Christmas Eve is upon us. The cityscape has been transformed by brightly coloured lights, festive decorations and displays. Carolers serenade shoppers, and there are signs of changes in peoples’ day to day life. Some are preparing for holidays in warmer climates, while others play favourite holiday movies in the long dark evenings. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, is a perennial favourite. The contrast between familiar Victorian attitudes to human desperation and the transformation of Scrooge remains powerful.
Christmas, this time of birthing, stands as an icon of hope. It is the moment when our deep desire for peace, equity and joy seems possible. This desire lies deep within human consciousness. It is filled with the challenge of paradox. For in order to have peace one must be aware of and know conflict, in order to have equity one must be aware of, and mourn injustice.
Fritz Eichenberg, a Quaker, was well known for his woodcuts. He created images for Dostoyevsky’s novels, but later formed a unique creative partnership with the social justice activist Dorothy Day. Their collaboration caused him to create a number of powerful scenes. He bridged ancient stories and reframed them with modern motifs. Over 100 of his prints were published in the Catholic Worker.
One woodcut, created in 1950, was a nativity scene. He carved an image quite unlike ones we see on Christmas cards. In this woodcut, neither Mary or Joseph are to be seen. Instead the naked, haloed infant is shown as the epitome of vulnerability.
The eyes of the infant are closed. He is resting on a bed of hay, adored by a donkey and a cow. Their comforting bodies form a fleshy wedge to shelter the child. Almost obscured by the hay we see the symbol of modern pain and conflict, a discarded soldier’s helmet. It has been placed near the infant. The side wall of the stable is open to the elements. It reveals a ravaged landscape. There, in the war torn, devastated countryside, a radiant star shines, revealing the results of human rage and hunger for power.
It is an unlikely place for the Messiah, the one who is to bring salvation to the world. Here is the harbinger of a new creation, exquisitely weak and unimaginably powerful. This “king” sleeps peacefully, far from the palaces of royal power or political influence. In this print, we see no heavenly host of angels, no shepherds abiding in their fields, no Madonna. What the onlooker is forced to confront is the simple truth. Into the poverty of our world, the brokenness of our humanity, this fragile infant speaks with great intensity and calls into life the hope all might be different.
For some this image is difficult. It has removed the soft loving mother and the safety of a caring father. No longer is this an infant surrounded by human and angelic support. This Christ child has come into the reality of the pain and brokenness of humanity.
We know wars continue despite our best efforts. Poverty and injustice are on the increase. Yet this image of the Christ child, vulnerable and alone, is the antithesis to political power and military might. His arrival is heralded by the very stars, filling hope with joy. All we who visit the manger each year cannot change his journey. But we are called to sit with the true meaning of Christmas: eternal joy and peace wrapped in vulnerabilit
The Reverend Canon Nancy Ford, Deacon, is the Anglican Director of Deacons for the Diocese of British Columbia and Deacon to the City of Victoria out of Christ Churh Cathedral.
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This article was published in the print edition of the TImes Colonist on Saturday, December 24 2016
