Here’s a picture from our trip to Ireland last summer of Adam Pomeroy’s “The Nativity,” which is on display at Galway Cathedral.

The Cathedral itself is interesting in that it is the youngest of Europe’s great stone cathedrals. It was built a little over 50 years ago on the site of an old city jail.

Kristin remarked that the painting made her think of the women forced by the Church to live and work in the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland. The women were often forced to give up their babies for adoption. With the institutional looking bed and simple clothing – I wonder if this was Pomeroy’s intent. The government inquiry into the Magdalene Laundries would have been very much in the news around the time of its creation. Perhaps this was not intended, but if it were it would add a level of depth and subversion.

Either way I love how Pomeroy’s nativity scene incarnates the story of Mary and Jesus into Irish culture and life. This Christmas it strikes me how the birth of Jesus changes the way we see the nativity of every human being. Every family reflects the Holy Family. Every child reflects the Christ child. 

What if the women in the laundries had been treated as holy families? Or how does the incarnation challenge us to see the dignity and holiness of the parents and children on the U.S. border?

It reminds me of Thomas Merton’s mystical experience at Fourth and Walnut (now renamed “Merton Square”) in Louisville, KY:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers…

I have the immense joy of being [human], a member of a race in which [God] became incarnate…

There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander