Living Wittily

The Cost of Being Joseph, and Loving Mary.

 

 

 

For years U A Fanthorpe wrote a Christmas poem for her friends.

These and other Christmas poems are now gathered in the Collected Poems.

A favourite is the one about Joseph - not because it's great poetry, it isn't - but it is imaginative psychology with just enough theology to hold it together.

And Poussin's painting shows him suitably worried and wondering what in Gabriel's name he's got himself into!

 

 

I am Joseph

I am Joseph, carpenter,

Of David’s kingly line,

I wanted an heir; discovered

My wife’s son wasn't mine.

 

I am an obstinate lover,

Loved Mary for better or worse,

Wouldn't stop loving when I found

Someone Else came first.

 

Mine was the likeness I hoped for

When the first-born man-child came.

But nothing of him was me. I couldn't

Even choose his name.

 

I am Joseph, who wanted

To teach my own boy how to live.

My lesson for my foster son:

Endure. Love. Give.

The Theological Possibilities in a Damaged Painting of the Nativity

From countless depictions of the Nativity I have chosen this one by Fra Filippo Lippi (mid 1400's), because paradoxically it says something the artist intended but not in the way it now appears.

What do I mean? Mary's robe was originally painted in blue, a tradition of honouring Mary by sparing no expense in portraying her purity, beauty and sanctity. On this painting the blue was a thin coat on dry plaster, rather than blue pigment mixed into the plaster in a true fresco. Over the centuries the colour has degraded into grey. This cost-cutting device has the unintentional irony of portraying Mary as she saw herself, a poor handmaiden unworthy of honour. Thus an upmarket depiction of the Nativity now shows Mary in a flaked and entirely faded cloak. "He was rich yet became poor, that we through his poverty might become rich". So many Renaissance paintings of the Nativity are all but perfect; their codes and symbols, narrative drive and cultural context, theology and piety, their execution and technique - the finest art the world has ever seen.

Perhaps especially at Christmas, we are helped to see the scandal and the loss, the cost and the consequence, the trust and the terror, the extraordinary ordinariness of the Word made flesh, and the frightened courage of the Mother of the Son of God sharing that poverty as an act of self impoverishing faith in a God who somtimes asks the impossible, and then by divine grace enables and embraces human trust, so winning the response of the human heart.

Perhaps. A happy and thoughtful Christmas to all who come by here regularly. Because for Christians Christmas is a time when joy should be unconfined, and thought too!

BBC Nativity: Good TV and not bad eisegesis either.

The BBC adaptation of the Nativity finished last night, and I thought it was a beautifully conceived mini-series. Written by Tony Jordan (Eastenders, and Life on Mars) who researched the historical and theological background over four years, it struck the right balance between the discourse of historical drama and soap opera. Tatiana Maslany as Mary was compelling and convincing, both in her confusions and then her growing certainty of the mystery that had engulfed her. The men, Joseph and her father, perhaps understandably rejected her story as fantasy, and their hostility was grudgingly tempered by enough humanity to send her away, and accompany her as far as Bethlehem. Herod was suitably psychotic, just the kind of egomaniac who would have children slaughtered to secure his own security! The Magi were an attractive combination of the comic and and the mystic, otherworldly and well versed in the real-politik of Herod. The portrayal of astrology as a life study and serious epistemology in its own right was sympathetic and I think an authentic depiction of the best science and mathematics of the time.

The climactic scene of the birth was a remarkable sequence of old, old story and original juxtapositions. Joseph, turned away in Bethlehem by his family so long as he insisted on staying with Mary; his frantic search in crowded streets for a midwife or at least a woman to help Mary; the accidental desperation of kicking in the door of the stable; the labour of Mary, lonely, primal and anguished, and the pivotal moment when Joseph took her hand as the baby is being born; the coincidence of the stars reflected in the convergence of Magi and shepherds; the midwife donating her blue outer garment, signifying much that would come to be revered in Mary. These are thoughtful interpretive moves that gave freshness to familiarity, and depth to a story often enough reduced to shallow thought and surface sentiment.

