Christmas has multiple dimensions to it. Its stories in Luke’s Gospel, Matthew’s Gospel, and John’s Gospel are varied and absolutely loaded with archetypes that are nothing short of delicious.
Roman Catholic biblical scholar Raymond Brown used to stress how one finds in the Nativity stories hints and summaries of the entire Jesus story to come, including, of course, the clash between Jesus’ teachings about peace and compassion vs. the Empire’s teachings about greed, war, and power-over.
Furthermore, the Christmas stories add up to new creation stories as well, part of the promise of a “new heaven and a new earth.” Just as the Hebrew Bible contains multiple creation stories (check out Psalm 104, for example, and the Song of Songs and much more), so too does the Christian Bible. Christmas is just too rich and powerful an archetype to ever go away.
Even the onslaught of capitalist consumerism, eager to appeal to consumer addictions and thereby drown the story in buying and selling sentimental silliness, cannot fully erase the depths of the remembrance and meanings of Christmas.
As I indicated in yesterday’s DM, the story recounts the most important moment in human history, no matter whether one takes it literally or figuratively.
Among topics and archetypes stirred up by the Christmas story are the following: Cosmic visitations from angels; the cosmic invite from a very bright star; the role of motherhood, its trials and its promises (see the Magnificat as well as the nativity moment); how women are necessary leaders destined to bring the divine more fully into history; the power of evil and empire builders who will even kill babies to achieve their ends; courage of fathers (Joseph) to protect their wife and newborn baby and willingness to listen to dreams; the important role that the most vulnerable in the society (shepherds) play; the role of animals in human and cosmic history—ox, donkey, sheep, as witnesses to the divine (See Is 1.1); and how the Holy Spirit is the spirit of creativity who brings the divine into the world and how Christ is born in us as well as in Mary; how divinity is “novissimus” as Meister Eckhart says, the newest and youngest thing in the universe always. And so much more.
In the Christmas day DM, I shared M.C. Richard’s two paintings on the theme of doxa or glory, so key to an experience of the Cosmic Christ—one pictures Mary and her “golden” baby, and another the angel announcing “Doxa” to the shepherds.
M.C. took up the theme of doxa regularly in her paintings and in her poetry. She painted one picture of a red barn surrounded by a golden halo, a sign of doxa and glory.
On the occasion of her 80th birthday, M.C. reproduced a poem and handed it out to the participants (of whom I was one). The poem tells of a painting she created about the doxa to be found in nature, and the poem was so special to her that she printed it and framed it for that singular occasion. She called it, “In Celebration of the Poet’s Eightieth Year.” Here is the poem:
THEY ARE SLEEPING
I have painted the female hills
stretched and piled against the sky.
They are sleeping.
I have given them golden haloes.
They are saints.
They are sleeping.
I have painted the gold in clouds and crevasses as well,
meaning to say how they too are saints,
how the world sleeps,
how womanly is the landscape,
how a whiskered angel also sleeps as a field of grain.
She tells the story of this painting this way: A landscape! A neighbor suggested I paint the hills on our horizon. I did, and they look like women’s bodies lying stacked and sleeping. In the spirit of deep ecology and divine cosmology I gave them golden haloes. They are saints!—not literally—they are the holy presence of the earth, her body.*
One is reminded of what Thomas Merton wrote: “Every non-two-legged creature is a saint.”
*Imagine Inventing Yellow: The Life and Work of M.C. Richards, (Worcester Center for Crafts, 1999), p. 35.
Banner Image: The Holy Family with angels, shepherds, and animals rapt in glory: “The Nativity.” Painting by Lorenzo Monaco, c. 1408. Wikimedia Commons
Queries for Contemplation
What archetypes in the Christmas stories speak most deeply to you? Which ones do you think are most needed for humanity to fashion a future of survival for itself and Mother Earth and other creatures today?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
Stations of the Cosmic Christ
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet
Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest, pp. 125, 153, 234f., 360-362f., 439, 442.
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human
Matthew Fox: Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality
The Return of Father Sky: A Cosmic Mystery for Kids of All Ages
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5 thoughts on “The Multiple Dimensions to the Christmas Archetype”
Sorry! I emailed yesterday as I coud not access Matthew Fox’s interview. I got it today. Thanks. Ann Lynch
Being aware of the vast array of archetypes underlying Christmas is as close as we can get to the roots of life and consciousness. The very bottom of solar darkness (in the Northern Hemisphere) provides the most favorable context to intuit the power and to experience the wonder of the Life-Force, alias Spirit, as it becomes manifest in the building blocks (archetypes) of the human potential. As silly sentimental and commercial Christmases can be (and there seems to be no limits to what we should call “Kitschmas”) they have at least the merit of perpetuating in the collective subconscious a vague sense that “there must be something there.” When our bling-bling civilization has collapsed, future generations will surely rediscover the deeper meaning of Christmas:
“And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious.” [T. S. Eliot]
The nativity scene of baby Jesus Lovingly surrounded by Mary and Joseph, humble people young and old, wise kings, and animals in a humble manger under the cosmic stars is very archetypal of the birth and growth of our inner human~Divine Christ Lovingly supported by the Divine Feminine, angels, humanity, and the Living Cosmos in our eternal spiritual journeys with one another and All sacred beings and spiritual dimensions….
Plain and simple: firstly, that humanity awakens to the reality that the “Star of Bethlehem” was not a star. Stars are suns and they do not hover over stables, or even planets. UFOs can, and in much more recent times have been seen to hover over nuclear weapons sites and deactivate them. The US Congress is now addressing this fact. Secondly, that “Angels” are extraterrestrial intelligences who exist upon higher dimensional frequencies. The human race is gently being awakened to the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence with millions of people worldwide having witnessed UFO sightings together with the beautiful, strange, miraculous manifestation of crop circles. Nothing else and nothing more will fashion a survival for humanity, Mother Earth and all creatures than this dawning reality. The birth (and death) of Christ speak to it but it is, as yet, too massive a shift in our collective conscious evolution that we are unable to comprehend and embrace it. But we will.
Thank you, Matthew, for pointing out that so many Christian values are represented in the story of Jesus’s birth. It helps me reframe a story filled with likely inaccurate and seemingly impossible events–framing it (like Genesis’s creation stories) as a carrier of important theological truths, instead of historicity. When we look at events recounted in the Bible as history (and therefore pick them apart), not theology, we miss the spiritual teachings. One archetype speaking to me this morning is “how women are necessary leaders destined to bring the divine more fully into history.” I believe that if we chose more women as our leaders, we would create a more just, compassionate, inclusive, and peaceful world. Here’s a look at some women who are doing that.
https://taletor.com/women-leaders-who-are-changing-the-world/