This is Christmas. This is love.

In the bitterly cold twilight I am walking around the yard, and I stumble upon this building:




I stopped and stared, and slowly breathed in the cold air, and just felt myself, standing before this huge building with its message of complete and total reverence to an entity even greater.. standing, as I am, small, mundane, trembling in the blue light - awestruck.

What is man that thou art mindful of him?

I've always thought that buildings, as a particular type of work of art, are usually consumed by a collectivity in state of distraction - it's not like a painting that's purposefully hung up on a wall in the Louvre, and you troop in for a focussed, purposed consumption. Most of the time architecture serves as the backdrop to the stage of everyday urban life. But every now and then some building strikes me so powerfully that I stop dead in my tracks and I just stare and there is a feeling, just for a moment, that I am completely and willingly consumed by something much bigger than I am, and I cease to be. In my shock/horror/admiration/awe I forget who, what, or where I am. Just for that infinitesimal moment. It happens whenever I encounter something that literally takes my breath away - it may be a book, a movie, a painting, a landscape, a building. In the face of something so much 'larger than life' in its sheer size and ingenuity... it almost feels like the will and money and talent that has gone into it cannot, will not, be contained, and it rushes out to hungrily incorporate, consume - and sometimes extirpate - all that dare violate its sacred sphere.

For buildings it is usually the scale that completely overwhelms me, or in the case of the Emerson building (Harvard's Philosophy Department), a particularly evocative inscription. Coming from Europe, it still strikes me as a bit odd that I can actually read and understand the inscriptions on buildings, and sometimes a modern spoken vernacular like English just doesn't quite carry the same dignity and pathos as Latin. But if you think about it, it actually makes a lot more sense to have inscriptions that most people and - not just the classically schooled - can comprehend.

I'm thinking of how best to describe what I feel about buildings that do that to me and this quotation from Jonathan Raban's 'Soft Cities' comes to mind - “it is a dream of glass and grass and concrete, where a handful of watercolour humans, tapering from the shoulders down, flit their spidery way through an architecture so simple and gigantic they cannot corrupt it". He's talking about modernist town planning (hence 'simple'), and Thomas Campanella's 'City of the Sun' in particular, but the idea remains.

I love these moments of solitude and profound unbeing. It reminds me of what Philip Larkin writes in 'Wants': 'Beneath it all, the desire of oblivion runs.'

But he's being his usual bleak self. The feeling of losing yourself and of being wholly consumed can be a good one of course - I want to lose myself in God's love, in His goodness, in His mercy and His grace. To be clothed in His righteousness, to bask in the clear, warm light of His presence and His approval. To feel that I am no longer my old sinful self.

The Psalmist's question (Ps 8: 3 - 4):

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?

The answer:
(I am plagiarising the ecard Joyce sent to me - thanks dear!)

Jesus humbled himself.
He went from commanding angels
to sleeping in the straw.
From holding stars
to clutching Mary's finger.
The palm that held the universe
took the nail of a soldier.

Why?

Because that's what love does.
You have made us a little lower than the angels, and You have crowned us with glory and honor.

The gift of God.
The birth of Christ.
This is Christmas.
This is love.

Merry Christmas :)