The Gospel of John in Pictures: John 1: Nathanael

I started writing about images depicting episodes from John's Gospel much earlier in the year.  Here is another.  Mark Cazalet's Nathaniel (asleep under the fig tree)* does and doesn't portray a visionary moment from John.  Philip, already a disciple of Jesus, persuades Nathanael to come with him to meet Jesus:

When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false.
How do you know me? Nathanael asked. Jesus answered, I saw you while you were still under the fig-tree before Philip called you.
Then Nathanael declared, Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.
Jesus said, You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig-tree. You shall see greater things than that.
He then added, I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.  John 1:47-51

Unlike Cazalet's painting the narrative doesn't suggest that Nathanael was asleep but perhaps what Cazalet's image is doing is intensifying and compressing into a single 'moment' some of the allusions already playing out in the narrative.  Jesus' statement about 'the angels of God ascending and descending' sends his readers back to Genesis 28:10-22 and Jacob's dream at Bethel of a stairway to heaven, with angels ascending and descending on it; in John's gospel Jesus himself is the stairway to heaven.  And perhaps by depicting Nathanael as asleep under the fig-tree, Cazalet gives us a visual reminder of sleeping Jacob, where the text of the gospel gives us a written one.

* The conditions of use of the The Methodist Church Collection of Modern Christian Art mean that I can't use the image directly within this blog but I hope that you'll follow the link and appreciate both this painting, and the many other beautiful things in the collection.

At the End of the Year

As this year draws to its end,
We give thanks for the gifts it brought
And how they became inlaid within
Where neither time nor tide can touch them.

from John O'Donohue, 'At the End of the Year', with thanks to TBH.

'Seeing' religious art

Some interesting discussion on The Guardian's Cif Belief pages at the moment responding to the question 'Do we need faith to see religious art?'  Here's a brief quote from Catherine Pepinster's response:

Is [religious art] really appreciated by those who don't believe? Can they fully understand it, indeed conceive of these other minds in another time and place where faith held sway?

That must depend on the extent to which the viewer can accept the possibility of the divine, or the existence of the religious impulse. I suspect that there is a growing tendency, for all Richard Dawkins's efforts, for people to accept that there is such an impulse.

Doom

Holidaying friends brought me back a postcard of The Wenhaston Doom, a C16 painting of resurrection and judgement:

Other people have written more knowledgeably about how this time-capsule from our mediaeval ancestors survived the protestant iconoclasm of the C17 under a coat of whitewash, emerging after a rainy night on a later restoration project to speak to us so eloquently of ways of thinking and worship now irrevocably lost.  My interest is in how this piece of art brings both a future, and the spiritual, into our present. 

It's a curious piece of social commentary that the rich - king & queen, cardinal and pope - are shown at the centre of the picture being welcomed into heaven.  The message from the painting to its mediaeval audience seems clear: those of high social status are righteous, and will inherit an eternal reward.  This view is supported by the Bible text beneath the picture from Romans 13:1-4

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.  Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.  For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended.  For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.

But perhaps the painting's message is more complex.  The four rich people are all naked, apart from their identifying headwear; under the trappings of prosperity, all humans are equal.  In its own time, and perhaps in ours too, a salutory reminder to those of us insulated from human suffering by prosperity and social status often derived from education or profession of how fragile these things are, and ultimately how meaningless.  For our society, increasingly divided by disparities between rich and poor, this painting reminds us of some essential equalities. 

Also interesting is how this painting externalises the consequences of how lives are lived.  Human beings are notoriously bad at evaluating the future consequences of present actions; in one of my past roles this was called 'optimism bias'.  There is no optimism bias in this picture, no hope of 'getting away with' a life lived with no understanding of the consequences of injustice commited in the present, no comfort that things will work out with our best interests preserved.

However warm the promised punishment for the wicked, this painting could just be viewed as cold comfort for those who suffer(ed) an impoverished present.  A future heavenly reward for the 'good' and a future hellish punishment for the 'bad' might offer the comfort of a changed perspective on current circumstances but little else of present benefit.  You can't eat this painting or its vision.  Material comfort came, and comes, not just from the painting itself but from the response it tries to provoke in those who I think are the real targets of its message.

This portrayl of judgement as a single point in the future should remind us, as perhaps it reminded those who saw this before it was hidden away, of the very real needs of our world and the ability of our actions now to influence this.  By bringing a future into our present, along with a spiritual dimension to our present lives, this painting reminds us of how far a response to its message of essential human equality could carry, with all its consequences of good towards those without a crown or a cardinal's beretta.

Encounters: story-telling.

