Painting Christmas

A plain photograph of the birth of Jesus would be altogether unremarkable—except that it showed a woman bearing her baby in a public place. That might cause a remark or two. Polite society could find the photo offensive (“Rifraff, as shameless of private bodily functions as the homeless in New York City”). Social activists could criticize polite society itself (“Don’t blame the victim! Bearing babies in stables is a sign of the country’s unkindness”).

But no one would call the photo holy.

That which the camera could record of the nativity of Jesus does not inspire awe. It is either too common or too impoverished. A cold, modern scrutiny, a searching of the surface of things, reveals nothing much meaningful here.

Let me put it another way: If, for us, reality is material only; if we gaze at the birth with that modern eye which acknowledges nothing spiritual, sees nothing divine, demands the hard facts only, data, documentation; if truth for us is merely empirical, then we are left with a photograph of small significance: a derelict husband, an immodest mother, a baby cradled in a feed-trough in an outdoor shelter for pack animals—a lean-to, likely, built behind a mud-brick house where travelers slept both on the floor within and on the roof without. Simple, rude, dusty, and bare.

Ah, but those for whom this is the only way to gaze at Christmas must themselves live lives bereft of meaning: nothing spiritual, nothing divine, no awe, never a gasp of adoration, never the sense of personal humiliation before glory nor the shock of personal exaltation when Glory chooses also to bow down and to love.

Such people have chosen a shell-existence, hollow at the core. Today, a fruitless rind; tomorrow, quintessential dust.

Our seeing reveals our soul—whether we conceive of one or not. So how do we see Christmas?

If we do not recognize in the person of this infant an act of almighty God who here initiates forgiveness for this rebellious world; if we do not see in Jesus the Word made baby flesh, nor honor him as the only premise for any Christmas celebration, then we see with that modern eye merely. Stale, flat, unprofitable.

If the “true meaning of Christmas” is for us some vague sentiment of fellowship and charity and little else, then we see with that modern eye merely. Human goodness is a poor alternative to Immanuel, the active, personal presence of God among us. Human goodness is unstable. God is not. Moreover, to celebrate human goodness is to celebrate ourselves—and there never was a self that could elevate itself by staring at the self alone. Mirrors are always experienced on exactly the same level as oneself, neither higher nor lower.

If the “spirit of the season” is for us a harried getting and spending, an exchanging of gifts, we see with that modern eye merely. Instead of the love of God to redeem us from dying (and so to cause in us his ever-living love), we have that halting human love that might redeem a day from loneliness but that itself must, at the end of that day, die.

Or if we reduce the glory of the Incarnation to craven phrases like “Season’s Greetings” (for fear of offending some customer, some boss, some someone who finds no Christ in Christmas), then we offend God by bowing down before those who see with the modern eye merely. Likewise, “Peace!” is rendered an empty wish and “Joy!” is sourceless if ever we are ashamed of the Prince of Peace. For the world can make an illusion of joy, but illusions, when they shatter against experience, leave people worse than before. And this world has never, never, by its own wisdom and strength, compacted a lasting peace.

No. I will not see the scene with that empirical, modern eye. I refuse to accept the narrow sophistications and dead-eyed adulthoods of a “realistic” world. I choose to stay a child. My picture shall not be undimensioned, therefore, neither as flat as a photograph nor as cold as news copy—no, never as cold as my scientist’s case study.

Rather, I will paint my picture with baby awe, wide-eyed, primitive, and faithful. More medieval than modern. More matter than material. And I will call it true: for it sees what is but is not seen. It makes the invisible obvious.

My painting is immense. Stand back to look at it. It is composed of seven concentric circles, each one lesser than the last, and all surrounding Jesus.

Orbis primus. The widest circle is the whole world, dark and cold and winterfast. The universe. All creation yearning for this birth and all of it mute until a word is put within its mouth. This word: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. That one.

Orbis secundus. Just inside the first sphere is another, scarcely smaller than the first because it touches that one everywhere and serves the whole of it. The second is a choir of angels countless as the stars, bright with white light and expectation, gazing inward, full of news—for heaven itself attends his Advent here!

Orbus tertius. The third circle is trees, great ancient trees, the giants that stand in shadow outside civilization, northern forest, the jungle that ruins every human road, mountain escarpments covered with timber, the cedars of Lebanon—for it is from the simplest growing things that the beams and boards of the Lord’s rude birthing-room is built. The third circle is poor and dark and huge with groaning. When you hear it, you might call that sound the wind; I tell you, it is the travail of trees long ago made subject unto vanity, who even now await with eager longing the manifestation of the Son of God.

