A VERY Happy Christmas to all my readers.
Thanks for checking in from time to time. I will endeavour to be a better poster in 2017!
But in the meantime, here is some food for sight and thought.
Christ Child, by Mike Chapman (1999) in the entrance portico to St Martin in the Fields, off Trafalgar Square, London
I love this sculpture and have photographed it many times in different lights. He is carved out of the top of a huge block of Portland stone and somehow pulses with the wonder of a brand new life, with his umbilical cord still intact. It reminds us that we are talking about an earthy and solid moment – a moment when (if I can put it like this) God Got Biological!
That was a monumental event – a cosmic event if ever there was one. And yet, a moment of acute fragility and human dependence.
One of the greats, John Donne, put it so well. I come back to these lines every Christmas (from his Holy Sonnet XV).
‘Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.
This sculpture always stops me short – confronting me with that wonderful truth that truly defies all language: the Word became flesh.
