Last summer, I bought a book of postcards in a second-hand store. Thirty images of Mary and the infant Christ – with everything from Botticelli to Edward Burne-Jones. Six centuries of mother and child. It is the kind of book that you might pick up in an art gallery gift shop so I wondered how it had made its way to the second-hand store. None of the postcards had been removed and there were no marks or words written on any of them, either. I wondered who originally bought the book and why.
Was she a mother? A minister? An artist?
What did these images have to say to her?
The range of images is rather interesting. Images of devotion. Images of foreboding. Of peace and beauty and laughter. Breast-feeding images. Too-haloed images. Floating-on-clouds-while-angels-sing-around images. Formal and luminous and powerfully present. Like Christmas sermons, which always tell the same story, yet need to find new ways to shape it, these images ask us again and again to consider the link between mother and child, the intimacy of God born among us.
Turning the pages, I’m struck by Mary’s hands. Holding, reaching, cradling, cautioning. When my own small ones were new, I kept seeing my mother’s hands in my own gestures. I wonder if Mary did, too. And if these artists might have experienced something similar. Whose actions did they remember as they painted Mary’s hands?
My favourite image of the Nativity is a painting by Gari Melchers, a 19th century American artist known for his naturalist approach and startling portraits. He imagined the Bethlehem stable in the quiet after the birth. Mary sits on the floor, her legs stretched out, her hands beside her in shadows. A large bowl sits nearby with a towel folded over the edge, and a curved jug catches the light. Mary’s clothing are also illuminated, the blue fabric gilded over the softness of her belly, still-swollen just after birth. Joseph sits above her, perched on a stool, his clothing also golden, and both of them are looking at the child. His manger is a box set right on the stable floor, his arms so small and vulnerable, and, around his head, there is a halo of bright light or maybe it is illuminated straw.
The stable door is open. Anyone might come in, and if you look, you can see that the edge of the door also catches the golden light. Soon they will come. Shepherds with their news of a strange song, a strange bright calling in the dark night. Later, others. Perhaps other travellers from the road, seeking shelter, seeking more. Perhaps, the men who work with the animals, once again needing something from the stable. This is a space of work, after all. Joseph will need to find another place for his family to rest, and there will be food to buy and supplies needed for the journey ahead. All that will happen.
But in this moment, the baby has arrived. Mary can look into his face. Like every other mother, she will taste the joy of knowing – knowing, at last – who it is who has come to be with her. Not flesh-to-flesh as they have been, closer than breath and almost impossible, but now face-to-face, eye-to-eye.
Finally here and met.