Of these trees is fashioned a stable—order emerging from the wild world. But the stable lacks all sign of wealth. It offers no comfort of civilized life. For this King shall be lowborn in order to lift the low on high. The abandoned, the rejected, those that sit outside the gates—trees and slaves and the poor—shall be delivered from bondage and lifted to the glory and liberty of the children of God!

Orbis quartus. Next are animals, herds and flocks afoot, great streams of obedient beasts and the untamed, too, circling though the midnight forest, gazing inward like the angels, yearning to know the fate of their young: for there are ewes here whose lambs have gone inside the stable; there are cows whose calves are representing the whole species; and there is a donkey whose daughter has borne a woman to the very center of the universe, a woman great with child.

For nature makes a harmony at this Nativity. Fur and feather and human flesh, myriad shapes and yet more myriad voices. Listen! Listen with the ears of your faith and hear in the roaring of all creatures a choral praise and piety, the melody of the turning earth and the music of the spheres: “Blessing and honor,” they sing, “and glory and power be unto him that sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb forever and ever!”

And the lesser lambs and the oxen and that singular donkey say, “Amen.”

Orbis quintus. The circle in the circle of the singing animals is a gathering of shepherds whom I paint with the faces of children, smiling, shining, breathless, and reverent. You can see their expressions. There is a lantern in this more intimate space, a single flame, and orange light. Warmth. Fire.

These are the people of every age who, hearing the news, believe it. Of course they are children! These are those who, believing the good news, rushed to see it for themselves and have now come in from deepest darkness—through the circles of angels and trees and beasts—to behold with their own eyes a Savior, their Savior, their dear One, their Lord.

Some of the shepherds hold hands. Two are giggling. One weeps. She can’t help it. It is what she does when she encounters joy—she weeps.

And one near the back of the bunch is called Wally.

That’s me.

Orbis sextus. Circle six is a man and a woman, one standing, one reclined in weariness. The man is Joseph, the stepfather who lends house and heart and lineage to his foster child. The woman is Mary, the mother, regal and transcendently beautiful, for heaven crossed all the circles to choose her; and she, when heaven came near nine months ago, said, “Let it be.”

Immediately upon her faithful response it did begin to be!

It happened! It happens still because it happened once.

Ah, children, the sixth circle must be the circle composed of time: the year in the middle of all years, the first day of that year. For this woman’s riding on one daughter of the donkeys; for her lying down on straw, her straining forward to bear a King and crying out in dear pain her own verse of the universal hymn; for the crowning of her baby, the infant-skull pressing against the deeps of her most human womanhood—all this is the beginning of the meaning in the history of humankind.

For it is this that keeps creation from the annihilations of absurdity, that on a particular day, in a particular place, within the womb of a particular woman, the fullness of God was pleased to rise through human flesh to be born as flesh himself into the world.

It happened! She brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and—

Orbis septimus.—and the smallest circle of seven, meaner than the others, is a manger of wood.

Wood, lumber from the forests: for Jesus is born material truly, bone and flesh and a red-running blood.

But wood, rough planks hewn by human hands: for one day wood will kill him.

Wood is the bracket of the earthly existence of the Lord Jesus Christ. Wood is the smallest compass around him, for it is our sinning and his loving—which, taken together, shape the very person of the Christ. This is his personal form both visible and invisible, a servant, a slave, a body obedient unto death.

For here, in a sphere which is the size of any human being, is the truth that cannot be seen but which my painting depicts in an outrageous round of wood as in a carving: his life, enclosed by a cradle and a cross, saves ours thereby. Oh, my dear, you are in the picture, too! Do you see yourself? Kneeling next to Wally? And in your hand, a hammer.

In his tiny baby hand, a nail.

Centrum orbium omnium. But then here, in the perfect center of all my circles and of all the spheres of all the world; here, in the center of all galaxies; in the center of thought and love and human gesture, blazing with light more lovely than sunlight, a light that makes of Mary a madonna, light that can kindle wood to burn a sacred flame, light that cancels in fire your hammer and that shows on your brow even now a crown of life, light that lightens the Gentiles and the deepest pathways of all creatures and the forests once sunk in shadow—

—here, I say, in the center of everything, brightening all things even to the extremes of time and eternity—

—here, himself the center that holds all orbits in one grand and universal dance, is Jesus!

Here! Come and look! Do you see the tiny baby born? Do you see that Infant King? And do you recognize in him Immanuel?

Amen, child! O wide-eyed child all filled with awe, amen: for now you are seeing Christmas.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

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