The Lower Right Hand Corner of Our Lives

The Nativity of the Lord – Midnight

Isaiah 9:1-6 / Psalm 89:4-5, 16-17, 27, 29 / Titus 2:11-14 / Luke 2:1-14

The Lower Right Hand Corner of Our Lives

A few years ago, Richard Temple wrote an insightful article for Parabola magazine on a painting by Bruegel the Elder: Census at Bethlehem (1566). The painter offered his contemporaries insight into the events surrounding the birth of Jesus, and their own response to those events. Reflecting on the painting might also help us gauge our own response as we celebrate this feast of Christmas.

Temple points out that when we first look at the painting, we might not think its theme is religious at all. Bruegel’s sixteenth century Holland landscape features villagers going about their daily business. There are many people around an innkeeper anxiously waiting to make arrangements for a room; others in the background cross a frozen lake with heavy loads on their backs while still others play or work at their chores. In their routine they seem oblivious to what's going on in the lower right hand corner of the scene: a pregnant woman has arrived on a donkey led by her husband, but no one seems to notice.  

Bruegel’s message might be even more timely for us today than it was for the people of the sixteenth century. In twenty-first century America he might have painted a mall and a busy highway in the background, and an airport crowded with taxiing airplanes, arriving and departing. 

In the midst of so much hustle and bustle, will we be lulled into a state of unawareness? It's so easy to get caught up in the everyday things of our lives and miss the presence of Christ coming to us in very simple ways. We're bombarded with commercial messages of people who are understandably trying to make a living as merchants; trying to do what is reasonable to them; trying to do what they've always done. And that's the temptation at Christmas — to get drawn into business as usual — even holiday business as usual — the meal, the guests, the decorations, the gifts.

But the good news of Christmas isn't about hustle and bustle. Nor is it about the special fanfare, as Bruegel shows us by omitting the “angels we have heard on high” and the glitter and flash of Christmas trees and decked-out holly. Temple says that Bruegel invites us to ask a simple question: Am I the innkeeper? Am I so busy with the commerce of Christmas that I miss the promised child? Am I so busy playing host to others that I miss the one who wants to host me? Am I so busy with good intentions of gift-giving, that I miss the gift that God offers me in Jesus?

·         Sometime this Christmas Day – maybe this is it – take a quiet moment to step away from the festivities, and divert your attention from the guests and gifts to the “lower right hand corner” of your life, and notice the Virgin with child.  Come, let us adore him.