The star is not the point. Nor is the manger nor the shepherds nor the angelic caterwauling in the night.
The mother and father are not the point, nor the cattle lowing while the world snores on, nor—at the risk of heresy—the squalling newborn.
The Holy slips so softly into the world, unnoticed in creation’s warp and weft, the hawks laser-eyed for signs of voles don’t see it.
Nor you, from tallest steeple. It makes nary a ripple in the water nor transubstantiates the bread and cup. You’re bound to miss it. But know this:
if urgency of affairs or commands of kings would hustle you away from purported holiness— fear not. The star is not the point.
Paul Hooker, The Longing: Poems. Eugene OR: Resource Publications, 2024, p.97.
____
At the risk of antagonizing all my friends, I think Christmas is not about Baby Jesus or Mary and Joseph, or the shepherds and angels. They are, as the poem suggests, Not the Point.
Once, on a hot August afternoon now more than thirty-four years ago, I waited in a long line that snaked through courtyard beside the sanctuary of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, wound its way down stone stairs into the basement. I was waiting to see the Site of the Nativity, the place where, it was said, the manger once stood that cradled the newborn Jesus. I was, I think, vaguely hoping to capture some sense of the Holy, that rarefied Something that had brought pilgrims like me to this site for how many centuries. The line filed past an ornate grotto the size of a manorial fireplace. The space was hung with thuribles secreting incense-laden smoke that mainly contributed to the oppressive closeness and humidity of the choked and crowded passageway. At its center, bolted to the floor, was a metal star, intended, I suppose, to mark the precise location of the Incarnation. As I approached, I could sense my anticipation growing, almost against my will (I didn't and don't think this was the Actual Spot...but what if it was?), sense myself hoping for an encounter with the Holy (however unlikely). I paused before the grotto, waiting in expectation. Was it here?
'Twas not to be. A security guard hired by the Church and charged with the task of crowd management prodded me on, pointing in the direction of the long line behind me. "Close in two hours" he managed in broken English (was it that obvious I was American?), "Many people behind you. Move on please." I moved, and the Holy—if it was there at all—receded into the incense cloud and evanesced.
Out in the August sunlight again, I wondered what I had waited in line to see: a tin star riveted to a church basement floor? An over-large fireplace stuffed with the paraphernalia deposited by generations of the religious? A tourist trap? I still don't know.
I decided to cross the square in front of the Church to a souvenir shop apparently frequented by those released from their Visit to the Manger. Suddenly, I was missing Pat, at home halfway around the world. So I bought her a malachite necklace, which she still has in her jewelry case. Every time I see it, I am back before the grotto, beclouded by incense and jostled by the crowd. Every time I see it, I am waiting again for the faintest glimpse of the robe-hem of the Holy, retreating from view. That day, I thought I had been deprived of my moment with the Numinous. But perhaps not....
O magnum mysterium, et admirabile sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natum, iacentem in praesepio! Beata Virgo, cujus viscera meruerunt portare Dominum Iesum Christum. Alleluia!
O great mystery, and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the newborn Lord, lying in a manger! Blessed Virgin whose womb is worthy to bear the Lord Jesus Christ. Alleluia!
The American composer Martin Lauridsen set this ancient Latin text, the fourth responsory for Matins on Christmas Day, to unforgettable music, first performed in Los Angeles on 18 December 1994, thirty years ago tomorrow. It has since become a staple of Christmas repertory for choirs and chorales all over the world. I’ve sung it a dozen times. Pat is playing the Robert Shaw recording of it while I write these words and she bakes my birthday cake (pineapple upside-down cake, if you must know). When I heard the opening strains, I got up from my desk and padded into the kitchen, sat down at the island to listen, while tears rose in my eyes. It is one of the two or three most beautiful, transporting pieces of music I have ever sung.
