Daily Nourishment for December 27, 2024: The Snow Lay on the Ground with Guidance from Lauren Winner
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 2 minutes
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes
Merry Christmas. Some of this week’s invitations will each respond to a Christmas carol or hymn. Today’s hymn is “The Snow Lay on The Ground.” Please read the words here. And listen here if you wish.
- Lauren
Pause.
Here is a 1929 image of snow by Kawase Hasui 川瀬 巴水. Gaze at it for two minutes, three, four. Allow your breath to slow as you gaze.
Where does your eye want to linger?
What surprises you about putting this image together with the hymn?
Prompt.
The nativity story according to the Gospel of St. Luke does not mention snow, or stars - but “The Snow Lay on the Ground” does, right there in the first line.
Like so many hymns, “The Snow Lay on the Ground” sings the church’s imagination of the story - it’s full details not there in the biblical text. Christians are always doing this - valuing not just the Scriptures, but also valuing the ways the church has embroidered the Scriptures over time. We especially have embroidered the Christmas story. In the church’s Christmas songs, we add to the nativity scene a little drummer boy who plays his best for the infant; we give the angels harps of gold; we sing our way to the bleak midwinter when frosty wind made moan - there’s no moaning wind in the Gospel according to St. Luke.
We add all these things because the birth of Jesus is one of our pivotal moments and pivotal moments attract all the energy we’ve got. Pivotal moments inspire us to a cornucopia of literary and musical and visual representation. And we add all these things becuase all these things, all this thing’d context — animals and harps and snow — constitute the very world Jesus comes into, thing’d himself; flesh himself.
His presence in the flesh world transfigures everything, and we want to represent in our hymns and our art how all the cosmos becomes centered upon the flesh of this one baby. “The Snow Lay on the Ground” begins with snow and stars because he’s born into an already adoring universe.
And the animals! The oxen and ass shared a roof with them - there are no oxen or asses in Luke’s account, though since at least the 4th century, the church has been placing them there. The animals show, again, that the entirety of the cosmos is recentered, refocused by the incarnation. It’s interesting, though, that it’s so often an ox and an ass - and maybe some birds. The hymn doesn’t say ‘all the animals of the vicinity’ shared a roof. Our hymn doesn’t sing us up any pigs—pigs with whom the prodigal son was living when he’d sunk to his lowest; pigs who figure in the biblical idiom for wastefulness (“cast your pearls before swine”). I don’t know of any swine at the manger, in any hymns, or snakes either for that matter. Jesus comes to heal the whole of the cosmos, but it is we who do the embroidering, and there are bits we we have a hard time embroidering in.
The hymn tells us, too, that Jesus is born into a family - it sings of his family and goes beyond Scripture in naming his grandmother, Anne, who is nowhere named in the Bible. We also get Jesus’ earthly father:
Saint Joseph, too, was by
To tend the Child;
To guard him, and protect
His mother mild;
That “too” is really revealing - “St. Joseph, too, was by.” It sounds like the hymn-writer really had to work at finding a way to mention Joseph and this was the best the writer could come up with. Joseph is at first given a typically feminine-scripted role - tending the child. That is, the hymn seems to be suggesting that this Jesus will not only come into and transform the cosmos, the stars and the snow and the oxen - Jesus will even, immediately, transform the social order; Jesus will undercut the things we think we know about, in this case, the roles men and women are supposed to play in the family. But then the hymn undercuts its own undercutting, next depicting Joseph doing something typically masculine, guarding and protecting. The hymn-writer can’t quite get there, just as the hymn writer can’t quite get to the pig. Jesus may upend the social order but we’re only halfway to figuring out what that upending means. Or maybe a quarter of the way.
Practice.
One: The “prompt” above suggests that “pivotal moments attract all the energy we’ve got. Pivotal moments inspire us to a cornucopia of literary and musical and visual representation.” What’s a pivotal moment in the Scriptures that attracts your energy and creative attention? What embroidery would you like to add to Scripture’s account? Or, what’s a pivotal moment in your family history and family lore that attracts your energy and creative attention? What embroidery would you like to add to the account you’ve received?
Two: The “prompt” suggests that, although God wants to heal everything, we falter - we are unable to embroider into the story of healing those things we find most repugnant. How do you respond to that suggestion? What might you have trouble embroidering in?
Three: Write your own poem or hymn that embroiders the Gospel of Luke’s nativity story.
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Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Lauren Winner. Lauren Winner is a writer, professor, Episcopal Priest, & spiritual director.
Read Lauren’s full bio here.
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