Christmas and a Renaissance master.
In his 15th-century painting of the Annunciation, Filippo Lippi depicts the Holy Spirit as a dove flying toward the Virgin Mary, who is receiving the news from the archangel Gabriel that God has chosen her to be the mother of Jesus.
My thoughts linger on the shadow on the wall behind Mary. It may be that Fra Filippo is compressing time, depicting the Annunciation and the overshadowing of Mary in the same scene.
I wonder, though, if we aren’t meant to see a bit of darkness in this most holy and miraculous moment. We know from Saint Luke the Evangelist that Mary was “greatly troubled” when Gabriel greeted her as God’s “favored one.” Perhaps Fra Filippo is depicting her fear.
Or perhaps the Renaissance master is pointing us to the darkness to come. Indeed, the Christmas story is infused with this shadow. The Son of God, laid in a manger after being turned away from the inn. The Holy Family’s flight into Egypt — refugees in exile until the death of King Herod. That king’s massacre of all the male infants and toddlers in Bethlehem.
The Magi brought to Jesus gifts of gold and frankincense. Their third gift was myrrh, commonly used to embalm bodies and used three decades later by Nicodemus at Jesus’s burial. A curious gift for a newborn. The wood of the manger foreshadows the wood of the Cross.
Of course, we hardly need the Christmas story to remind us of the darkness of this world. The early Christians needed it even less. What’s remarkable about Christmas is the hope that the darkness is not the final word. Adventus — Latin for “arrival” — is defiant hope. That hope is realized three decades later with the great earthquake, the stone rolled back, the empty tomb.
It goes without saying that none of this may be true. Public opinion surveys show that religion is on the decline in America. And at first encounter, Christmas appears impossible. The creator and sustainer of the universe, an infant unable to control his hands and feet. The maker of Mary, born to her as her son. The great king, born in poverty without a throne. The great liberator, born with no army.
Given that, why believe in Christmas? Philosophical arguments for God’s existence — St. Thomas Aquinas’s proofs, for example — are compelling. Christianity’s quick success at overturning the world’s power structures is persuasive. It is hard to look at the last 2,000 years of history and not conclude that something remarkable must have happened in Judea in the first century.
But none of this is dispositive. For this believer, reason and empirics are helpful, but ultimately inconclusive. How to believe? Embrace your full ability to know by embracing your full humanity. Learn from the movements of your heart. Take seriously the knowledge you acquire from personal experience. Be open to the numinous.
Do not shrink from the big questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why am I here? Why is there so much suffering in the world? As fantastical as it seems to the rational intellect, the most compelling answers to those questions might just be a person, born on Christmas, 20 centuries ago.
Encounter that person, and even the secular Christmas season becomes enchanted. The Christmas lights on your house remind of the Light of the World — a light more powerful than the darkness surrounding it. The Christmas tree in your house, alive through the cold and desolate winter, reminds of the possibility of everlasting life. All the people you see shopping on Wisconsin Avenue are eternal beings.
Fra Filippo’s shadow adds depth and context to one of Advent’s great moments. But the shadow is not the headline. Neither are the weariness of our hearts or the fallenness of our world.
The headline is the promise of liberation, of freedom, of peace — that existence is more than the shadow. The defiant hope told by an angel to a dreaming Joseph: Mary’s son would be called Emmanuel, which means “God is with us.” In a cancer diagnosis, in a layoff, in family conflict, in the grind of daily life, in loneliness, in a nation careening off course — God is with us.
And the fulfillment of that promise, the realization of that hope: a baby, asleep in a manger, with a star overhead.