As the last notes disappear into the ether, I find myself wondering why this piece moves me so. The answer, I think, is this: it is a musical rendering of mystery, characterized by what one reviewer, Susanne Stähr, called “volksliedhafte Schlichtheit, ätherisch entrückte Klänge, eigenwillige Expressivität (“folksong-like simplicity, ethereal otherworldly sounds, personal expressivity”).[1] Stähr is right; Lauridsen’s music soars into the ether on the wings of rising open fourths and falls back to earth in open fifths. Dissonant seconds sustain tensions that resolve finally into thirds, never cloying but somehow soothing. The music moves, but the movement seems more like stillness than motion. And through it all, one has the sense of sitting in the nave of some grand cathedral while the air fills with unknowable, inexplicable mystery.
The text Lauridsen uses is the sung response to Lesson IV in the liturgy for Matins of Christmas Day. I am not Roman Catholic, but what I understand of the Roman liturgy of Christmas Eve/Christmas Day is that Matins immediately precedes the Midnight Mass, which then gives way to Lauds, the liturgy of praise on Christmas morning. Before the praise comes the dark and the silence. Matins on Christmas is a liturgy for and in darkness and wordlessness. In this fourth responsory, there is not a single human or divine figure to be found, other than Mary (and she only as a womb, rather than a whole person). No shepherds, no wise men, no innkeeper, no Joseph, no Herodian guards prowling about—no people to confuse the moment with commentary and obscure the scene with sensationalism. There are only the animals, and they alone are admitted to the “admirable Sacrament.”
Don’t misunderstand; this is not some PETA-ized Christmas column, no misanthropic rant. Rather, what I’m pointing to is the silence, the absence of talk, the sheer awestruck wonder that transcends words and can somehow best be appreciated by those beings for whom words are both inaccessible and unnecessary, who live every breath and heartbeat in the presence of Mystery. I confess to no small envy of them.
We’ll be in worship on Christmas Eve. We’ll sing the appointed songs and read the appointed texts (and hear the inevitable sermon ostensibly derived therefrom), confess our sin in scripted unison and mumble “the peace of Christ” in the general direction of our fellow congregants to the accompaniment of a holy fist-bump. By the time all is said and done, I trust that most of the gathered worthies in the sanctuary will have some sense that they have celebrated the advent of the One into human life.
I doubt that I will, however. I suspect that the hour spent robed and seated in the choir loft singing and listening to the words of Christmas will leave me pretty much as it increasingly does: with the sense that I’ve sat through a ritual that has outlived its usefulness for me (I recognize this is an idiosyncratic sense not necessarily shared by others). I am weary of words said in worship, having spent my life writing and saying them. Words are like clothing: they conceal more than they reveal, provide places to hide as much as occasions to communicate. Words are little invitations to dishonesty. It’s not that I don’t believe them (although some of them I don’t); it’s that, used too often or too glibly, they cease to deliver what they promise, are flattened like champagne left open on the table overnight.
It won’t be until later, perhaps in the middle of the night, perhaps just before dawn on Christmas Day, that I will experience the Incarnation in the way I have come to know it best: in the wordlessness of the Great World that curls itself beneath my windows and waits just outside my door, in the chill of the pre-dawn frost, in the twinkle of stars alight in the windswept darkness of the night sky—in short, in a cosmos brimful-to-overflowing with the presence of the One who speaks not a word and yet who gathers all words and all things unto Itself. I will stand in the dark on my back porch and draw my bathrobe closer against the cold and open myself to the Sacrament once again.
Annunciation, 1898. By Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937). Philadelphia Museum of Art
Annunciation
The feast of the Annunciation falls in April, nine months before Christmas. That’s logical; it takes thirty-six weeks to gestate a human being. Yet every year I want to hark back to that moment at the beginning of Advent when we stand on the verge of seeing what the Annunciation began. I want the Annunciation to be the word that is Advent’s annual starting gun.
In truth, I don’t think time means much in the biblical universe. Or, to put it a bit more precisely, I don’t think time has any meaning in the reality of the One, in which all times—like all things—are one. In the reality of the One, there is only one moment, the eternal moment, in which all moments are gathered and in which there is no separation between one moment and another. So I feel some justification in rehearsing the myth of the Annunciation here at the beginning of Advent. If it’s all the same to the Holy, it’s all the same to me.
