Photo of the Day: Creche, St. Cecilia Church, Englewood NJ

Late yesterday afternoon, I, like so many other parishioners, lined up in front of this creche on the altar at my longtime church, St. Cecilia Roman Catholic Church in Bergen County, NJ, to take this photo.  

You will find the same image all over the world today, but those who go here feel a proprietary interest in beholding this—and those who have ever attended Mass here know exactly what I’m talking about.

Quote of the Day (G.K. Chesterton, on the Birth of Jesus as ‘Winter Fire for the Unfortunate’)

“Anyone thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.”—English man of letters and Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), The New Jerusalem (1920)

The image accompanying this post, Nativity, was created in 1603 by the Spanish Renaissance painter, sculptor and architect El Greco (1541-1614).

Quote of the Day (Thomas Merton, on ‘The Coming of Jesus’)

"We do not understand that this business about the crib is the real revolution that once and for all turned everything upside-down so that nothing has ever been, or can ever be, the same again. With the coming of Jesus, everything changes." —Thomas Merton, letter of December 20, 1962, in The Road to Joy: The Letters of Thomas Merton to New and Old Friends, edited by Robert E. Daggy (1989)

The image accompanying this post, The Nativity, was painted around 1644 by the French Baroque painter Georges de La Tour (1593-1652).

Photo of the Day: Nativity Scene, First Reformed Church of Nyack, NY

I came across this nativity scene on the front lawn of the First Reformed Church of Nyack, in Rockland County, N.Y. Originally built in 1836 and formally received into the denomination in 1838, the church is the oldest congregation in this picturesque village along the Hudson River.

Photo of the Day: Creche, St. John’s, Bergenfield NJ

I was driving around this afternoon, heading from one late-Christmas store purchase to another, when my eye was caught by the display you see here. This crèche scene was facing Washington Avenue, outside St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church, in Bergenfield, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

The sight pulled me up short, reminding me that this time of year should not be about the purchases but about a baby—but not just any baby—brought into a very dark world to light it with love, and to reunite the worlds of man and nature into a harmonious whole.

Quote of the Day (Joseph Brodsky, on the Nativity)

“Imagine the Lord, for the first time, from darkness, and stranded

Immensely in distance, recognising Himself in the Son

Of Man: homeless, going out to Himself in a homeless one.”—Joseph Brodsky, "Nativity Poem" (translated by Seamus Heaney) in Christmas at The New Yorker (2003)

This terracotta Nativity scene is part of the display in the Bavarian National Museum in Munich, Germany. It was crafted by Neapolitan sculptor Giuseppe Sanmartino (1720-1793).

Quote of the Day (Robert Cording, on How Jesus Will ‘Love Us in Our Weakness’)

“And will you intercede with sighs too deep for words

Because you love us in our weakness, because

You love always, suddenly and completely, what is

In front of you, whether it is a lake or leper.

Because you come again and again to destroy the God

We keep making in our own image. Will we learn

To pray: May our hearts be broken open. Will we learn

To prepare a space in which you might come forth,

In which, like a bolt of winter solstice light,

You might enter the opening in the stones, lighting

Our dark tumulus from beginning to end?”—Robert Cording, from “Advent Stanzas,” in The Best Spiritual Writing 2005, edited by Philip Zaleski (2005)

(The image accompanying this post is Nativity, a fresco from the early 1440s by Fra Angelica in San Marco, Italy.)