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The Pre-Raphaelite Burne Jones' "Angel Playing the Flageoloet" doesn't pretend to be theological. It doesn't need to be. An angel is a messenger from God, and the Christmas story wouldn't work without them. The annunciation to Mary, the sorting out of Jospeh, the cosmic orchestra at Bethlehem, the security branch facilitating the flight to Egypt, are all hinge points when heaven interrupts the earthly drama to redirect the plot.

Music is essential to the story – praise, joy, peace, – annunciation, communication, contemplation – these are almost the only words needed to define a good Christmas carol.

One of my occasional experiments is to look at a painting like this and decide which carol works best with it. "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" is far too theologically and conceptually heavy for this one. The calypso carol too upbeat. Maybe "Love Came Down at Christmas"? Any suggestions for a carol that complements this rather gorgeous but not over-excited angel?

 
In 1505 Raphael painted one of the most beautiful religious images in all of art history. "The Madonna of the Meadow" is replete with devotional allusion, rich in symbolic theology and represents the highest level of aesthetic and creative genius in the service of the Christian story.

Though the dominant figure is the Madonna, the central foreground image is of Jesus and John, apparently playing a game with the cross – but John is kneeling and holds the cross steady as Jesus holds both the cross and his mother's arm.

The pyramid structure is repeated in several places. The Madonna is seated, indeed anchored as the supporting presence for Jesus and gazing downward at both infants. The two children make a second pyramid, and the city in the background a third. Whether or not this is a trinitarian allusion, it gives the painting a powerful sense of rootedness in earth. Raphael by this time was experimenting with a more realistically portrayed, earthed, this worldly approach. The Madonna is not in a holy building but of the world, the city, the rural landscape the sea.  Various commentators note that her smile is enigmatic, hesitant, somewhere between smile and frown, uncertainty suggesting contentment threatened by foreboding. Her head is framed against the sky and is above land and sea, a compositional statement that more than hints at transcendence.

The colours blue and red are painted with startling vivid boldness, redemption and eternity, sacrifice and heaven, enwrapped in the form of the Virgin. The contrasting greens, and they are multi-toned, again brings together the fertile and fruitful life of earth with the redemptive intentions of heaven. The two red poppies answer to the two children, both of whom will die in the outworking of the Gospel story and the redemptive purposes of heaven.

Once again beauty is in the service of theology, and theology shows itself fit subject for art. There are passages of sublime theology that bear repeated reading, analysis, contemplation, intellectual wrestling and spiritual surrender. Likewise those paintings which reveal what George Herbert prayed about his poems, "utmost art". Advent is a time for such richly provoked engagement, as beauty and truth combine.

This is one of those priceless scraps of preparatory work that displays the thought processes of a great artist. It's one of Leonardo da Vinci's studies, Designs for the Nativity or Adoration of the Christ Child", though it presents a number of studies on one sheet.

I don't know what eventually happened to these images, whether they were later incorporated into paintings, frescoes or sculpture - for myself, these are masterpieces in their own right. And the cluster of drawings are delicately textured essays in carbon which together present motherhood and childhood in aspects of tenderness, joy and concentrated attentiveness. Looking on the biblical art site you can browse hundreds of representations of the Nativity – this is to my eyes, and to my theological aesthetics, the most sublime depiction of Mary and Jesus, Virgin and child, protective love and vulnerable presence. In each image Mary is kneeling as she gazes, holds, reaches out towards, opens her arms to, her child.

I don't sense the docile responsiveness of the annunciation here, "Let it be to me according to thy word….". In these drawings, Da Vinci has depicted a mother already bonded with her child. In each picture her eyes are on him, her body inclined towards him, her hands ready to hold, touch, defend him. It is an important balancing truth that just as the Word became flesh, and was fully human, so was Mary, with the full range of emotional strength and protectiveness and self-offering that is the deepest expression of human love.

It's one of the obvious but not often mentioned observations that in depictions of the Nativity, women are under represented. Yet the Word became flesh, that miracle of divine love embodied in human personality, was possible because of the risky, scary, relentless love of his mother. These experiments in ink are amongst the best images that insinuate such constancy, courage and natural humanity through the body language of a mother whose child, has become the centre of her universe. And that too is theological paradox – the centre of the universe, reduced to infancy, and protected by the all attentive love of a mother. So this too is the mystery of advent, the fragility of infancy surrounded by the resilient yes of a mother, open-eyed love to the reality of her child. 

In spirituality as in much else I guess we all have our conceptual and devotional comfort zones. As in most other areas of life, a comfort zone is a good place to be, for a wee while. But living there long term does little to set free our imagination, stimulate intellectual curiosity, develop emotional stamina, sustain mental and physical health, or change much else about us so that we might want to be more than we presently are content with being.