Occasionally, people ask me to tell them what I intended a poem of mine to mean. My standard answer is that I want it to mean whatever it means to whoever is reading it whenever it is read. I can’t determine meaning; that is the province of the reader.
But I can tell you what was on my mind when I began writing it. I was sitting in my study in the late afternoon, and sunlight was streaming through the half-closed louvers on the windows, creating an alternating grid of light and shadow on the floor. In the illumined spaces, where the light poured in as though from some sort of celestial ewer, I could see dust-motes floating in the air, moving aimlessly in every direction.
I don’t remember if I had been reading Luke’s story of Gabriel’s visitation to Mary, but something about the dust and the alternating pattern of light and dark and the silence of the room and the stillness of the world made me think of that young girl and her angel.
I never think of angels as embodied. Which is why I love this painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner, the African American artist who painted it in 1898. Tanner doesn’t show the traditional angelic figure, robed in white and standing in the midst of a heavenly aura. Tanner in fact doesn’t yield to our anthropomorphic arrogance at all but gives us instead an angel who is a shaft of brilliant, white-hot light, almost too bright to look at, and surely too unsettling to get comfortable with. Which is why, I think, Tanner depicts Mary as a shy teenage girl, seated on her bed, a little hunched as if to make herself smaller, looking sideways and upward with apprehension on her still-childlike face. This is not a mature woman who is ready to declare the eschatological revelation that will turn the world upside down. This is a frightened daughter of timid parents who know what it is like to live with the boot of the oppressor on your neck and his hands in your pockets. This is a child who knows more about threat than promise, more about fear than hope. And yet…
… there is something defiant in her glance, too, and in those quiet hands clasped in her lap. Not the eyes of the terrified, the rabbit suddenly aware of the wolf, the deer illumined by fast-approaching headlights, but the eyes of the wary and worldly, who know how to look out for themselves. Not hands raised in self-protection or flung forward in fright, but hands stilled and patient, as if to say, let us see what is in store, what the future already unfolded in the ken of the One who sends the light will show to rest of us who wait in the mottled time-bound darkness. She is saying, let us play this out, ravel this skein to the end, well beyond a manger and even all the way to a cross.
I suppose something like that is what I was hoping to convey with my Mary. Pregnant by some cause—does it really matter whether human or divine?—she is gathering her grit and mustering her moxie to take on this charge to bear the One into the many. I think she knows it will not be easy to carry this child, that there will be plenty who want to take him from her. Some of them sit on queasy thrones and would take her child because they need to feed their visions of grandeur with the blood of innocents. Others—and herein are most of us—dream up visions and versions of our own desiring and would take Mary’s child as the sigil of our own self-aggrandizement. I pulled up behind a car in traffic today, which bore a sticker on the rear window: “Just a girl who loves Jesus.” No, you don’t, I thought. The “Jesus” you think you love is a figment of your imagination, created to suit the predilections of your own life and lifestyle. The same, I then thought, is true of mine. And yours.
There is quite likely only one “girl who loves Jesus,” and that is the teenager reticent and yet somehow resilient, who sits and faces the Light that falls from the One, terrifying as it must be (Rilke once said, “Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich – Every angel is terrifying”), and still musters courage and voice to say, “Here am I; let it be with me as you would have it.” Loves him enough to accept the angelic assignment: pregnancy and delivery, motherhood and martyrdom and myth, heaven’s light and tomb’s dark. Here am I, she says, incredibly. So be it.
I don’t have that kind of courage. The best I can do is to follow her at a distance, as she makes her way toward Bethlehem, and Jerusalem, and into the world beyond, and finally into the mystic wonder of the heart. It is, I suspect, a holy and harrowing journey.
[1] Paul Hooker, The Longing: Poems. Eugene OR: Resource Publications, 2024, pp. 95-96.
Shape and Substance 