Sister Wendy's Christmas Card Choice

World-renowned art historian Sister Wendy Beckett has chosen a special selection of three Christmas cards for Aid to the Church in Need.

We were delighted to discover we were one of Sister Wendy's favourites charities, so earlier this year we asked her to choose some of her favourite paintings for our cards.

Here, the Carmelite nun explores the deeper meaning of the paintings she chose.

The Nativity, by Giotto di Bondone (c.1266-1337)
Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy

At the centre of every Nativity scene is the encounter of Mary with her newborn son, the Word Made Flesh.

Most artists show her adoring him, lost in prayer. Giotto, though, is interested rather in the wonder of that first sight. Now at last, after nine months bearing Him hidden in her womb, Mary's eyes are the first human's ever to look at God made Man.

It is an encounter for the little Jesus, too: he sees his mother for the first time. Giotto isolates mother and child, with a back drop of bare rock, removing ox and ass, shepherds and sheep, even Saint Joseph himself, to a lower level where they will not interrupt our sight line.

The angels, too, are bundled out of the way, singing and rejoicing aloft in the heavens. There is nobody in that still centre except Mary and Jesus, and the little mid-wife who helps hold the baby.

Some theologians have held that the Child Jesus passed through Mary's body in the same way as the Risen Jesus passed through the doors of the upper room.

Giotto is a practical man and shows us a Mary exhausted from child bearing. She is not the sweet young girl that many artists delight to show us. This Mary is a young woman, with a strong intelligent face: she is not pretty, she is handsome. 

And she is very isolated in her great vocation to rear God's son for him. Saint Joseph, worthy and noble man that he is, has clearly been up all night, and is exhausted. His part on this occasion is over. Now it is all between the young mother, wondering and silent as she contemplates her child.

It is such a beautifully organised picture, and Giotto's Mary is so full of character and determination. It is a memorable Nativity scene.

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Madonna and Child, by Sano di Pietro (1406-1481)
Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany

There are hundreds of thousands of Nativity scenes: there are thousands of thousands of scenes that simply show the mother and the child.

This is, after all, the essence of the Nativity, and here we can contemplate that essence without distraction.

Sano di Pietro is not one of the great artists, but this always seems to me a very moving depiction of the relationship between Our Blessed Lady and the Holy Child Jesus.

We call it a picture of mother and child, but Mary herself would have seen it as a picture of the child, primarily, with herself merely in attendance.

Sano sees her as one withdrawing from the immediacy of her surroundings.

She is lost in that musing of which the Scriptures speak: "Mary treasured all these things in her heart." She cannot understand what has happened, it is beyond human understanding. Yet she believes that when she holds that warm little body to her it is the great God himself whom she embraces. What a mystery! No human mind can comprehend it.

Like Mary, we believe – or perhaps, we try to believe, we pray to believe – and we are profoundly grateful. This is an especially beguiling child, and Sano shows him concerned only with supporting his mother.

His chubby fingers are raised in blessing, he presses his cheek against hers. This is a good instance of that basic truth that it is not we who love God so much as God who loves us.

Jesus is the active one here, the loving one. Mary's role is to accept that love and allow it to transform her, a role that is ours as well. It is the tenderness of the love that makes this little picture outstanding.

Christmas is all about love – not just celebrating God's love but trying to express it in the love we offer our families. People go to infinite and expensive pains at Christmas to celebrate family love, yet often it is a day of irritation, even bad temper, and the whole meaning of the day gets forgotten.

Jesus is only too ready to love our family through us: he will bear the burden, if like Mary we hold him and are conscious of him.

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Nativity with Burning Bush, by Albert Herbert (1925–2008)
England and Coe Gallery, London

It is a comfort to think that our poor, materialistic world can also produce a great Nativity picture.

Albert Herbert marvellously combines the burning bush of the Old Testament, that Old Testament in which Jesus is prefigured, and the New Testament in which he actually appears amongst us.

The third element in this magical little picture is a representative of our humanity, taken out of time, but longing for God as people have done through the centuries. The burning bush is far from a whimsical inclusion.

Herbert thought and prayed deeply, and he would have known that Saint Gregory of Nyssa suggested the burning bush was a symbol of Mary. The bush was on fire but never consumed, so Mary, that young Jewish maiden, carried God in her womb but was not consumed by his power.

Herbert's Mary is not dressed in first century clothes. She wears a nondescript garment that would suit any century, the immemorial clothing of the poor. She is tense with the importance of her function, which is not to hold the infant Jesus to herself, but to give him to the world.

He is such a very small baby completely without any indication of his divinity. This is how it happens, says Herbert. God does not come to us spot-lit and glorious, but humbly and by ordinary means.

The burning bush is in the past, in the present it is for us to kneel in the darkness and hold out our arms.

There is such longing and desire in the figure of the elderly man, balding, clad in a shapeless, colourless garment, whose face expresses no emotion, but who acts out his longing. We do not have to feel great desire, great gratitude, great joy: we have to believe in the reality of Jesus and our need for him.

The kneeling man is a man of prayer, and it is only in prayer that we can enter into a relationship with Jesus. Whenever we hold out our hands, Mary brings him close to us.

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