David Jones, 'Nativity with Shepherds and Beasts Rejoicing' 1929-1930
All four hooves, Welsh as a pony on hill
are inches off the frosted ground. They skip
for a fish tight saviour who is swathed in stillness
between apple breast and pillow of hair.
Come to look at it, all are off the ground:
cow and ladle, shepherdess and lute,
bits of floating Latin, but all stock still,
as if playing statues.
I am waiting for the cockerel to spill
its redness on the page to Botticelli up the colour
and set the world in motion, from out of winter
into summer. Then the snow will melt
and who knows what the sun might loose them into.
A David Jones Nativity (Gentilis animetur) by David Scott
When the wonderful Irish artist, Patrick Pye, and his equally, if not more wonderful wife, Noirin, visited me in Macedonia we went on a Church crawl, punctured by leisurely lunches and dinners, in search of the striking frescoes that populate many of its churches, especially at St. Panteleimon outside Skopje and St George in Kurbinovo. They both returned to Ireland with their feet not touching the ground, surprised by joy. https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2011/04/transfigured-in-macedonia.html
A joy that was a blend of the haunting stillness and presence of the images they had beheld and the animation of their encouragement - one that was both aesthetic, nurturing Patrick's subsequent art and spiritual. For the frescoes spoke of the true possibilities of what it means to be human.
Both Jones' drawing and Scott's poem implies the celebration, the joy in the stillness of that moment when this possibility, of the depth of being human, is restored in the birth of Christ and which awaits in Scott's poem its full animation in the life of the world to come, soon, now if we wish - though not necessarily achieved without some form of surrender, sacrifice.
Earlier this year I gave a day on Meister Eckhart (Eckhart compressed in three half hour talks - I am nothing if not ambitious) who saw that it was the birth in the soul of the Word, now, here, in this moment, that was what truly mattered - this was incarnation - and it was made possible for each and every person by God's incarnation in Jesus and God's assumption of human nature, not in any abstract sense, but in each and every person.
Each and every person is ready to be flipped from that winter stillness, dancing in anticipation, into a full-coloured summer of renewed, renewing life. It 'simply' requires you to fall back into it - your true nature - your ground in God's groundless ground. A fall back that then propels you forward into the world, serving it naturally from a renewing grace. (Of course, it is a touch more complicated than that - stay tuned for my next Eckhart outing)!
Jones' image too captures a sense of not only the unity of the human but of the human with the whole of creation - everything participates in that wholeness - everything is invited and invested with joy.
In what has been an extraordinarily difficult year - one in which I quite literally limped through half of it - I hope Christmas in its deepest sense can remind us that joy lurks and can surprise us in unforeseen ways.
I was walking up the stairs at the Boden Museum in Berlin a month ago and tripped forward, a trip that on my dodgy knee can have unpleasant consequences - but my balance held, I recovered, and was overcome with joy. It lurks in unexpected places! May we discover more, many more of those, intended or not.
Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and a joy flipped New Year!
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