Thursday, December 24, 2009

A brief tenderness made eternal

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Giotto: The Nativity (1304-06)
Scrovegni Chapel, Padua

My best wishes to you for Christmas or whatever you may be celebrating. No words I can offer would match those of G.K. Chesterton. He wrote of the Nativity, in The Everlasting Man:
... There is a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story on human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a mere legend or the life of a great man. It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our minds to greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which are turned into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero-worship. It does not exactly work outwards, adventurously, to the wonders to be found at the ends of the earth.
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It is rather something that surprises us from behind, from the hidden and personal part of our being; like that which can sometimes take us off our guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the poor. It is rather as if a man had found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is as if he found something at the back of his own heart that betrayed him into good.
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It is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush us and pass. It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness that is there made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion become a strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over something more human than humanity.
Eat, drink, be merry, give and receive. But take a moment to be thankful for the Light that has guided you to this time and place; the star you have followed, knowingly or not.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you, Rick, and a very merry Christmas to you and yours.

-J

Rick Darby said...

And to you, J.