John W. Lynch: "The Cross and the Crib"
Introduction
John W. Lynch, S.M. (1904-1970) was a priest, poet, and author; he lived and served in New York. His most famous work is a long poem about Mary, A Woman Wrapped in Silence (1941), which I discussed in an article years ago ("Expanding the Narratives of Scripture"). He wrote many other poems, which seem to be mostly scattered in journals and newspapers, or stuffed into his prose books, as well as a long poem on the life of Christ, This Little While, a companion to A Woman Wrapped in Silence. (A portion of This Little While, "The Crucifixion," can be found here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).
Among his prose works are Bernadette: The Only Witness, The Deed of God, and Hourglass: Stories of a Measured Year. This last book is a mixture of short reflections, poems, and stories loosely arranged across the course of the Church year. Below is one of those reflections, on the connection of the Nativity and the Passion, a theme that is one of my favorites.
The Cross and the Crib
John W. Lynch, S.M.
One of the good things about a cold, blustery day is that, hurrying for home at supper time, you are grateful, having made it, for warmth and lights and the smell of cooking. On this particular day, in addition to the steaming pans on the back of the stove, the housekeeper had been busy about the Christmas pine and the evergreens. The little figures of the saints on the mantelpiece were banked with branches, with a poinsettia valiant in the midst. It is surprising how much of Christmas in these northern climes is in the care for proper decoration. The season begins when the first wreath is hung. This instinct of preparation, of course, is very Catholic and leads eventually, and in climax, to gold vestments and laces and boughs swung in a sanctuary for a Midnight Mass. We need not, at the moment, go far into that, but only say that by some chance a wooden crucifix on the wall also was made ready for Christmas. That had been decorated too.
A single branch of pine, convex in shape and large enough to spread above and below, had been fastened as a background for the cross. Three or four red berries hung on the green needles and altogether it looked like heraldry, as if the branch were a shield with the cross emblazoned on it to make an emblem. The arrangement recalled pictures of one of those wayside shrines in Bavaria or the Tyrol where the crucifix is covered by a narrow, slanting roof and snow has fallen. There was no peaked roof over this crucifix and we did not have snow in the room, even for Christmas, but there was a sense of innocence, a sense of the Faith about the combination of the branch and the berries and the cross that suggested a shrine in a land where the Church is old and beloved as a daily presence.
When you think of it, this is the Crucifixion seen against the distant background of Bethlehem. As if, on that fateful Friday, a wreath had been hung on the crossbar; as if carols were sung against the thunder; and as though angels had come again and choired of peace and men of good will over Calvary. The crucifix is a stark symbol, and you think of sins and failure and the summons to penance when you see it, but with the Christmas pine behind it, somehow it was softened and lightened.
The Crucifixion against the vision of Bethlehem! As if among the soldiers, shepherds had returned. As if an ox had wandered up that hill. As if Joseph were here, and as if Mary, full of grace, had kept with her a lullaby from the night of the Star and had brought it here with her in the pain; as if the sharp joy and the ecstasy and the wonder of the Crib had been preserved, and she held them now in her grief, like a light, like a center of light shining here in the great darkness. As if part of the strength that let her be at the Cross was the memory of the bliss of His infant face; as if His Birth supported her for His Death.
We do not know, and certainly we must not strain the sense of the Scripture, but it is written of her that “she kept all these things, pondering them in her heart,” and might we not think that she never forgot the Midnight even at that dense and overwhelming midnight of mid-afternoon? That she could endure His scars for memory of “the swaddling clothes”? He spoke to her on Calvary, and the word He said to John is the word we claim and hold with John, but which He gave to her as her own. “Son, behold thy mother.” That in His word, Bethlehem was implicit, summoned now, and offered for a comfort? That she remembered gold and frankincense and myrrh when He had come to His last and utter poverty?
But the Christmas branch behind the cross does tell one thing certainly which Mary knew and which the Church has been teaching ever since. Both of these moments, the silent night and the quaking April day were made by the strange and eternal love of God for mankind. The crib and the Incarnation were prelude to the cross; the Redemption and Calvary are conclusion for Bethlehem. The promise of the one spoken by the angels is fulfilled in the other when He said: “It is finished.”
Long before, a prophet had linked them both in God’s meaning: “I know the thoughts that I think of thee; yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love.”
A single branch of pine, convex in shape and large enough to spread above and below, had been fastened as a background for the cross. Three or four red berries hung on the green needles and altogether it looked like heraldry, as if the branch were a shield with the cross emblazoned on it to make an emblem. The arrangement recalled pictures of one of those wayside shrines in Bavaria or the Tyrol where the crucifix is covered by a narrow, slanting roof and snow has fallen. There was no peaked roof over this crucifix and we did not have snow in the room, even for Christmas, but there was a sense of innocence, a sense of the Faith about the combination of the branch and the berries and the cross that suggested a shrine in a land where the Church is old and beloved as a daily presence.
When you think of it, this is the Crucifixion seen against the distant background of Bethlehem. As if, on that fateful Friday, a wreath had been hung on the crossbar; as if carols were sung against the thunder; and as though angels had come again and choired of peace and men of good will over Calvary. The crucifix is a stark symbol, and you think of sins and failure and the summons to penance when you see it, but with the Christmas pine behind it, somehow it was softened and lightened.
The Crucifixion against the vision of Bethlehem! As if among the soldiers, shepherds had returned. As if an ox had wandered up that hill. As if Joseph were here, and as if Mary, full of grace, had kept with her a lullaby from the night of the Star and had brought it here with her in the pain; as if the sharp joy and the ecstasy and the wonder of the Crib had been preserved, and she held them now in her grief, like a light, like a center of light shining here in the great darkness. As if part of the strength that let her be at the Cross was the memory of the bliss of His infant face; as if His Birth supported her for His Death.
We do not know, and certainly we must not strain the sense of the Scripture, but it is written of her that “she kept all these things, pondering them in her heart,” and might we not think that she never forgot the Midnight even at that dense and overwhelming midnight of mid-afternoon? That she could endure His scars for memory of “the swaddling clothes”? He spoke to her on Calvary, and the word He said to John is the word we claim and hold with John, but which He gave to her as her own. “Son, behold thy mother.” That in His word, Bethlehem was implicit, summoned now, and offered for a comfort? That she remembered gold and frankincense and myrrh when He had come to His last and utter poverty?
But the Christmas branch behind the cross does tell one thing certainly which Mary knew and which the Church has been teaching ever since. Both of these moments, the silent night and the quaking April day were made by the strange and eternal love of God for mankind. The crib and the Incarnation were prelude to the cross; the Redemption and Calvary are conclusion for Bethlehem. The promise of the one spoken by the angels is fulfilled in the other when He said: “It is finished.”
Long before, a prophet had linked them both in God’s meaning: “I know the thoughts that I think of thee; yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love.”
Source: John W. Lynch, Hourglass: Stories of a Measured Year (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952), 7-9.
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