Shepherds and Storks

The topic of Shepherds has arisen previously in this Advent Calendar. At that time we were knee-deep raising goats and cows. Now we are urban folk, knee-deep in grandchildren and legos. Still, the lessons learned from a decade of raising livestock continue to speak their messages.

Across those same years, extensive travel for work began for me. Those trips brought opportunities to enter museums I never expected to visit. Each visit afforded the possibility to fall in love with new artists. Of these, the Polish master Józef Chełmoński (1849-1914) may have affected me the most deeply.

Virtuosic in his ability to express rural life, Chełmoński defied certain trends of his day. He avoided the temptation to portray the fashionable. He rejected the impulse to overwhelm the viewer with “monumental” canvases. Many of his paintings, in fact, are small. Within them, though, multifaceted dramas do unfold, including some that are suspenseful or dangerous. At other times, his paintings invite us to be suspended in time as we join the silent characters he depicts.

I am reminded of the Christmas story by one of Chełmoński’s most iconic paintings. Here, peasants (assigned more likely to the plow than the shepherd’s staff) are transfixed on the sky as they track the passing of storks, birds utterly beloved in Poland and across Eastern and Central Europe.

chelmonsky-storks
Chełmoński, Storks (1900)

The legendary qualities of storks to bless still lead even the most sophisticated of city dwellers to take significant actions to induce storks to nest nearby. People actually go to the European equivalent of Home Depot to buy metal stork-nest frames for mounting on the roof (a stork’s nest is no small pile of twigs: it can weigh up to 90 pounds).

When I first saw this painting, and proceeded to learn more about storks, I was astonished. My only sense of storks involved “bringing the babies” (which, by the way, they do). Storks were cute, right?

How simplistic was my knowledge of storks. The ancient traditions surrounding these aerial foretellers go deep. Such traditions are still valued and taught. And like all traditions, they endure only as long as someone expends the effort needed to pass them on.

But back to Chełmoński’s painting. Here the storks seem to be returning from winter migration. Whether they will stop at this village or continue on, it is impossible to say. One thing is certain, though: their passage across the aerial highway has meaning to the man and boy, both accustomed to reading the sky in the same way biblical shepherds did.

Shepherds ancient and modern are called to understand the sky and what its messages will mean to their flocks. By day, shepherds move with the flock and by night they patrol the edges of the flock, ready to spring into action at the slightest threat. Their work, even if disregarded by the “fancy” among us, determines the fate of the village insofar as ensuring milk, meat, and all that wool and hides can provide.

Perhaps most importantly, in their isolation, shepherds became poets, songsters, and recipients of the messages of angels. So as we invoke images of Christmastime, let us remember that the message of Christ’s birth came from the sky and a celestial host to those least significant in the society, yet best able to understand it.

Consider fashioning some ways to help your children conjure up a sense of enduring a long, dark, perilous night. Into that canvas came the radiant light of God announcing Jesus’s birth. It came to shepherds not so different from the figures in Chełmoński’s painting: shepherds who understood the electric energy of such a glorious light.