Recently I've been thinking about story-telling in the last two chapters of John's Gospel, which strips out the 'cast' that populates the stories of Jesus' resurrection in the synoptic gospels to tell the story from the perspective of individual encounters between Mary Magdalene, John, Thomas and Peter, and the absent/present figure of Jesus.  Some paintings of some of these episodes help. 


Lavinia Fontana, Christ appears to Mary Magdalene c.1581

Fontana's painting gives us Mary's encounter from her perspective.  Mary arrives at the tomb to find the body of Jesus missing: 'she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.  He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”  Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”' (John 20:14-15)  In the narrative, Jesus is not dressed as a gardener, only mistaken for one; the painting takes us into Mary's world-view and her split-second moment of mis-identification.

In John's resurrection narrative Thomas is absent when Jesus' other disciples

Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas c. 1601-1602

see him, refusing to believe their story: "“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”  A week later, Jesus appears again, inviting Thomas: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” (John 20:25,27).  Caravaggio's picture shows this curiosity pushed to its limits.  As with Fontana's picture, so with Caravaggio, the artist imagines his way beyond the details of the story.  There is no indication that Thomas took Jesus up on his offer but it's clear that it's Thomas' searching doubt which becomes the focus of the picture, clear from the intensity of the gaze of the three disciples and the glow of the painting's light upon their curious faces.  Only Jesus remains fully in shadow: is he the least known? The least knowable?  Whilst his hands accept Thomas' investigation perhaps the shadow across his face implies that in the narrative of the painting, Jesus cannot be known by this investigation.  A visual depiction perhaps of Jesus' subsequent words to Thomas: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Following Jesus' encounters with Mary, and Thomas, the story continues with Jesus appearing to Peter and six other disciples, who are out on a fishing trip on Galilee.  Duccio's painting is itself a commentary on different ways of story-telling through painting.  The 'realistic' expressions on the faces of the disciples in a  

Duccio, Christ’s appearance on Lake Tiberias 1308-11 (Maesta Altarpiece)

painting whose composition is so stylised betray a shift away from an earlier style of painting which followed conventions about the portrayal of sacred things to allow pictures to act as 'signs' (icons) - directing their viewers towards sacred things.  For me this is a shift towards painting the sacred in terms of the everyday of the painter.  Just as Fontana gives us Mary's reality from John's story of Jesus' resurrection, so Duccio also uses his 'reality' to bring the sacred into the world we know; heaven in ordinarie.

With grateful thanks to my 'picture researcher', Sonia Mundey.

Something understood

A happy conjunction between gifts and experiences shared with close friends in this quote from Pete Rollin's book The Orthodox Heretic.  Whilst it speaks directly of a specific kind of activity, this could equally be broadened out to describe something of religious experience more widely - 'something understood' in the terms of the poem from which this blog takes its inspiration:

In academic life the said is often privileged over the saying. What is important is that meaning is communicated and, as such, the way it is communicated is important only insomuch as it gets the meaning across. Yet there are forms of communication that give emphasis to the saying over and above the said. 

An interesting example of this can be seen at work in the music of Sigur Ros, a band from Iceland that employs what they call “Vonlenska” (or “Hopelandic”) in many of their songs. “Vonlenska” sounds like a language, however it lacks consistent grammar, logical structure, meaningful syllables, and often even discrete words. When a song is sung in Vonlenska, the words that you hear do not “mean” anything; nothing is said in their saying. Yet the saying itself invites a change in the sensitive listener. In contemplating the music, one touches upon a deep resorvoir of emotion that emanates from the song. This mode of “communication” is similar to what we see taking place between an infant and its parents. The grammatical nonsense that is communicated by the infant to the parent and by the parent to the infant is a discourse in which nothing is said, but a connection is established or deepened.

When we are facing difficult situations is it not true that the pastoral act is not one that offers some explanation for the suffering (the said) but rather is found in the act of who who offers presence to the other in the form of words and gestures (the saying)? Here it is not an explanation that brings healing and comfort, but rather the fact that someone is interacting with us, the fact that someone loves us and stands with us…

…This is pastoral care at its most luminous.

I'd broaden this out, to argue that to describe this change, brought about by ordinary things - in this case - listening to music, is to describe religious experience itself.

Prayer Places

I'm a great admirer of the work of Tom Hunter whose beautiful photographs I first met through his Living in Hell series.  Re-discovering him this week I've found his Prayer Places works - in the light of current conversations about the nature of church such as my previous posting, I think these are worth contemplating in the light of Magdalene Keaney's commentary:

[Tom Hunter's photographs] also make me think about what a church is. How do they exist outside ritual, once a congregation, the community that defines and activates them, have left? Or perhaps they are not empty after all.

