Carrots for Michaelmas

Cultivating a Catholic family through literature, liturgical living, and urban homesteading

Follow Carrots!

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Home
  • About
    • About Haley
    • Advertise
    • Privacy
  • My Books
    • The Grace of Enough
    • The Literary Medicine Cabinet
    • Liturgical Year eCookbooks
  • Faith & Liturgical Living
    • Our Conversion Story
    • Catholicism
      • Saints
        • St. Anne
        • St. Anthony of Padua
        • St. Anthony of the Desert
        • St. Benedict of Nursia
        • St. Brigid
        • St. Dominic
        • St. Joachim
        • St. Lucy
        • St. Patrick
        • St. Scholastica
      • Christian Year
        • Advent
        • Christmas
        • Epiphany
        • Lent
        • Mardi Gras
        • Easter
  • Family & Homesteading
    • Birth
    • Children
    • DIY
    • Finances
    • Homeschooling
    • Marriage
    • NFP
    • Our Home
  • Bookishness
    • Blog
    • Book Lists
  • Fashion
  • Podcast
    • Episodes
  • Speaking

The Incarnation and the Pietá

December 21, 2015 By Haley 8 Comments

Welcome to Carrots! I'm so glad you're here. This is where I share thoughts on liturgical living, faith, parenting, culture, and an extra dose of Jane Austen. You can sign up for my email newsletter here to stay in touch, or look me up on Instagram!

Welcome to Carrots! I'm so glad you're back. You can sign up for my email newsletter here to stay in touch, or look me up on Instagram!

The Incarnation of Christ, celebrated in the liturgical season of Christmastide, takes on a richer significance for me with each passing year. The story of the Nativity is fuller–but undeniably stranger. It loses the saccharine quality of greeting cards and becomes complicated. Christmas becomes more intricately connected to Holy Week and I’m reminded that the miracle of the Incarnation isn’t merely that Our Lord was born as a human on the very earth I walk on, but that He came in order that He might die.

The wooden manger foreshadows the wooden Cross where His life will be extinguished. The joyful songs of angels at Our Lord’s birth precede the agony of the heavenly hosts at his Death. The wise men bring myrrh–perfumed ointments for funeral preparations–to point to Our Lord’s true purpose in visiting this planet. The ecstasy the Blessed Virgin must have experienced when she first beheld Him brings to mind her unrivaled suffering as she watched His torturous Passion. It is all one. It is all connected—God’s unfathomable love and sacrifice for humanity.

In some artistic renderings of the Nativity scene (I have Giuseppe Vermiglio’s Nativity and Adoration of the Shepherds in mind), there is a strange image included in the stable. It is a lamb, but not a cuddly creature watching and adoring the precious Baby Jesus. It is a lamb with its legs bound: the sacrificial lamb that will be taken to slaughter. It reminds us, as St. John the Baptist does, that when we see the Christ Child, we are beholding the Lamb of God, Who will carry our sins to the Cross.

I had a strange experience at the Christmas Mass this year. We sang this beautiful hymn:

What child is this, who, laid to rest,

On Mary’s lap is sleeping?

Whom angels greet with anthems sweet,

While shepherds watch are keeping?

This, this is Christ the King,

Whom shepherds guard and angels sing:

Haste, haste to bring him laud,

The babe, the son of Mary.

In the past, this song has always evoked an idyllic image of the Infant Christ, contentedly snoozing in his Mother’s arms. But when I heard the words this year, I did not think of Bethlehem; instead, I saw Golgotha. I saw a grieving Mother Mary cradling the dead body of Our Lord. I saw the Pietà, Michelangelo’s masterpiece that cries out in its sorrow and beauty, Behold, God’s love for you.

The Incarnation and the Pieta

The Nativity isn’t cute. It isn’t clean. The God of the Universe is born among animal dung, right in the thick of humanity’s filth. He comes to give up everything, including his very life. But it is an undeniably beautiful scene because it is an image of God’s unwavering love.  His coming is the moment that all creation has waited for, with tears and groaning, like a woman in labor. Everything hinges upon it.

Perhaps if we did not suffer, we could see the Nativity as merely heart-warming and leave it at that. But in this our exile, we grasp at the truth of the Incarnation. We cling to the Cross, where our Savior’s arms are outstretched, and He cries out, “Behold, God’s love for you.” And this most grotesque and most beautiful of all images, the Crucifixion, is what makes the Incarnation our source of hope. The true King has come to offer Himself as a sacrifice for us: To heal what is broken and to set all things right. His sacrifice, his death, becomes his triumph and our salvation. Take heart, I have overcome the world. And knowing that, we can sing “Joy to the World” with full hearts.

