by CCW | 3 January 2019 05:00
“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[1], 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!
Yet all this fullness of images speaks to the activity of holy imagination as informed by the central theological idea of Christmas and one which is largely lost to view in the culture of christmas. It is the idea of Emmanuel, which means as we are told, God with us. The mystery of God with us is the mystery of God himself. In a way, that is the whole insight that opens us out to a new way of thinking about ourselves and our world. God is always near at hand, always with us. The Christian story of Christ’s Nativity instantiates that idea in the Incarnation but the insight into the eternal presence of God has its expression in various ways in other religions and philosophies of the world. It is wisdom; not knowledge, certainly not information, but wisdom.
The tondo in its very structure (a circle) reminds us of an important feature of wisdom. It is not about our linear reasoning; it is more about a constant circling around the still point of all being and truth. Our lesson in Chapel on the Thursday and the Friday of our return to School is Luke’s account of what has come to be known as The Christmas of the Shepherds, one of the three traditional masses of Christmas along with The Christmas of the Angels and The Christmas of the Eternal Sonship of Christ, his eternal birth, as it were.
In a way, it is a salutary corrective and counter to all of the busyness and bustle, exhaustion and frenzy of the culture of christmas. Luke presents the humility of the shepherds which complements the humility of God. Set in motion, they have come to Bethlehem to “see this thing which is come to pass,”literally ‘this saying which has happened’, itself a kind of hint of the Word made flesh in John’s Prologue. There is something extraordinary in the ordinariness of the birth of a child; the angel of the Lord had told them to “fear not,” “for unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” Strong words and given with a sign, “a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes.” They come and find it so. Good on them, we might say. Good tidings of great joy, it might seem for them, but no. It is “good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.” And so it something which cannot be hid in the corner of our hearts; it has to be made known to all.
That is the special wonder of The Christmas of the Shepherds. They are our teachers. They do not keep hidden what they know. Their wisdom and the wisdom of the angels is something which is shared. “And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child.” And so it becomes something for us to wonder at as well. “All they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds.”
Wonder. Such is the beginning of the possibilities of learning, of education. We return to wonder. But only if we will be like Mary and “keep all these things and ponder them in [our] hearts”. Pondus meum amor meus, “My weight is my love,” Augustine famously says in his Confessions. Love is the weight of the soul. A love which is opened out to us with the music of angels and the songs of the shepherds, a love which is food for the soul. A love which gathers the world into itself. A mystery, the meaning of which we can never exhaust; a mystery about which there cannot be too much. The mystery of divine love now with us.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
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