KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 2 January
But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart
“If music be the food of love, play on,” Orsino says at the opening of Shakespeare’s Christmas play, Twelfth Night. We return to King’s-Edgehill after the Christmas Break only to find ourselves still within the orbit of Christmas, still within Christmastide and yet to come to the twelfth night of the proverbial twelve days of Christmas. No doubt, if not music as the food of love, there has perhaps been a lot of the love of food, even “surfeiting”! Too much Christmas, it might seem. No matter, the greater question has to do with the meaning of Christmas itself which may or may not have much to do with the culture of christmas, globally and locally.
Christmas, religiously and artistically speaking, is about a surfeit of images, a fullness of images which entrance and mystify. Christianity, as the Christmas mystery reminds us, is very much about the fullness of imagesin contrast to Buddhism which is about the emptiness of images. For both, though, there is the awareness of the problem of attachment; our being too attached to one image or another in the wrong way or to the wrong extent. In short, there is the constant challenge about thinking Christmas.
I am reminded of the lovely tondo painted c. 1440/1460 by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi in Florence, Italy. It now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Tondo refers to a circular painting. Known as The Adoration of the Magi, it portrays imaginatively and in a rich fullness of images the Christmas story, actually the story of the Epiphany on the twelfth day of Christmas in the western reckoning, with the Magi-Kings presenting gifts to the Child Christ pictured in the foreground of the painting. Included in the painting are a host of people: men and women and children; and a number of animals, a kind of representation of the whole world of creation coming and worshipping Christ. It envisions the powerful idea of creation as a whole worshipping the Creator now and wondrously in its midst, Christ as God and man. Among the animals there are ox and ass, many horses, camels, a dog, perhaps a greyhound, and two peacocks. While ox and ass are common features of many representations of the Nativity and along with camels have at least some sort of biblical resonance with other passages of Scripture, particularly the prophet Isaiah, they are not literally part of the nativity story in Matthew and Luke or in John’s majestic theological narrative about “the Word made flesh.” And certainly there is no mention of peacocks and greyhounds, let alone moose and beaver or kangaroos!