I am by no means an artist. In fact it’s only in the past number of months that I’ve begun putting pencil to paper – taking baby steps in trying to understand how to use shading, lines and different pencils (2B 4b HB 6H) in service of an idea or image. And aside from being a total novice, I don’t exactly have a lot of time on my hands for drawing, though I do find it a soul-nourishing activity. It makes me slow down for a moment, to reflect on life and its meaning.
Earlier this Fall the Presbyterian Record opened its annual art competition for the December issue of the magazine. I took the competition (and the reality of a deadline!) as a source of motivation to create something. It was an opportunity for me to think about how I would represent some aspect of Christmas. The end result is the pencil drawing, below, which I have also put through a “sepia” filter.
Like many within the church I have a kind of love-hate relationship with Christmas. On the one hand I have beautiful childhood memories of Christmas – of trees and lights and family celebrations. And even today I have a kind of delight in aspects of the season. And yet beneath these positive aspects of memory and celebration is a deep frustration with the way Christmas (Advent is essentially bypassed!) has become a saccharine and tinsel-strewn affair of little or no substance. Worse, perhaps, the church often caters to this indulgent and superficial approach to the season, which means that our representation and celebration of Christmas is not as rich or deep as it could and should be.
In submitting my own drawing to The Record, I had no sense this was a great piece of art or that it had any chance of making the cover of the magazine. It’s not, and it didn’t! If it belongs anywhere, then it belongs in a small little corner toward the back pages – which is where it found a home.
But my little piece was an attempt to capture both the beauty and ambiguity of Advent and Christmas – to resist the saccharine shallowness. As I think about my own drawing, which I call “Pensive”, I think that words of Barry Corey (president of Biola University) get at what it is all about:
Advent accepts the tension of the already and the not yet. It welcomes waiting. It is merriment and melancholy together, beauty so sublime that, like the best art, it simultaneously comforts and rocks us to the core.
In my image, a contemporary Mary is great with child – and her hopefulness is expressed in lines of delight that extend into a future that she imagines for herself and her child. But in the same moment of her hope there is the tension and struggle and difficulty of life as this is represented in the dead branch and the cross that is suspended over all of life. Of course the cross is most obviously that of her son, who will walk the path of suffering service with honest and difficult obedience.
The words of Simeon, to Mary, also come to mind: “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.” The cross of the Son becomes the cross of the mother. There is glory here, and joy. The story is also rife with ambiguity and foreboding, particularly if we accept the judgment that the gospels are, at some level, extended passion narratives.
So there really is a place for images of comfort and peace in every season, but it seems that we are inundated (by church and culture and marketers) by images of superficial comfort and peace in this season. These images do not drive us back to the truth of our own experience – nor do they capture the complexity and struggle embodied in the narrative of Advent and Christmas.
So perhaps this drawing and this blog post have a simple intent in the end: to offer a plea for a little more honesty in how we represent and live this season. A plea that needs an answer in my own life, as much as in any one else’s.