On the critical side I have a couple of serious reservations. Rabbi Jonathan Romain, and adviser to the BBC on religious themes, took serious exception to the portrayal of a Rabbi refusing sanctuary to Mary when she and her mother fled into the synagogue to escape a stone throwing baying mob. I think Romain is right. The Torah provides for places of sanctuary, and requires compassion and mercy be shown in sacred space - such a response of mercy would have been more typical of Jewish religious ethics of the time, at least at their best. Rabbi Romain saw the scene as anti-Jewish, and likely to have a negative impact on Jewish-Christian relations. I'm surprised if he is an adviser to the BBC that he wasn't shown the scene much earlier and asked to comment. The refusal to help two life-threatened women did jar, and for me was inauthentic, an unfair caricature of a religious tradition that has always understood mercy is woven into the very texture of law.

My other comment is about why there wasn't a fifth episode. The omission of the flight to Egypt, against the background of the Herod's mad power paranoia, and the Slaughter of the Innocents, sanitises a story in a way that is morally and theologically misleading. There are enough holocausts still happening in our world, enough recurring slaughters of the innocent, for us to be able to locate such atrocity within the very story that points to a promised end to such normalised cruelty. Not for nothing is the Wonderful Counsellor and Prince of Peace prophecy of Isaiah 9 contrasted in the same text with the burning of the trampling boots of the soldier and the blood soaked garments of war.

The birth of this child is a threat to the world's power structures, from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, from Nazareth to Rome, from Washington to London, and beyond. The birth of this child is a statement by God, reiterated wherever innocent lives are rendered dispensable and redefined as collateral damage, from Bethlehem to Egypt, and from every site of murder and cruelty in the pursuit of power. The birth of this child triggered the ensuing political madness of power paranoia, and this also is part of the story. Not for Christmas cards of course, but for those who follow the One born in the stable, and do so with theological and moral seriousness, there is the call to see and name the cruelties and atrocities of inhumane power systems and unjust structures and merciless economies.

(The image above is from the pulpit of Siena Cathedral, a detail of The Slaughter of the Innocents.)

"Peace on earth, good will to men" - believing against the noise of the artillery

CHRISTMAS BELLS

 

I heard the bells on Christmas Day

Their old, familar carols play,

     And wild and sweet

     The words repeat

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

And thought how, as the day had come,

The belfries of all Christendom

     Had rolled along

     The unbroken song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

Till ringing, singing on it's way,

The world revolved from night to day,

     A voice, a chime,

     A chant sublime

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!  

 

Then from each black, accursed mouth

The cannon thundered in the South,

     And with the sound

     The carols drowned

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

It was as if an earthquake rent

The heart- stones of a continent,

     And made forlorn

     The households born

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

And in despair I bowed my head;

"There is no place on earth," I said;

     "For hate is strong,

     And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

 

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;

     The Wrong shall fail,

     The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807- 1882)

Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift....

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his own vanity; God-like, he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis, completely expressible in words. To write or to speak is almost inevitably to lie a little. It is an attempt to clothe an intangible in a tangible form; to compress an immeasurable into a mold. And in the act of compression, how Truth is mangled and torn.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The Wave of the Future, Harcourt brace and Co, 1940, p. 6

Faith is not expected to give complete satisfaction to the intellect. It leaves the intellect suspended in obscurity, without light proper to its own mode of knowing. Yet it does not frustrate the intellect, or deny it, or destroy it. It pacifies it with a conviction which it know is can accept quite rationally under the guidance of love. For the act of faith is an act in which the intellect is content to know God by loving Him and accepting His statements about himself on his own terms...By faith one not only attains to truth in a way that intelligence and reason alone cannot do, but one assents to God Himself. One receives God. One says "yes" not merely to a statement about God, but to the Invisible,  Infinite God Himself.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Burns and Oates, 1962, p. 98

Perhaps something of what Lindbergh and Merton were saying is captured in Paul's apophatic exclamation - "Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift" - generosity beyond articulation, the Word made flesh because the Word overflows the expressive capacity of words. When all our words are spoken, and all our thoughts are thought, the residue of meaning is immeasurable, infinite, eternal - but has become personal, "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Him....and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, full of grace and truth. And we have beheld his glory.... Gloria in Excelsis Deo! 