What is your Religion?

Discussion over the question in the 2011 Census: 'What is your Religion?', with arguments that this is a leading question which actively encourages people to tick a religious answer, have reminded me of this piece of dialogue regarding market research methods from the TV comedy Yes (Prime) Minister:

Sir Humphrey: "You know what happens: nice young lady comes up to you. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do you? So she starts asking you some questions: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a lack of discipline in our Comprehensive schools?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think they respond to a challenge?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?"
Bernard Woolley: "Oh...well, I suppose I might be."
Sir Humphrey: "Yes or no?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Of course you would, Bernard. After all you told you can't say no to that. So they don't mention the first five questions and they publish the last one."
Bernard Woolley: "Is that really what they do?"
Sir Humphrey: "Well, not the reputable ones no, but there aren't many of those. So alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result."
Bernard Woolley: "How?"
Sir Humphrey: "Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the growth of armaments?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think it is wrong to force people to take up arms against their will?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "There you are, you see Bernard. The perfect balanced sample."

There are more serious questions at stake - does a leading question lead to artifically inflated numbers of religious people in the UK, in turn create an unfair bias towards religous groups in the allocation of public services?  I suspect humanists and fundamentalists* alike might welcome a rooting out of 'true' as opposed to 'nominal' religous believers.

Whilst 'What would Jesus do?' is one of my own least favourite questions, closely followed by 'What would Jesus think?' I'm left wondering how this concern over religious identity squares with someone whose recorded teaching seems to resist the identification of following his teaching with membership of a religious organisation.  Jesus' teaching in the Gospels only explicitly mentions 'church' twice (Matthew 16:18; 18:15) and on both occasions what seems to be in mind is a much looser 'meeting' or 'congregation' of similarly commited people than a monolithic institution. 

*I'm using this word very precisely.

Lily Allen and the Bishop

The suggestion by the Bishop of Sheffield that Lily Allen's song 'The Fear' makes useful accompanying listening for a Bible-study course speaks into a 2,000 year old debate about Christians' attempts to ventriloquise secular or non-Christian cultural sources into speaking on matters of their faith. 

Paul famously tried this in a soap-box moment at the Aeropagus in Athens, quoting both Cretan philosopher Epimenides and the Cilician Stoic philosopher Aratus as speaking of the God known by Paul as a disciple of Jesus (Acts 17:28).  The narrative in Acts then takes Paul from Athens to Corinth, and there's the implication in one of the letters that Paul wrote to the church there that he'd reflected on the preaching technique used in Athens and (perhaps) rejected it as ineffectual:

When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.  For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.  My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.  (1 Corinthians 1:1-5)

Strictly speaking, the use of the song in the course is not because it consciously articulates Christian doctrine but rather (says the Bishop) because it captures "something of the spirit of the age", and Lily Allen has endorsed its use in this way. 

I'd have no blog if I didn't think that cultural artifacts spoke both into, and from, religious experience but it leaves me wondering about an uncritical approach to this, or at least to an attitude that would view such approaches with great skepticism.

Defying Gravity

I think my love of words is becoming apparent.  I hope it's just a harmless eccentricity, albeit one bordering on the pretentious (numinous? I mean, really?).  Much of this has to do with ambiguity, and the ability of a single word to carry multiple, and sometimes contradictory meanings.  The coining of new meanings creates new places for the imagination to play. 

'Gravity' is one of these words: first used in English in figurative senses, as in the quality of being grave or serious, its use in the physical (scientific) sense only came in the seventeenth century as in 'the attractive force by which all bodies tend to move towards the centre of the earth'.

In an imaginative space, the force becomes a metaphor for serious things, a (un)happy carrying of two sets of meanings in a single word.  Some examples would be the song 'Gravity is merciless', or Roger McGough's lament for a dying friend in his poem 'Defying Gravity':

Soon now, the man that I love (not the armful of bones)
Will defy gravity. Freeing himself from the tackle
He will sidestep the opposition and streak down the wing
Towards a dimension as yet unimagined.

