Saints and Poets

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.

Our God, heaven cannot hold him,
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign;
In the bleak midwinter
A stable place sufficed
The Lord God incarnate,
Jesus Christ.

Enough for him, whom Cherubim
Worship night and day
A breast full of milk
And a manger full of hay.
Enough for him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
which adore.

Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Through the air;
But his mother only,
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.
 
What can I give him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,
Yet, what I can I give Him –
Give my heart.

In the late nineteenth century, Christina Rossetti, responded to a request from Scribner’s Monthly for a Christmas poem.  The verses she supplied beautifully evoked the intimate encounter of heaven and earth touching in Jesus Christ.  They also challenged.  Our grateful response to such mystery is meant to be total and complete.  We must give our hearts.

Perhaps due to the four wonderful years I enjoyed in Rochester, New York, the line that most speaks to me is simply this: snow on snow, snow on snow.

My first experience with a real Rochester snowstorm – though I doubt locals would describe it as such – occurred just weeks before Christmas.  I was driving home from a church meeting and all of a sudden the sky seemed to open – almost as if its outer skin had been punctured – and the snow poured. More than a bit unnerved, I pulled to the side of the road and sat there watching the sky with wonder.  I have never seen such snow!  I felt small (but in a way that left me more thrilled than frightened).  I felt like a tiny figure in a snow globe that had just received a vigorous shake.

It occurs to me now how appropriate these feelings were, not for the storm (even I soon learned that was minor!) but for the miracle of Christmas.   In fact, I think I felt like the shepherds Rossetti portrays at the end of her poem.  Small and insignificant – what can I give him poor as I am? – yet also filled with a wonder is somehow both intimate and inviting, drawing us in and inviting us to give our hearts.

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 Just now the earth recalls His stunning visitation.  Now
the earth and scattered habitants attend to what is possible: that He
of a morning entered this, our meagered circumstance, and so
relit the fuse igniting life in them, igniting life in all the dim
surround.  And look, the earth adopts a kindly affect.  Look,
we almost see our long estrangement from it overcome.
The air is scented with the prayer of pines, the earth is softened
for our brief embrace, the fuse continues bearing to all elements
a curative despite the grave, and here within our winter this,
the rising pulse, bears still the promise of our quickening.

Scott Cairns.  Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected (Brewster, Mass: Paraclete Press, 2006 pp.136.)

The greatest Christmas text – at least according to me – is the Prologue to John’s Gospel (John 1: 1-18).  Here, John describes the birth of Jesus as light – the light which is coming into the world and the light that shines in the darkness. 

SCOTT CAIRNS provides a view from the other side, from the side of fallen human existence: that He of a morning entered this, our meagered circumstance … igniting life in all the dim surround.

Who can argue that life as we know it is but a “meagered circumstance”?  And isn’t it also true that the presence of Christ in our lives changes how we see the world and ourselves.  Our perspective is not free from shadows after Christ comes that is true but it is also true that we find life and light even in the dark places because the Messiah has come.  In this life, we may see dimly – as the Apostle Paul says (1 Corinthians 13) but we do see.  And for this gift, we can thank Jesus Christ for he is morning light that shines in our meagered circumstance … igniting both light and life in all that remains dim around us.

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At the Cat’s Table they were discussing Italian art.  Miss Lasqueti, who had lived in Italy for a few years, was speaking.  “The thing with Madonnas is, they have that look on their faces – because they know He is going to die when young … in spite of all the hovering angels surrounding the child…. Somewhere in the Madonna’s given wisdom, she can see the finished map, the end of His life.  No matter that the local girl the artist is using cannot attempt that knowledgeable look.  Perhaps even the artist cannot portray it.  So it is only we, the spectators, who can read that face as someone who knows the future…. The recognition of that woe comes from the viewer. (p. 200).

Michael Ondjaatje, 2011, The Cat’s Table, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 269 pp.
 

MICHAEL ODAATJE’s new novel takes place on a ship bound from Sri Lanka to England in the final days of World War II.  The Cat’s Table refers to the place where those unfortunate passengers – whose social status is so low – that they must dine every meal as far away from the captain’s table as it possible.  They dine at the Cat’s Table.  And since London is a long way from Sri Lanka, they have plenty of time for conversation.

In one of these conversations, Miss Lasqueti attempts to explain the haunting beauty of paintings of Madonna and child.  In many, if not most, Madonna’s, Mary’s gaze is aimed directly at the viewer of the painting.  It is as though she wants us to meet her eyes and ponder.  We are being invited into the story.  And, as Miss Lasqueti notes, this story has its tragic elements.  In includes a cross.   While the cross is a symbol of our redemption, it is also a sign of Mary’s heartbreak.  The son that she cradles in her arms is born to save and – thus in a sense – born to die.  To truly see these paintings, says Miss Lasqueti, is thus to experience “a recognition of woe.”

