Back when I started doing this semi-official semi-regular piece I explained that it was because I, like a magpie, can tend to flit from shiny thing to shiny thing and sometimes be distracted by a particularly enthralling glimmer.
It’s Advent now, what I like to think of as “real Christmas” and that’s the season of shiny.
Why do I call this “real Christmas”? What kind of blasphemy is that? Well, because I realised three or four years ago that Christmas Day is too small to hold all of what is wonderful about this whole ‘holiday season’ and that I love spending a month and a half surrounded by twinkling lights, rich burgundy and gold. I love that month and a half of listening to _Past Three O’Clock_ and _Veni, Imanuel_. The whole thing is shiny.
Oh, and speaking of my shiny mind, I’ve had a conviction lately. Convictions are maybe too serious for Friday, but I’m putting it out there because I really want all the minds that play with me here to offer me input. (Indiana girl that I am almost always spells that word “imput”.) Anyway, after prayerful consideration I’ve decided that I’ll no longer put up a Nativity Scene in my home. It struck me awhile ago that I can’t get past the fact that the Nativity Scene is a straight up likeness of things that are in heaven above. How is baby Jesus not a graven image? I thought about keeping everybody else up but then it seems eerie and too spot on to have a nativity scene with an empty creche. Passersby (there are a lot of people traipsing through my house?) would be able to make a point about how I had literally taken “the Christ out of Christmas.” So there’s that. Anyway, There’s that deep thought. [ETA: I’m moving this up from the comments because I realise in my quest to have 500 words I omitted some things that need to be said aloud.
For years I’ve been of the opinion that the Nativity Scene is a better decoration, a more holy decoration, because it depicts the Holy Family and isn’t just poinsettias. So I’m realising that in my own heart I turned the nativity scene into a sort of idol and that I was letting the ersatz Christ doll take the place of actual Christ in my approach to the world. So, hence, my conviction. But it certainly isn’t something I can apply across the board.
This isn’t so deep a thought but I want to get back into “it’s Friday, don’t go rolling in the deep” attitude. Let’s take a vote, shall we? Like all votes I take here, this is not designed to elicit comments. Rather it is designed for you to just say outloud “I vote This Way” and we’ll let the Jungian Field take over. You can leave a comment if you want, but I’m not into that whole History Textbook thing. I really to this day hate my World History textbook from my Junior year. Any text book that can make the real life Game Of Thrones story boring is just evil and dull and evildull. And I will forever associate questions at the end of a text passage with that goodforesaken mess. So anyway. What were we voting on again? Right. Do you think Henry VIII wrote Greensleeves? It was my favourite Christmas song for years as a child–maybe because it was one I could play decently on the piano–and I loved the fact that the writer was anonymous. When I grew up and found out that people think it’s not really anonymous but Fat Wifekiller being uncharacteristically modest I was by turns intrigued and disappointed. I also wonder what the heck kind of weird kid I was. My other favourite song was The Battle Hymn Of The Republic. Shiny.
My creche is an ingathering of all to All. I’ll take a pic and send it to you when we put it up and you can see what you think about whether it’s a graven image or a meditation on the power of Love. (Or just a whimsical custom we started when Chloe was a tot and wanted Elmo to come to see the Baby Je-Beezus.
I’d love to see a picture. And I’m needing to also make clear that this is my belief for myself based on my own understanding and not anything that I’m going to go around yelling about when other people do it. Because I think that perhaps the “graven imageness” of it is not in the image itself but in how one personally approaches that image.
For years I’ve been of the opinion that the Nativity Scene is a better decoration, a more holy decoration, because it depicts the Holy Family and isn’t just poinsettias. So I’m realising that in my own heart I turned the nativity scene into a sort of idol and that I was letting the ersatz Christ doll take the place of actual Christ in my approach to the world. So, hence, my conviction. But it certainly isn’t something I can apply across the board. While I want to see a picture of your nativity scene just because, I’m not going to say “you have a graven image.”
I love my Nativity scene because it’s one of the few things I have that my grandma gave me. But my children, when they were babies, always stole the baby Jesus and lost him. If I replaced the baby, it would happen again. Therefore, we’ve almost always had an empty manger.
With no history to back me up at all–I’m going to just say “NO!” Of course Henry didn’t write it. It doesn’t fit at all with him, his style, etc.
If you follow the graven image logic, then I take it you don’t like pictures of Jesus either? Or any other material representation of Jesus?
I just had a conversation similar to this on Wednesday so I am curious about your thoughts.
I grew up Anabaptist; they’re very adamantly against Crucifixes and other visual representations of Christ. But for some reason–you may remember–my parents had that Sallman’s Head Of Christ picture* hanging at the top of our stairs. They tend to be less strict about it than I do, obviously. I assume they meant it as a visual statement that Christ was part of our home, but it always struck me as being wrong.
It’s a weird issue because the 2nd commandment doesn’t prohibit against art, but against making visual representation of Holy things for the purposes of worship because it tends to focus our human mind on the finite visual instead of the Infinite Mystery. It’d be like a man who fell in love with the picture of his wife in her early 20s and only loved that fantasy woman in his head, ignoring the real, vital, living woman by his side.
But Jesus is fully God and fully man so the case can be made logically that a depiction of Jesus is a depiction of the Man and therefore not against the commandment. Me, though, I find more and more as I get older that the pictures of “Jesus”, even the good ones like the Sallman Head Of Christ cause me to focus on that instead of the “pictures” of Jesus we get in the Bible. There’s that song “Behold The Man” which is a moving description of Jesus using the verses in Isaiah, and I find that I’m more moved to contemplate The Christ using that imagery than the pictures. But that’s me, where I’m at in my personal faith journey. I don’t think it’s a hill to die on and I don’t think others will see it my way, I don’t expect them to. I think God takes into consideration what is in a person’s heart.
*
http://www.warnersallman.com/collection/images/head-of-christ/
We’ve never used a Nativity scene at my home, although that has more to do with laziness / seasonal overload than any hard-thought principle.
re: Greensleeves, I sort of naively assumed it was written by Eric Knight.
Wait, what are we voting on? creches, or “Greensleeves”? I see that Wikipedia says no about Henry writing “Greensleeves,” and gives a convincing reason, but mostly I think that Henry being a creep isn’t relevant. I mean, Phil Spector and Ike Turner produced Tina Turner singing “River Deep, Mountain High,” and that’s one of the greatest records ever, and one of the greatest expressions of the sort of love that (ahem) neither one of them seems to have given the women in their lives.
I get what you’re saying about the Nativity scene, and I’ve had similar thoughts. However, for me, I feel like mine is just a reminder to slow down and remember what Christmas is all about. It also serves as a reminder to be thankful because I remember how I was fortunate enough to travel to Bethlehem and get it there. I feel like there is a difference between just having it on display and using it as an idol. Basically, I land on to each his own.