Christmas greetings!

Flight to Egypt by Sadeo Watanabe

Warm greetings and wishes for a wonderful holiday season.  We are thankful for a year full of positive progress on our goals, an enjoyable month in San Diego with our children and other family members, and a long list of guests at our informal B & B.  Here is some Christmas art and poetry that appealed to me—enjoy!

CHRISTMAS POEM

No longer able to believe
That the great Unknowable
Came among us as a child.

He finds a way,
This tinselly time of year,
To the crib and the singing.

In some kind of fealty
To those whose softness
Nourished his growing:

And, for a moment,
Dreams himself back
Into the sweetness. —Pádraig Daly

Golden Sea by Makoto Fujimura

ON ANGELS

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seems.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.
The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draw near
another one
do what you can.  —Czeslaw Milosz

CHRISTMAS GREETINGS
Hail O favored one, the Lord is with you! –Luke 1:28

My mail carrier driving his stubby white
Truck, trimmed in blue and red, wingless
But wheeled, commissioned by the civil service,
Delivers the Gospel every Advent.

This Gabriel, uniformed in gabardine,
Unsmiling descendant of his dazzling original,
Under the burden of greetings is stoical
But prompt: annunciations at ten each morning.

One or two a three a day at first;
By the second week momentum’s up,
My mail box stuffed, each card stamped

With the glory at a cost of only twenty-two cents,
Bringing the news that God is here with us,
First class, personally hand addressed.  —Eugene Peterson

UNCLE ERNIE
A tree from the forest is cut down
…men deck it with silver and gold. Jeremiah 10:3,4

My uncle Ernie didn’t believe in God.
At least that’s what he said. But he always
Went to church on Christmas. Which I thought
Seriously compromised his atheism. It was

Nineteen thirty-seven, the year we didn’t
Have a tree. He came to dinner, looked
Around and roared, “Evie” (that’s my mother)
“Where’s the tree? You can’t have Christmas

Without a tree!” “No tree this year, brother.
Just Jesus.” She quoted Jeremiah on the tree
Cut down and decked with baubles and tinsel. Stunned

By her impiety he muttered through a mouth full
Of lutefisk “damn, damn, damn, damn”
All through dinner. Next year the tree was back.

—Eugene Peterson

ART:  Sadao Watanabe (1913-1996), born and raised in Tokyo, was a Japanese prinmaker famous for biblical prints in the mingei folk art tradition of Japan.

Makoto Fujimura is a 21st-century artist. He graduated from Bucknell University, then studied in a traditional Japanese painting doctorate program for several years at Tokyo National University.  He is the artist for the  “The Four Holy Gospels” project commemorating the 400th year of the King James Bible.

POETS: Pádraig Daly is a contemporary Irish poet working as an Augustinian priest in Dublin who has published numerous collections.  This poem is from God in Winter.

Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was a Polish poet, writer, translator and diplomat. A Catholic, he aided Jews in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. He defected to the West in 1951 and became a professor in the United States. In 1980 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Eugene Peterson’s The Message is a remarkably fresh paraphrase of the Bible.  he is author of at least 30 books, each of which is wise and beautiful and helpful.  These poes are from the collection Holy Luck.