Back where the strings are attached there will be a service
And homage paid to the giant yo-yo. A box of left-overs
Will be lowered into a space on loan from the clay.
Then, weighted down, the living will walk wearily away

Had they had access to this range of meanings the first Christians might have been happy with idea of the physical body as a 'box of leftovers' but probably less so with the idea that this was entirely dispensable.  For them, there was an intimate (but difficult to define) relationship between their present experience and their belief that Jesus' resurrection was an experience that they would share too:

But someone will ask, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?'  How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.  When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. (1 Corinthians 15:15-38)

So a single word can both define a measurable scientific reality and yet help us explore (using something we experience constantly) the unmeasurable territory of the inexorable passage of time into the future and the time-limited reality of our own mortality.  A love of words may be harmless, but it helps us in the serious business of living too, and as it's my blog, the last words on gravity are mine:

Ultrasound

I found you in my night sky
Picking out your constellation
Reminded by each single star
Of that moment
When all your future
Was crammed into a point of light

Coalescing towards me out of the dark
You will be caught
In my lifetime's gravity

Until this fades
And you spin away from my sky
Leaving my night starless

Seen / Unseen

In spite of some of my earlier posts I'm not always a fan of 'religious' or 'Christian' art, which can often be twee, or mawkish, or both.  Illustrating some of the narrative sections of the Bible can avoid some of these pitfalls, as in my posts on Elijah or the crucifixion of Jesus, but trying to depict some of the Bible's concepts can be more challenging.  Which is why I'm very fond of this photograph:

(Mary Gaston, Mystery & Ignorance, used with permission)

At first glance this both disturbs and baffles, creating a puzzle as we look at it.  Of course, this can and can't be read as a picture with a spiritual dimension and perhaps it's that level of uncertainty which creates the appeal for me.  If there's a link between this photograph and the Bible, I find it in words Jesus speaks:

"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." (John 3:8)

As in the picture, so in this statement, there are ways in which the unseen can become tangible, the spiritual part of our everyday lived experience.

A brief interlude on questions...

though truth and falsehood be
Near twins, yet truth a little elder is;
Be busy to seek her; believe me this,
He's not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best.
To adore, or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.
Yet strive so that before age, death's twilight,
Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night.
To will implies delay, therefore now do;
(John Donne, Satire III)

Zero Yorkshiremen

Others will comment more eloquently on the literary merits of The King James Bible - published 400 years ago - than I can.  It's true that the influence of its language has been widespread: how could the following piece of parody from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail be possible if the words and rhythms of the Authorised Version were not so well known:

LAUNCELOT: We have the Holy Hand Grenade [...]
ARTHUR: Consult the Book of Armaments! [...]
BROTHER MAYNARD: Armaments, chapter two, verses nine to twenty-one. [...]
SECOND BROTHER: And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade that, with it, Thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits in Thy mercy.' And the Lord did grin, and the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats and large chu--
MAYNARD: Skip a bit, Brother.
SECOND BROTHER: And the Lord spake, saying, 'First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then, lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.'

The Monty Python team were also famously responsible for the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, but it's a source of mischevious delight to me as a 'Southerner' living in exile in the North that neither Yorkshiremen nor indeed Northerners of any description had any significant influence on the language of the King James Bible:

[W]ith virtually no exceptions, the scholars assembled [by King James I] for the purpose of translating the Bible were based in the South of England [...] Northern forms of English made little, if any, impact on the translation.  Alister McGrath In The Beginning - The Story of the King James Bible

Mischief aside there's an interesting feature of the language of the King James Bible which the Monty Python parody (unintentionally?) emulates, and which brings it very much into the world of this blog.  The Authorised Version uses the Thou/Thee/Thy forms of address for both God speaking to people, and people speaking to God, as in the 'Lord's Prayer': Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. (Matthew 6:9)

The (singular) Thou/Thee/Thy form of address had been used in Mediaeval England amongst family members; the (plural form) Ye/You/Your as a mark of respect when addressing a social superior.  Whilst this distinction was slightly old-fashioned by the time the translators of the King James Version set to work it fascinates me that the translation made this familiar way of speaking to God, as though to a family member, a commonplace in our language.  A relationship with transcendence might beg a respectful form of address; in the language of the King James Bible, people speak to God as though to a family member.  Heaven in ordinary.

The insignificance of Jesus' crucifixion

Visual arts relish the crucifixion of Jesus: the courtroom drama of the trials, enormous crowds, the potential for enormous crosses silhouetted against a darkening sky - there can be moments of bathos too: who can forget the portly and aging John Wayne as the centurion at the foot of the cross in The Greatest Story Ever Told drawling "Surely this was the Son of Gaaaaaad"?

A lot of this visual drama may be mis-placed.  Crucifixions were commonplace enough in the early first century.  Following the death of Herod in 4 BC there were outbreaks of revolt throughout Judea. Varus, the Roman legate of Syria took two legions and brutally pacified the country, particularly in Galilee:

Upon this, Varus sent a part of his army into the country, to seek out those that had been the authors of the revolt; and when they were discovered, he punished some of them that were most guilty, and some he dismissed: now the number of those that were crucified on this account were two thousand.  (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 17.10.10)

Commonplace, and perhaps in easy public view: "those who passed by hurled insults at him" (Matthew 27:39). 

