In this season of our Sun’s death and rebirth, may you be “wound/ With mercy round and round/ As if with air/” Gerard Manley Hopkins (1883)

Featured image: About 700 prehistoric cave paintings—strung along about 1 1/2 miles of wall in the Magura Cave, Bulgaria—include an annual sun-moon calendar from the Bronze Age that—via carbon dating of the bat guano out of which it was created—archeologists dated back to ca 7,000 years ago. Flanking the calendar, human figures salute the sunrise on the morning of  the winter solstice. The paintings were discovered by Italian archeologist Marco Marelli, director of the Museum of Planetary Sciences in Prato, Italy in 2005 but his team decided to reveal their find only in 2016 in order to minimize damage and/or vandalism before access could be better controlled. 

The joy that I usually feel during this winter solstice season is somewhat damped this year by my ongoing angst about the self-grasping and non-sharing culture that pervades our country—and much of the world—during this sad time in our history. Browsing the art magazine to which I subscribe, I was further unmoored by the latest street mural by the anonymous British artist and activist who calls himself “Banksy”: on December 21st ( the day after the winter solstice) he stenciled two bundled-up children lying down and stargazing “on the roof of” a row of garages on a quiet cobblestoned street in the “affluent London neighborhood of Bayswater.” The image is a reference to the estimated 102,000 unhoused children currently residing in temporary accommodations in the city out of a population of 9 million. That is, one child in every 50 residents of the capital city are not permanently housed. 

What are the children were watching? Stars? Santa’s sleigh? Missiles and drones? The Star in the East? (Jozanne Rabyor, Hyperallergic comments.)

Closer to home,  an estimated 154,000 unhoused children currently reside in temporary accommodations in New York City, in the city out of a population of 8 million. That is approximately the same ratio of homeless children as in the city of London: one NYC child in every 50 NYC residents. A community funded mural by lead artist Craig Anthony Miller brought the entire school of P.S. 257 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, out to paint a mural despite no funding from NYC Public Schools. (86% of students at P.S. 257 are identified as low-income, significantly higher than the citywide average of 60%.) Miller was the lead artist of the project, in which all ca 575 Pre-K through 5th grade students as well as some parents and volunteers participated.

Closer my home in Salt Lake City, unhoused statistics are still “only” 56% of the national average.  Nevertheless, statewide over 600 children currently do not have permanent housing. The majority of unhoused people are in Salt Lake City.  Although the numbers are lower than in the rest of the country, no child or adult or veteran or old person or person with disabilities (to name a few of the disproportionate afflicted residents of Utah) should ever be non-securely housed amid the material abundance of the United Sates.  My years of social advocacy does not include nearly enough time and effort toward people who lack the major life comfort of a safe, a warm place to sleep and enough food and other material goods to live in the kind of dignity we all desire. What would the god born in a temporary shelter, commonly used for animals, say about the regrettable state of housing for all in the cities of the world? “Me, too. Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20).

Four centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus, Ethiopian King Ezana embraced Christianity in the kingdom of Aksum, beginning the diffusion of the new religion’s beliefs and art throughout the Horn of Africa. Virgin and Child in Manger, from a Psalter, Ethiopia, 15th century. Ink and pigments on parchment with wooden boards.

What would the god born in a manger say about US churches that this year display nativity scenes that protest against the immigration raids and deportation conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement currently so devastatingly practiced in our country? What would Jesus think about, for example, the nativity display outside the St. Susanna Church in Dedham, Massachusetts? It features an empty manger with a sign saying “ICE was here,“ which suggests that immigration authorities detained Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. A secondary sign states, “the holy family is safe in our church,” inviting people to call a number if they see immigration agents. removed the Holy Family. What would the politically incorrect Jesus—the Jesus who challenged the religious establishment by driving the moneylenders out of the temple—what would this Jesus say about the Boston Archdiocese’s scathing opinion that “the scene should be removed and the manger restored ‘to its proper sacred purpose'”?

“The birth of Jesus in the feeding trough of a humble animal shelter remains inherently political,” says Ed Simon, Public Humanities Special Faculty, Dept of  English, Carnegie (“The Egalitarian Vision of Nativity Scenes“). “It reveals not just the paradox of a god embodied in an earthly baby but the radical truth of equality inherent in the Christian god choosing to enter the world in marginalized circumstances, thereby declaring the sacred dignity of all human beings and our moral obligations to one another.” The earliest art example of “divine births” was discovered in the same cave that held the solar calendar -and sun-saluting depictions mentioned above. This wall painting consists of  a lion with its head worn away (at the top), a horned deerlike animal (at  bottom right) and a female- and a male figure in the middle, with an infant floating above (between the couple),  A star is placed east of the male figure’s pointing fore-arm. In contemporary rock art from the same area, birth is linked to the sky and death associated with Earth, particularly its nether regions. Remarkably, this “nativity” was painted in red ochre 3,000 years before the events of the gospels. Continues Morelli, “No hypothesis of direct influence needs to be posited — such themes are simply in our collective unconscious.”

Even in its most basic forms, the birth of a god subverts hierarchies; it is a mystical statement about the relationship between the sacred and the profane expressed by poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in the title of this post: the “mercy round and round/ As if with air/…world-mothering air/ Nestling me everywhere” (“The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe,” 1883). Elsewhere in the poem, Hopkins writes these lines about the Virgin Mary: [ She]…

Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy.

In other words, the infinite and eternal Christian god voluntarily became the infant, Jesus,  through Mary’s womb. She didn’t just give birth; she contained the divine within a human boundary, making god’s boundless grace accessible in the same way that air is invisible, yet accessible to humans for breathing.

The Milky Way, with which I grew up in South Africa, is associated with the Egyptian Milky Way Goddess Nut. The Greek author Plutarch wrote that Nut could give birth to new gods only on the last five days of the year. That is, just after the winter solstice. During one of those time slots, she gave birth to Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, Seth, and Horus the Falcon, the spiritual liaison, the “mercy,” between the pharaohs and the sun god Re.

Murals of Nut show her body covered with stars and bent over in the shape of an arch, her legs imitating the two southern “legs” of the Milky Way intersecting with the southeast horizon. She is held aloft by her father, Shu, and is arched over Geb, her brother the Earth god. On the right, the setting sun sails down her arms towards the outstretched arms of Osiris, who will regenerate the sun in the netherworld during the night. Accordingly, Nut is responsible for the birth of the sun every day of the year. On the left, the rising sun (the falcon-headed god Re) sails up Nut’s legs.

How, then, can I leave a more palatable taste ion your tongue after force-feeding you with my depressing concerns about the loveless state of our culture? To achieve that, I have to return to Hopkins’s idea of a “mercy” that surrounds us like air. For the new year heralded by this solstice season, I wish you access to whatever “mercy” that still surrounds you in the form of the people who love you and even the strangers who wish you “Happy Holidays” without knowing the state of your politics or the turmoil in your heart. I wish you the strength and opportunity to pass that forward the “mercy”—the spiritual liaison between you and the god of your own convictions—to breathe its light and love into the air. We are in dire need of it, the Light of the sun, or, as many of you might say, the Light of the Son.

Let’s all be good. Santa is watching!