Often Mary is tenderly brushing her cheek along the cheek of her son.  This wordless gesture of affection reminds me of a mother dog nuzzling her pup.  It is a gesture of intimacy and love.  And along with it of course are those sad eyes of the Madonna as if she knows her child is not long for this world.        

A few years ago, I was leading a tour of the Holy Land.  We were visiting the Church of the Sepulchre which tradition says is the very spot where Jesus died on his cross.  On the wall was a huge mosaic.  And at its center, I noticed the same cheek-to-cheek gesture – the nuzzle – shared between Mary and Jesus.  I was so taken with it that I zoomed in close with my camera and snapped this photo.

I’m struck by how old Mary looks almost ancient as if the grief of seeing her son die on the cross has aged her well beyond her years.  I’m also drawn to the  faces – the disciples perhaps – of those standing around Mary and her dying son.  Their hands are drawn to their faces as if to express, “How can this be?

All this is to say that Miss Lasqueti makes a fine point.  Whenever we see a painting of Madonna and child or perhaps a nativity scene, we are not just to think to ourselves, “what a cute little baby!”  We are to imagine the person this child becomes and the unique, holy work – work that ultimately involved the cross.  We see the child with “a recognition of woe.”

And yet Miss Lasqueti is only half right for the story of Jesus does not end with the cross.  It ends at Easter – or more precisely forty days after with his Ascension.  The Gospel is no mere tragedy.  It is the story of new life and hope beyond even the bounds of death.       

So as Christmas approaches and Madonnas and nativity scenes multiply around us, we are invited to see the whole story within the single frame.  We see not only cross but resurrection.  Ours is not just a “recognition of woe” but an acknowledgement of redemption.

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Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories…. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life….  One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.

                                      Tea Obreht, (2011), The Tiger’s Wife,

                                         Random House, New York, 338 pp. 

A few weeks ago, my old college friend, Hunter Lambeth, was in town.  He was speaking to the local chapter of the New Canaan Society.  Hunter is initiating a new mission area for Young Life in the West Bank of Palestine.  Having been asked to share with us some of the events of his life that has led to such a remarkable sense of calling, Hunter began in this way.  I grateful, he said, to have this opportunity to tell my story, but my story is really His story.

As Hunter spoke to us, I kept going back to this first statement.  The more I considered it, the more profound I realized it to be.  On a superficial level, it is of course contradictory.  How could the story of a twenty-first century southerner also be the story of a first century Palestinian named Jesus?  Yet, on a deeper level – the level of faith – what Hunter said was no mere contradiction.  It was a paradox.

For one who has given his life to Christ, it makes perfect sense – even if stretches the bounds of the imagination – to think of the story of our lives being somehow enfolded in – or perhaps a mere extension of – the life of our savior.  Hunter was speaking a paradox – a truth that contradicts on the surface but somehow coheres (or makes sense) on a deeper level.  The Apostle Paul said something equally paradoxical when he wrote in the Book of Galatians, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.

Put another way, Hunter was giving testimony.  He wasn’t engaging in speculative theology but narrative theology.  As H. Richard Niebuhr once noted that when the earliest theologians of the church were asked what they meant by God, salvation, and revelation, they didn’t espouse philosophical definitions.  Instead they turned to the story of their life.  They said, What we mean is this event [the life, death and resurrection of Christ] which happened to him also happened among us and to us.  (H. Richard Niebuhr, (1941), The Meaning of Revelation, Macmillan, New York, 34).  That’s narrative theology.  Niebuhr’s point was the same as Hunter’s.  To be a follower of Jesus is to allow His story to be so deeply woven into our own that we begin to lose sight of where one story begins and the other ends.

If this all sounds a bit too mystical, maybe this quote from Tea Obreht’s novel can help.  In The Tiger’s Wife, a young woman of the Balkans idolizes her grandfather.  She follows in his footsteps by becoming a physician, and when he dies she becomes consumed with discovering the meaning of his life.  She discovers that two stories – the story of the deathless man, the story of the tiger’s wife – opened the portals of his scientific mind to mystery.  Through one, he matured into a person of wisdom.  Because of the other, he never surrendered his childlike sense of wonder.

What I think Hunter was saying is something like this.  He was sharing with us that one story – the story of Jesus – has so captured his imagination that he has given his heart to the Author of this story.  He now understands himself – his life story – in light of this greater story.  It runs through Hunter’s life like a river branching out its tributaries.  In fact, it has so shaped the landscape of my old friend’s existence that it no longer makes sense to speak of it as some external influence.  It – the story of Jesus and His love – has become part of who he is.  Or better still, he has become part of what it will forever be.  My story, said Hunter, is really His story.  I like that.  Even though it defies explanation, I think that’s a fine way to live your life and mine.  May it become true of us all.  May the story of our lives – whether we’re called to go to Palestine or to stay where we are – be enveloped by the story of Jesus and His love.

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