Odilon Redon's painting The Crucifixion strips out much of the over-dramatisation, depicting a moment of strange everyday intimacy which would only be possible without theatrics.  Mary, Jesus' mother, and his disciple John are shown by the cross in a painting of this moment:

When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, "Woman, here is your son", and to the disciple, "Here is your mother". From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.  (John 19:26-27)

The picture is not prescriptive; the lack of detail both leaves space for the imagination to play but also suggests, very subtly, something other-worldly.  For me this picture achieves with greater credibility something that more over-dramatic portrayals strive for but fail to deliver: the way that an ordinary public execution in a culture in which these were commonplace brought something heavenly into the lived experience of Christians. 

Finding Sanctuary

A perceptive friend bought me a copy of Abbot Christopher Jamison's book Finding Sanctuary: Monastic steps for Everyday Life as a Christmas gift.  This is, and isn't, 'the book' of the BBC TV programmes The Monastary and The Big Silence.   

The appeal of the book for me is in the way that it demonstrates the ability of ancient Christian traditions - in this case the 'Rule' (a set of practical guidelines, or 'disciplines') written by Benedict 1,500 years ago for communities of monks - to offer an antidote to what the book calls the 'busyness' of everyday life.  Whilst this antidote is accessible, it is not just another consumer product, Jamison writes:

You cannot mistreat people one moment and then find sanctuary the next.  Finding the sacred space begins with the recognition of the sacred in your daily living.

In the world of this blog this is 'heaven in ordinary' - finding the spiritual in the everyday.  In other words, the benefits of religion can't easily be divorced from the practical discipline of actually living it. One of the pieces of practical advice in achieving this which particularly resonated with me, given by Benedict in the Rule and quoted in the book, is:

You are not to act in anger or nurse a grudge.  Rid your heart of all deceit.  Never give a hollow greeting of peace or turn away when somebody needs your love.  Bind yourself to no oath lest it prove false, but speak the truth with heart and tongue.

The Ox, and Ass, and Lobster

All sorts of animals crowd into the Nativity story, as in this piece of dialogue from the film Love Actually:

Karen: So what's this big news, then?
Daisy: [excited] We've been given our parts in the nativity play. And I'm the lobster.
Karen: The lobster?
Daisy: Yeah!
Karen: In the nativity play?
Daisy: [beaming] Yeah, *first* lobster.
Karen: There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?
Daisy: Duh.

Or in the carol In the bleak midwinter:

Enough for Him, Whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, Whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Or in the mediaeval Latin text O magnum mysterium, often set to music, and for me most memorably by Morten Lauridsen:

o great mystery

and wondrous sacrament,

that animals should see the newborn Lord,

lying in a manger!

Blessed is the virgin whose womb was worthy

to bear our Lord Christ.  Alleluia!

Lord, I heard your call and was afraid;

I considered your works,

and I trembled between two animals

Lobster, ox and ass are all missing from the narratives of the birth of Jesus in the 'canonical' gospels written by Matthew and Luke, as are any mentions of animals at all, apart from the 'flocks' watched over by the shepherds outside Bethlehem (Luke 2:8).

What interests me is the way in which the birth stories in Matthew and Luke are sparse enough to both beg, and to hold, an imaginative filling-in of details.  One of these imaginative 'fillings-in', and perhaps the source for some of the more traditional animal inhabitants of the Nativity story such as the Ox and the Ass, is the 8th century Pseudo-Matthew gospel:

And on the third day after the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary went out of the cave, and, entering a stable, placed the child in a manger, and an ox and an ass adored him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by the prophet Isaiah, "The ox knows his owner, and the ass his master's crib." Therefore, the animals, the ox and the ass, with him in their midst incessantly adored him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by Habakkuk the prophet, saying, "Between two animals you are made manifest." (Chapter 14)*

What all these texts betray are two deep human desires.  Firstly, a curiosity about the details of life of Jesus, and in particular his childhood, which the New Testament both stubbornly refuses to meet but also (strangely) prompts by allowing so many empty spaces within which the imagination can work.  Secondly, a longing for the divine to be made real and understandable within the span of domestic experience; the Ox and the Ass provide the realism, the prophetic 'authority' of Isaiah and Habakkuk appear to provide a divine sanction for their inclusion - heaven in ordinary.

*The Isaiah quote is 1:3, that from Habakkuk is 3:2 but where the King James Version has 'O LORD, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid: O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy.' the Pseudo Matthew gospel relies on the Septuagint (LXX) which translates the words in bold as 'two living creatures'.