It is week three of the Advent journey. The scripture readings, music, and prayer bring a dawning sense of the Glory of God. A source of joy for me every week is finding art for preparing a visual presentation to share on the Wednesdays of Advent.
The pastel above by the French Symbolist painter, Odilon Redon. Mary is visiting her cousin Elizabeth who is saying, “And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.” (Luke 1:42-45)
At the moment depicted above, Elizabeth and Mary alone bear the risk of bringing these unexpected cousins into the world: John the Baptist who would proclaim the coming of the Lord in the wilderness, and Jesus, who would be called Christ. As their mothers support each other during pregnancy, the sons will support each other’s roles in the story of the coming of God’s Glory.
Redon’s art also shows the moment before Mary breaks out into her prayer-poem we call the Magnificat, which was one of the choices for readings for last Sunday, known as Gaudete Sunday—gaudete meaning “rejoice.”
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed….”
Reading Advent’s scripture with concepts in visual art, such as contrast in light and dark, is one focus of our Advent & Art series. It is said that Advent begins in darkness. And so did Redon’s career—he did not use color often until he was about fifty. To my eye, Elizabeth and Mary’s experience is expressed above in Redon’s selection of colors. Orange and blue are complements—opposite each other on the color wheel.
Elizabeth, united to Mary in orange tones, expresses her own joy at her improbable pregnancy with John, while blessing Mary for believing there would be fulfillment of the unbelievable thing spoken to her by the Lord. The women are gestating the great story of contrast—the Glory of God in a broken world.
For many, light struggles to break through this time of year. As a child, uneducated in faith, I experienced a seasonal fatalism, not hope. I knew, as I know now, that something was going to happen. However naive, I think it would have been good for me to view God as one from whom I might receive a good gift. But a Santa Claus-like god comes and leaves. He does not hang around long in the darkness.
Persevering in faith in the darkness, one may see the opportunity to learn to desire the Giver above the gifts. Suffering the lowliness of believing in the darkness invites Glory to break through.
Eventually, I learned that hope comes by adding substance to faith—by proclaiming it—embodying it—trying to do like Mary did.
“Faith is what someone knows to be true, whether they believe it or not,” was writer Flannery O’Connor’s modern take, perhaps on Hebrews 11, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” O’Connor wrote about faith as she could in her time—strangely, often with ugliness to show beauty by contrast.
We do not live in a society like Mary’s where the prophets were read and people waited for the kingdom of God to come. But we have what we know is true and beautiful, and we can proclaim it, as Mary did. If we give it flesh, Christ, the light of the world, appears in the flesh—in us—showing who God is.
From this stance much poetry has been born. For our Bible Symposium in 2023, we look forward to welcoming the priest-poet Malcolm Guite, whose interview with Tish Harrison Warren appeared in Sunday’s NY Times. Unfortunately it is only accessible to subscribers, but I have included the link to Guite’s Advent book HERE, and below are some of his words from the interview. Peace.
The word Advent means “arrival” or “coming.” The church saw that preparing for the coming of Christ at Christmas could also be a way of looking to that larger hope, which is the final coming of Jesus, the day when, at last, the earth will be filled with the glory of God. And in my book I said, well, I think there’s a third “coming,” a kind of continuous coming. We all experience a series of Advents. My prayer life and spirituality is very much focused on the Eucharist. So for me, every time I hold out my hands and the wafer is placed there and I receive him, that’s an advent. And in fact, that’s actually also Christmas. It’s an incarnation. He chooses the humble form of the bread as he chose the humble form of the baby to be his body.