A version of this post can be found in our liturgical year book of recipes and reflections: Feast! Real Food, Reflections, and Simple Living for the Christian Year

Related Posts

None

Filed Under: Catholicism, Christian Year, Christmas, Faith & Liturgical Living Tagged With: christian year, Christmas, incarnation, liturgical year, the pieta

Comments

  1. Christie says

    December 21, 2015 at 6:30 pm

    Streaming tears, now I’m holding my little baby and imagining him being sacrificed and it’s really hitting home that that’s how Mary felt. 🙁 Thank God death isn’t the end!!

    Reply
  2. Angela says

    December 21, 2015 at 11:13 pm

    What a well written post. I so appreciate you making this point. Thank you!

    Reply
  3. Alicia says

    December 22, 2015 at 1:05 am

    Beautiful. Your thoughts are what I try not to think about because I wasn’t able to put it into words. Thanks for bringing the life of Christ to your readers.

    Reply
  4. Melanie says

    December 22, 2015 at 6:44 pm

    Deep thoughts
    Worthy of dear Flannery

    Reply
  5. Anna says

    December 22, 2015 at 7:59 pm

    Thank you for putting words to this – I’ve been reflecting along the same lines this Advent. I’ve been having a hard time thinking of Christmas as the birth of a little baby, because I’m grieving the loss of my own babies. But I can find joy in His birth because His incarnation and his passion, death, and resurrection opened heaven for my babies. And I am so thankful for that.

    Reply
  6. Ashley says

    December 27, 2015 at 12:10 pm

    This is beautiful. I think of the swaddling cloths as a foreshadowing of his burial cloth and of Our Lady laying the Christ Child to rest in the manger in the stable-cave as a foreshadowing of His being laid to rest in death in the tomb-cave. And yet the ending is all the more glorious in the later story.

    Reply
  7. Michael says

    December 28, 2015 at 4:38 pm

    Wow…great post! As a Catholic seminarian, well done! I never thought of the Pieta as a juxtaposition of Mary holding her Son as she did in the manger scene. Great connection. Goosebumps throughout reading the article. Thanks!

    Reply
  8. Hannah says

    December 31, 2015 at 12:25 am

    Toward your meditation on the Nativity/Passion – a gripping, mournful Christmas Carol, the Fayrfax Carol (music by Thomas Ades):
    https://youtu.be/78pJF5MN-HU
    ‘A, my dere, a, my dere Son,’
    Seyd Mary, ‘A, my dere;
    A, my dere, a, my dere Son,’
    Seyd Mary, ‘A, my dere;
    Kys thy moder, Jhesu,
    Kys thi moder, Jhesu,
    With a lawghyng chere.’

    This endurs nyght
    I sawe a syght
    All in my slepe:
    Mary, that may,
    She sang lullay
    And sore did wepe.
    To kepe she sought
    Full fast aboute
    Her Son from colde;
    Joseph seyd, ‘Wiff,
    My joy, my lyff,
    Say what ye wolde.’
    ‘Nothyng, my spowse,
    Is in this howse
    Vnto my pay;
    My Son, a Kyng
    That made all thyng,
    Lyth in hay.’
    ‘My moder dere,
    Amend your chere,
    And now be still;
    Thus for to lye,
    It is sothely
    My Fadirs will.
    Derision,
    Gret passion
    Infynytly, infynytely,
    As it is fownd,
    Many a wownd
    Suffyr shall I.
    On Caluery,
    That is so hye,
    Ther shall I be,
    Man to restore,
    Naylid full sore
    Vppon a tre.’

    The Fayrfax Carol
    Words: Early Tudor, Anon.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Contact

haley@carrotsformichaelmas.com

Sign Up for My Newsletter!

More ideas about celebrating the liturgical year, free printables, great links I love, and more of the Carrots family in your inbox!



Welcome! I’m Haley Stewart, a bookish mama of four and wife to a beekeeper. Writer, speaker, podcaster, and Catholic convert. Homeschooling, bacon-eating, and bright red lipstick-wearing Jane Austen aficionado. My first book, The Grace of Enough: Pursuing Less and Living More in a Throwaway Culture is available now!

All rights reserved. ©Haley Stewart Unauthorized usage and duplication of text and images without the express permission of Haley and Carrots for Michaelmas is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links to posts may be used as long as clear credit is given to Haley/Carrots for Michaelmas.
Follow on Bloglovin
follow us in feedly

Recent Posts

  • Let’s Support Pregnant Moms and Babies!
  • My New Book! Jane Austen’s Genius Guide to Life
  • Let’s go to the UK this summer!
  • Join me in supporting Haitian women!
  • Big Life Changes for the Stewarts!

Archives

Disclosure

Some links found in my posts are affiliate links. If you make a purchase through an affiliate link, I will receive a percentage of the sale at no additional cost to you. Thank you for helping me support my family and keep the lights on here at Carrots! Haley Stewart is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.
Privacy Policy

Copyright Carrots for Michaelmas © 2023 · Design and Development by Santa Clara Design · Log in