LOOK: Incarnation by Tim Joyner
Tim Joyner is an artist who works primarily with natural pigments and inks derived from locally foraged materials, such as stone, lichen, and seaweed. He is also the worship director at Trinity Church Congregational in Bolton, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and four kids.
Incarnation is a painting he made during Advent 2021. He describes its makeup and meaning in a Rabbit Room blog post:
The painting . . . is pretty dark for an Advent piece. It’s primarily Lamp Black (a pigment that I associate with longing and prayer because I make it from the discarded stubs of vigil candles), with some even darker Jet Black. There’s some white from Jingle Shells and a bit of Verdigris, but those are there mostly to make the black pigment look even blacker. Even the orb of gold leaf in the very center of the painting is obscured enough that it mostly just draws attention to the rising movement of dark pigment.
This painting is a reminder to myself that, yes, at the end of all this waiting there is an arrival. But it’s not me arriving at the other end of darkness or doubt, brokenness or betrayal. It is the Christ Child who arrives. He meets us here. And rather than chasing away all that it means to be human—including the pain and the longing unfulfilled—and banishing it forever, He wraps Himself in it. We find Christ not on the other side of our longing, but within it.
LISTEN: “Where the Light Is Gone” by the Wood Drake Sessions, 2023
Refrain:
Where the light is gone
There to us be bornCome, O come, light the shadows
Unto us like an arrow
Make a way, O Emmanuel
Through the night, through the nightIn the scars that we carry
From the wars of our families
Make a way, do not tarry
In the night, in the night [Refrain]In the weight of addiction
In the shame of its mission
Make a way from the prison
In the night, in the night [Refrain]In the years of our sorrow
When the griefs leave us hollow
Make a way, we lie fallow
In the night, in the nightFinal Refrain:
Where the light is gone
There to us be born
Where the light is gone
There may Christ be born
The Wood Drake Sessions is Paul Ranheim of Colorado and Kirk Sauers of Georgia. This song, they write,
asks for Christ to be born into the aches of our world and the longing of our hearts.
Although the Son of God came into our world to joyfully dwell with us, the Christmas season, for many, is often painful, lonely, and despairing as the realities of broken families, stinging disappointments, personal addictions, and profound grief confront us in a poignant way.
Our desire in writing this song is to connect the birth of Christ to these very real, dark areas of our everyday lives. It is a prayer for the hope of the Messiah to be “born” into the places where no light seems to exist.
Art & Theology 