 13 in response to recent atrocities in Israel and Gaza (I’ve been returning to it a lot over the past month):
This post is part of a daily Advent series from December 2 to 24, 2023 (with Christmas to follow through January 6, 2024). View all the posts here, and the accompanying Spotify playlist here.
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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Anders Widoff (Swedish, 1953–), Maria (The Return), 2005. Polyester, silicone, fabric, glass, hair, and oils. Uppsala Cathedral, Sweden. Photo: Lieke Wijnia.
The lengthening shadows of the cedar trees
Have blended into twilight, and the sun
Has plunged in glorious gold precipitance
Beyond the dim crest of the western hills,
Bearing with it the day’s disquietudes;
And now the stars, that lamp the feet of God,
Are lighted, and night’s purple silences
Steal gently round me fraught with memories.
’Twas such an hour as this—long, long ago
Yet seeming yesterday—he came to me,
My little son, in joyous travail born
Out there across the hills in Bethlehem,
Where we who journeyed southward to be taxed—
Strangers in our own father’s land—had found
No shelter in the crowded khan, and shared,
Perforce, a grotto with the stabled kine.
Ah, how it all comes back again to me!
The courtyard, in the flickering torchlight, filled
With huddled trav’lers sleeping ’neath the sky,
The kneeling camels of a caravan,
The patient asses dozing by the wall,
A smell of roasting meat at little fires,
The shouts of melon-sellers, the low drone
Of reverend elders bending at their prayers,
Barking of street-dogs, porters’ blasphemies,
The laughter of a girl, the mellow flute
Of some rapt lover, and the tinkling tune
Of sheep-bells forward moving through the dark.
And then the hour supreme, wherein my soul
Clomb the dark pinnacles of pain, and death
Grappled with life through whirling aeoned years,
But fled at length and left the Miracle.
They laid him there beside me on the hay,
A wee pink being in his world’s first sleep;
My arm was round about him and his breath
Was warm with life on my exultant breast,
And they whose winged watch is set to keep
Ward in the valley lands of heaven looked down,
Not up, that night to find their paradise.
All weak with labor and soul’s happiness,
I lay beneath the sapphire tent of skies,
And in my heart I made a little prayer
Of thanks that flew up to the throne of God
On swift dove pinions of unuttered song;
And as I prayed, lo, upon loops of stars
Night’s velvet curtainings were lifted up,
A wondrous light turned all the world to rose,
And down the skies swept singing seraphim
In mighty echoes of my little prayer.
Oh, can it be that threescore years have marched
In troubled caravan across the waste
Of desert life since then, and can it be
That I, who sit here in mine eventide,
White with the snows of sorrow and of time,
Was once a bright tressed girl who heard the choirs
Of heaven rejoice that she had borne a son?
Why, I can feel that little heart beat still
Close to my own, the touch of little hands
Warm and caressing on this withered breast;
Still I can hear the first low wail that marked
His woe’s beginning and the tortured path
That he should tread in mighty gentleness,
With pain and anguish, ’til his love supreme
And terrible meekness, overcoming death,
Should lead him conqueror to sit with God,
Pleading for sinful men in paradise.
Today I stole into the synagogue
And heard a rabbi read the sacred scroll:
How that my lord, Isaiah, said of old,
Thy Maker is thy husband, he hath called thee
As a forsaken woman, spirit grieved;
God, for a little moment, hides his face
From thee, but with his loving kindness soon
And tender mercies shall he gather thee.
Then was I comforted, and peace displaced
The turmoil in my heart, and minded me
Of that great promise Gabriel bore from God
And the immeasurable fruitage of his word,
The life and death and glory of my son.
So in the shades of life and night I sit,
Under the sheltering arbor of the dark
That curves above, vined o’er with trellised stars,
Waiting my spirit bridegroom, and the sound
Of that loved voice—long silent save in dreams—
Calling across the vibrant firmament,
O Mary, Mother Mary, come to Me.
This poem is from ’Prentice Songs (Pittsburgh: Aldine Press, 1913) and is in the public domain.
George Mahaffey Patterson (M. P.) Baird (1887–1970) was a lifelong resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who worked in theater and city government. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1909 and then taught in the Department of English as a professor of theater history and production. He formed the student group the Pitt Players, financing, writing, and directing several of their early plays. While on the faculty, he also locally published three collections of poetry: ’Prentice Songs (1913), Loaves for Hyacinths (1914), and Rune and Rann (1916). In 1917 Baird joined the US Army, serving as a lieutenant in the Sanitary Corps during World War I. Upon his return to civilian life he began a career in government service for the city of Pittsburgh, serving as executive secretary of the Art Commission and chief examiner and later president of the Civil Service Commission. He was senior research analyst for the Department of City Planning when he retired in 1961.
Art & Theology 