Welcome to Advent: Now and the Not-Yet. The pieces in this exhibit can be viewed as stand-alone works but are designed to build upon one another as we explore the tension of Advent as described in Fleming Rutledge’s collection of sermons, Advent: The Once & Future Coming of Jesus Christ.
The following excerpt from Rutledge’s book provides an introduction to Advent and a summary of the temporal strain Christians experience – the need to acknowledge the pain and suffering present in this world while looking forward to Christ’s return.
The poetry that accompanies each piece in the exhibit is from W.H. Auden’s contemporary retelling of the nativity story, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, to which Rutledge refers in many of her Advent sermons as a literary exploration of this idea.
Advent is a season of tension....a time to reflect on both loss and life. Thank you for joining me in an exploration of this grief and hope.
In our sins we have been a long time.
Advent begins in the dark.
•••
Theologically speaking, Advent is not really a season of preparation for Christmas. It is the season of preparation for the second coming of Christ. In a very deep sense, the entire Christian life in this world is lived in Advent, between the first and second comings of the Lord, in the midst of the tension between things the way they are and things the way they ought to be.
•••
Advent tells us that Christmas is not really Christmas if all we are thinking about is a nice little baby. The baby will grow up, and all the violence that the rulers of this world can devise will expend itself upon his broken, bloody, naked body. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, “Grace…operates surrounded by evil.” From the time of John the Baptist until now the kingdom has suffered violence. The shadow of the cross falls across the manger.
•••
But something has happened. John’s preaching sets it in motion. With the announcement of John, the world begins to turn on its hinges. The final reckoning is going to take place. And so the Judge of all the universe arrives upon the scene. But it is not as we thought. The face of the Judge is marked with infinite suffering. His hands and feet are torn by spikes driven in by violent blows. His brow, pierced by the crown of thorns, bears tokens of utmost humiliation. The judgement has already happened. It has taken place in his own body. The Son of God has borne it all himself. The Judge who is to come has given himself to be judged in our place “to save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.”
•••
Advent is the final breaking in of God upon our darkness.
~Fleming Rutledge, Grace in a Violent World, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ
Winter’s Age
2025
Encaustic and fabric on wood panel
20 x 24 inches
Darkness and snow descend;
The clock on the mantlepiece
Has nothing to recommend,
Nor does the face in the glass
Appear nobler than our own
As darkness and snow descend
On all personality.
•••
The prophet’s lantern is out
And gone the boundary stone,
Cold the heart and cold the stove,
Ice condenses on the bone:
Winter completes an age.
~ Excerpt from W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 1942
Dreadful Wood
2025
Encaustic, metal and fabric
on wood panel
20 x 28 inches
That is why we despair…
We are afraid
Of pain but more afraid of silence, for no nightmare
Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void.
This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God.
•••
Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.
~ Excerpt from W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 1942
Secret Garden
2025
Encaustic and Tyvek on wood panel
20 x 20 inches
For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere
that is not a desert
~ Excerpt from W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 1942
The Annunciation
2025
Encaustic and fabric on wood panel
20 x 20 inches
The garden is unchanged, the silence is unbroken
For she is still walking in her sleep of childhood:
Many before
Have wandered in, like her, then wandered out
Unconscious of their visit and unaltered
The garden unchanged, the silence unbroken:
None may wake there but One who shall be woken.
Wake.
~ Excerpt from W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 1942
The Choosing
2025
Encaustic on wood panel
20 x 20 inches
When Eve, in love with her own will,
Denied the will of Love and fell,
She turned the flesh Love knew so well
To knowledge of her love until
Both love and knowledge were of sin:
What her negation wounded, may
Your affirmation heal to-day;
….child, it lies
Within your power of choosing to
Conceive the Child who chooses you.
~ Excerpt from W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 1942
The Vision of the Shepherds
2025
Encaustic and Tyvek on wood panel
20 x 20 inches
Unto you a Child,
A Son is given.
Praising, proclaiming
The ingression of Love,
Earth’s darkness invents
The blaze of Heaven,
And frigid silence
Meditates a song;
For great joy has filled
The narrow and the sad,
While the emphasis
Of the rough and big,
The abiding crag
And wandering wave,
Is on forgiveness:
Sing Glory to God
And good-will to men,
All, all, all of them.
Run to Bethlehem.
•••
O Living Love, by your birth we are able
Not only, like the ox and ass of the stable,
To love with our live wills, but love,
Knowing we love.
~ Excerpt from W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 1942
The Flight into Egypt
2025
Encaustic, paper clay, and iron with rust patina on wood panel
20 x 20 inches
…..To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.
…The happy morning is over,
The night of agony is still to come; the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will be done, that, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.
~ Excerpt from W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 1942
The Land
2025
Encaustic, metal, and jute on wood panel
25 x 24 inches
He is the Way.
Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.
~ Excerpt from W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 1942
The Spark
2025
Encaustic and intonaco on wood panel 36x26
He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
~ Excerpt from W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 1942
Ubuntu
2025
Encaustic and graphite on honeycomb cardboard 36x36
He is the Life.
Love Him in the World of the Flesh;
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.
~ Excerpt from W.H. Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, 1942
Ubuntu names a shared beauty: an African wisdom of community, compassion, and reverence for every person. “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together,” says Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Blind-contour portraits set among vibrant flora keep each face’s quirks yet merge into a living whole. Like us, alone they are incomplete fragments; together in relationship with one another and the world around us they become their true selves..
