We’re in those days after Christmas now. How do we adjust? I need twelve days like my Catholic friends. Perhaps you have been touched, as I have, by all the angels and singing and shepherds and oxen kneeling and especially the baby Jesus in a manger. But don’t we have to get on with real life now? We will hear that “the child grew big and strong and full of wisdom; and God’s favour was upon him.” Luke 2:40 (REB) I will look soon at the part of the story soon, but just now I’m not ready to move on from the baby. This seems foundational.
I read a story on Christmas morning that got me thinking. In the online daily Plough (I hope you know this amazing publication) the author Sean Rubin tells the story how he discovered the power of art as a young boy. He would often ride the bus with his mother from the Bronx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She would wheel him up to a great piece of art in his stroller and should would tell him all about the painting. The article turns out to be a beautiful tribute to Rubin’s mother, though it is also about how art can shape our lives and our faith.
After many interesting twists and turns in the journey of faith, the mother ends up opening a book of great paintings and spots the Adoration of the Shepherds,” by Georges La Tour, painted in 1644. I was surprised too that I had never before seen this painting.
Rubin says the moment his mom saw the painting she was struck with wonder: “My mother told me this story often enough that I can still hear it in her voice. . . . ‘I finished reading the rest of the book, and when I closed the cover I yelled out, almost involuntarily, ‘Oh my God – Jesus is the Messiah!’”
After all her wanderings this was an illumination that changed her life. She was converted from wandering and led to the answer to all her yearnings. Can this really happen through a great piece of art? Can it happen through the carols and hymns we sang over Christmas? Can it happen from the stories being told in our holy Scriptures and beyond? Of course it can. And it has happened time and time again throughout history. It’s happened to me.
Look at this marvelous painting for a moment. Aren’t you just a bit dazzled as I am? Ask some questions, like where is this light coming from, even as Joseph, holding the candle, shades the light with his hand. It can’t be the candle that lights the scene. It seems, in fact, to be coming from the baby’s face.
And look at the participants, rapt in attention. The shepherds who have heard the singing, the mother and father who are caught up in wonder and awe, even the lamb peering at the baby while chewing some straw. We start the Christian story with this little body. God decided to start his story on earth in this body.
Before you leave the painting look at Mary. What an extraordinary portrait she is here. She’s a real woman who has just had a baby. No halos over her head. And she’s rapt in wonder: “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered over them [in her heart.]” She is deeply absorbed, captured, changed forever.
That’s the way I want to enter into this after-Christmas season. That’s the way I want to bring this child into my life every day. I have lots to learn from all that follows in this story, but it all starts here, in wonder before this baby. In this way, perhaps gazing at the painting, we can invite Christ into our lives, into our bodies, and he will come, as Paul says so clearly, and live close by, in fact, he will live within us. Stunning, isn’t it? We hear it in this story and see it in the painting. I’m not ready yet to move on. There is so much yet to gaze upon.