What Prayer Teaches Us.

 

Prayer has taught me that God is God, and I'm not.

(Stanley Hauerwas, Interview)

Burne Jones' Nativity: Hesitating Before the Otherworldly

You can find out more about this remarkable painting here. David Goff explains the technique, the composition, and gives some comment on the biblical allusions. There are even several questions at the end, to encourage you to think, while you look at the painting. 

I suspect you love this painting or it does nothing for you. But here's why I think it's an important portrayal of what on earth was going on at the Nativity. It is otherworldly, eerily strange, fantastic like a dream, psychologically potent with symbol. It makes Christmas seem miraculous, unreal in any empirical everyday sense that can be captured by realistic paintings, digital photography or satellite imaging. Trees and angels merge in an archway over the forest; cave and Magi and Joseph arch over the Madonna and child, and the Virgin herself is protectively arched over the baby. All is in shades of blue, ethereal, luminous with presences strange to the earth; the world has never seen anything like this.

What is happening here is unprecedented in the universe, and all the ways of human communication will be strained and refashioned in order to tell the story. Logic and science, poetry and art, words and music, ideas and images, the entire spectrum of human knowing and communicating will only be able to convey some sense of this vast mysterious happening when the story unfolds in the life of the child, and human voices are orchestrated in praise of this tiny, vulnerable gift of Gods self - "the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us,... and we beheld his glory", "wrapped in swaddling cloths, and lying in a manger."

This painting rebukes both our tendencies to sentimentalise and our complacent disinterest; it laughs at our logic and questions our reliance on graphic realism; it pulls us out of our technologically obsessed worldview and ignores our lust for control of knowledge and mastery of the world around us. This is the Nativity as subversive theology, the silvery monochrome medium conveying mystery far more effectively than colour, and the artist choosing a way to bypass our expectations and habits of thought about what on earth God was doing, entering Creation as a mortal child.

Let all mortal flesh keep silence.......

Angels - the Plot Directors of the Christmas Story.

The Pre-Raphaelite Burne Jones' "Angel Playing the Flageoloet" doesn't pretend to be theological. It doesn't need to be. An angel is a messenger from God, and the Christmas story wouldn't work without them. The annunciation to Mary, the sorting out of Jospeh, the cosmic orchestra at Bethlehem, the security branch facilitating the flight to Egypt, are all hinge points when heaven interrupts the earthly drama to redirect the plot.

Music is essential to the story - praise, joy, peace, - annunciation, communication, contemplation - these are almost the only words needed to define a good Christmas carol.

One of my occasional experiments is to look at a painting like this and decide which carol works best with it. "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" is far too theologically and conceptually heavy for this one. The calypso carol too upbeat. Maybe "Love Came Down at Christmas"? Any suggestions for a carol that complements this rather gorgeous but not over-excited angel?

Mother and Child: Advent according to Leonardo Da Vinci

This is one of those priceless scraps of preparatory work that displays the thought processes of a great artist. It's one of Leonardo da Vinci's studies, Designs for the Nativity or Adoration of the Christ Child", though it presents a number of studies on one sheet.