Being a man, may be a biological accident, but it's also an inevitable part of my human identity, a partial and incomplete way of looking at the world, and therefore a limitation of horizon and persepctive that I need to allow for – being a man, I can only guess at what it was like to be a young woman, visited by an angel, who announces my future, and links it to the future of the whole creation. The Annunciation is one of the most stunning moments in the history of human religious experience, an event with comic and cosmic significance; comic, because it begins a drama that will resolve in an unimaginable triumph of love, life and goodness; and cosmic because the drama is the drama of the world's salvation and the redemption of all Creation. The great artists of the Renaissance saw this with instant clarity and portrayed it with magnificent anachronism, extravagant symbol, and theological sensitivity.

Now as a 21st Century man, I encounter such art and realise I'm out of my depth, summoned by a beauty beyond me, addressed by strangeness, compelled to read but uncertain of the language, and therefore needing a grammar of aesthetics and a dictionary of medieval religious concepts and affections, to help me unlock the syntax of images that say more than words. So a painting of the Annunciation like that of Vittore Carpaccio above, invites me to be perplexed, impatient, and conceptually disempowered – that is, it beckons me across the thresholds of my comfort zone. And only if I have the courage to go, will I discover through contemplative patience, and through intellectual welcome of new and different ways of knowing, yet one other way of theological encounter, spiritual openness and personal surrender – which is prayer and a deepening love of God.

And let's face it. Devotion to the Triune God whose life of eternal self-giving is ever interwoven in mutual love, and is inexhaustibly expressed in infinite goodness, and overflows in endlessly creative purposes, reaching out to embrace the Creation called into being by that same self-expending love, requires of us more than the complacency, contentment and constraints of our personal devotional comfort zones.

And so to Carpaccio's painting, and Advent. Because whatever else Advent does, it forces upon us a reconceptualising of what God is about, and what our lives are about. The Annunciation is an event that changes forever and a day, the life of a young woman. Theologically, it reasserts the limitless paramaters of grace, it redefines the nature of redeeming love, it reconfigures the hopes of a nation, a world and all humanity, all of which hangs on the yes of a young woman. That is what the painting is about. Look at it in that light – that crisis moment that awaits the words, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word".  

C S Lewis again:

"The pure light walks the earth; the darkness, received into the heart of deity, is there swallowed up. Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned."

Letters to Malcom, ch. 13.

One of Sheila's Christmas card photos of our garden – this was before the big precipitation of Saturday.

Now I'm not one for ad hoc Advent miracle stories in which we all find our own angels doing their thing on our personal behalf.

But here's what happened.

I spend most of Sunday morning digging our way out of the house and clearing the drive.

Then I do the same for our neighbour who isn't up to that kind of thing now.

Next up the hill through snow deep enough to come over the tops of my wellingtons, to clear the road for my car, and to remove the 9 inches of frosted snow from it.

Job done I collect the snow shovel, scraper, long handled brush (only way I can reach across the car roof being so diminutive myself)

Walking back down I'm greeted by Dempsey, the big daft dug from next door, lolloping around in snow carrying his blue ball.

Drops it at my feet and demands I throw it – which I do, and it disappears into a snow drift.

Dempsey hasn't a scooby doo where it went, and sits there waiting to see what this thick wee human is going to do about it.

In a reversal of roles, he sits there and I go and retrieve it. 

Then in for a hot tea and a Nick Nairn crumpet – at which point I look for my keys.

The bunch of keys, car, house, and every other locked premise I'm repsonsible for.

  Somewhere in the deep snow, between the car and the house (50 metres or so of 18 inch deep all but virgin snow) somewhere, I dropped the keys.

Easily done. I had gloves on – was sure I'd pocketed them – clearly had missed, and the keys fell soundlessly into the snow.

At which point the snow plough went up the road and I had visions of my keys bulldozed under tons of snow and probably now buried till Spring.

The day got worse – more snow, so heavy it wasn't wise to be out poking in snow looking for keys.

So bad the car struggling up the hill outside the door had two people with shovels and grit helping it up the road.

I make a list of who to phone and how to get new keys, spare keys – the whole thing an embarrassing amount of trouble for other people.

Doorbell rings.

A polite person in white, holds out to me a bunch of keys which he knows are mine.

An angel. An Advent messenger. A heavenly visitor, who has for once heard my self-centred petitionary prayer to have my blessed keys returned.

A miracle. A sign that I am favoured amongst men!

Well. Actually. A man with a shovel who had been digging away the snow to get the car up the hill and who had come across a bunch of keys.

One of them was the Honda car key – only one Honda owner nearby. Keys must be mine. Rational deduction, not miracle.

Aye right! Sometimes the miracle is the coincidence of circumstances – what are the chances of dropped keys, deep snow, snow plough, stranded car, man with shovel, clink of keys and Honda logo, all coming together to that point when my doorbell rang and I'm faced with a man smiling through a layer of snow handing me my keys, for which I had prayed with intermittent desperation, once I'd stopped cursing my own carelessness? Huh?

Anyway, the rest of the day was spent in the wondering afterglow as I pondered these things in my heart :))

…….

For those interested, I have posted a more traditional Advent reflection over at Hopeful Imagination.