Christmas Lights

A Poem and Illustration for the Third Week of Advent

For Advent this year, I am sharing a poem and a work of visual art each week.

This week’s poem is one of the rare poems I wrote in my twenties before starting to regularly read and write poetry. While I can feel the ways I have grown as a writer since penning this poem, its imagery and sentiments continue to stay with me. I hope you enjoy it!

Christmas Lights

 Everywhere we look we see
     bright rows of stars on Christmas Eve;
     the darkness cannot but receive
their light—even mistakenly
     illuminating, to its fright,
     their marvelous display at night;
 
and in our homes, an irony,
     the Christmas symbol ever seen:
     the never-Fall, the evergreen,
the never-dying dies so we
     can celebrate, amidst our strife,
     the glory of a given life;
 
and underneath the Christmas tree,
     the gifts that everybody sees
     and wants to open early (“Please!”)
are purchased costly, given free;
     though so long in their boxes trapped,
     one morning they will be unwrapped!

We see all this and yet forget
     the Light who shone into our depths,
     the Ever-Life who died our death,
     the Giver of immortal breath,
the God who chose to pay our debt
before there was a Christmas yet.

---

This week’s visual art is José y Maria by Everett Patterson. This modern urban portrait of Joseph and Mary is crammed full of fun biblical allusions that are a delight to spot. But the reason I love this illustration is because it helps us encounter afresh the shocking fact—to which we can become so jaded—that God chose to be born to a poor, marginalized family on the fringes of empire. It is too easy to romanticize Joseph and Mary’s story, and I love how this illustration pushes against that tendency.

Everett Patterson - José y Maria (pen and paper, 2014).

Patterson created this piece during the Syrian refugee crisis, at a time when xenophobia was on the rise. He wanted to communicate in a fresh way that “Jesus was a refugee, a poor person with nowhere to lay his head.”

One thing I didn’t notice until Patterson explained it is that he “framed and composed [José y Maria] like a medieval illustration, with halos and the stilted postures of medieval paintings.” Kudos to Patterson for being the first and only person to use a giant “beef jerky” sticker as an iconographic halo! It’s an artistic move as profound as it is playful, reminding us that—in contrast to the shiny, sanitized nativity scenes we often see—God came (and still comes) to meet us (ordinary people!) in the messy reality of our everyday lives.

---

Notes

Thanks to Ekstasis Magazine for originally publishing my poem “Christmas Lights.”

You can buy prints of Everett Patterson’s José y Maria here.