I don't know what eventually happened to these images, whether they were later incorporated into paintings, frescoes or sculpture - for myself, these are masterpieces in their own right. And the cluster of drawings are delicately textured essays in carbon which together present motherhood and childhood in aspects of tenderness, joy and concentrated attentiveness. Looking on the biblical art site you can browse hundreds of representations of the Nativity - this is to my eyes, and to my theological aesthetics, the most sublime depiction of Mary and Jesus, Virgin and child, protective love and vulnerable presence. In each image Mary is kneeling as she gazes, holds, reaches out towards, opens her arms to, her child.

I don't sense the docile responsiveness of the annunciation here, "Let it be to me according to thy word....". In these drawings, Da Vinci has depicted a mother already bonded with her child. In each picture her eyes are on him, her body inclined towards him, her hands ready to hold, touch, defend him. It is an important balancing truth that just as the Word became flesh, and was fully human, so was Mary, with the full range of emotional strength and protectiveness and self-offering that is the deepest expression of human love.

It's one of the obvious but not often mentioned observations that in depictions of the Nativity, women are under represented. Yet the Word became flesh, that miracle of divine love embodied in human personality, was possible because of the risky, scary, relentless love of his mother. These experiments in ink are amongst the best images that insinuate such constancy, courage and natural humanity through the body language of a mother whose child, has become the centre of her universe. And that too is theological paradox - the centre of the universe, reduced to infancy, and protected by the all attentive love of a mother. So this too is the mystery of advent, the fragility of infancy surrounded by the resilient yes of a mother, open-eyed love to the reality of her child. 

The Comic and Cosmic Significance of the Annunciation

In spirituality as in much else I guess we all have our conceptual and devotional comfort zones. As in most other areas of life, a comfort zone is a good place to be, for a wee while. But living there long term does little to set free our imagination, stimulate intellectual curiosity, develop emotional stamina, sustain mental and physical health, or change much else about us so that we might want to be more than we presently are content with being.

Being a man, may be a biological accident, but it's also an inevitable part of my human identity, a partial and incomplete way of looking at the world, and therefore a limitation of horizon and persepctive that I need to allow for - being a man, I can only guess at what it was like to be a young woman, visited by an angel, who announces my future, and links it to the future of the whole creation. The Annunciation is one of the most stunning moments in the history of human religious experience, an event with comic and cosmic significance; comic, because it begins a drama that will resolve in an unimaginable triumph of love, life and goodness; and cosmic because the drama is the drama of the world's salvation and the redemption of all Creation. The great artists of the Renaissance saw this with instant clarity and portrayed it with magnificent anachronism, extravagant symbol, and theological sensitivity.

Now as a 21st Century man, I encounter such art and realise I'm out of my depth, summoned by a beauty beyond me, addressed by strangeness, compelled to read but uncertain of the language, and therefore needing a grammar of aesthetics and a dictionary of medieval religious concepts and affections, to help me unlock the syntax of images that say more than words. So a painting of the Annunciation like that of Vittore Carpaccio above, invites me to be perplexed, impatient, and conceptually disempowered - that is, it beckons me across the thresholds of my comfort zone. And only if I have the courage to go, will I discover through contemplative patience, and through intellectual welcome of new and different ways of knowing, yet one other way of theological encounter, spiritual openness and personal surrender - which is prayer and a deepening love of God.

And let's face it. Devotion to the Triune God whose life of eternal self-giving is ever interwoven in mutual love, and is inexhaustibly expressed in infinite goodness, and overflows in endlessly creative purposes, reaching out to embrace the Creation called into being by that same self-expending love, requires of us more than the complacency, contentment and constraints of our personal devotional comfort zones.

And so to Carpaccio's painting, and Advent. Because whatever else Advent does, it forces upon us a reconceptualising of what God is about, and what our lives are about. The Annunciation is an event that changes forever and a day, the life of a young woman. Theologically, it reasserts the limitless paramaters of grace, it redefines the nature of redeeming love, it reconfigures the hopes of a nation, a world and all humanity, all of which hangs on the yes of a young woman. That is what the painting is about. Look at it in that light - that crisis moment that awaits the words, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word".