As you are in the school building over this month and the next, I hope that you can take a few moments to enjoy the prints hanging in our main hallway. Epiphany is the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas, and we will reflect on these images through January. Students in medieval and Renaissance history (9th grade) are at work on their Epiphany Celebration in Painting and Verse (January 6 in the multipurpose room from 12:30 to 1:55). At this event, students each observe a painting closely and reflect on what these artists from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance sought to portray regarding God’s self-revelation as Christ. In the West, Epiphany focuses on the adoration of the magi while Eastern churches reflected on the Baptism of Christ (and also call this day Theophany). Students study images covering both traditions up through the Reformation, with several works by Albrecht Durer, who was influenced by Luther’s ideas (such as the priesthood of all believers which Cal Sanelli has noticed in his image). Adults attending the ninth grade celebration last year responded with interest and delight over what these young students had to share. You may preview all of this year’s images here.

Our Poetry Festival last Friday also provided a time for thought and revitalization. I have heard that, as Mr. Jackson sat through this festival, he was inspired to start writing a poem in preparation for his engagement this past weekend. Students, teachers, parents and grandparents read and recited an excellent selection of poems in several languages including Middle English, Spanish, Russian, Korean, and Chinese. In the competition from grades seven to nine, Molly Bailey took third place, Noah Perrin took second and Grace Prensner took first. Between the two older students competing for Poetry Out Loud, Rory McDowell was selected to represent CCA. (The time and place for this year’s regional competition is still to be announced.) Our three judges (poetry students from Messiah College) provided each winner with excellent feedback regarding their work. Rory McDowell was congratulated for his commanding execution and charged to reflect more sensitively upon some of the material in his poems (“As kingfishers catch fire” by Gerard Manley Hopkins and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden).

One poem that will be shared during our ninth grade Epiphany event is “Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot. Several of the prints on display in our upstairs hallway treat themes from this poem. One of these prints is “Adoration of the Magi” by Pieter Brueghel (a painting that AnneMarie Swartz will speak about). You could teach a whole geometry lesson with the shapes and proportions behind this painting. And all of it serves to hide and contrast Christ. He is almost lost from view within a scene that combines both winter beauty and the smudge of human toil. As in Eliot's poem, the kings in Brueghel’s painting are learning what it means to find a place that is “(you may say) satisfactory.” Please consider joining the ninth grade for this event. And I hope that we can all create a few leisure moments to reflect on our own birth and death with Christ as we seek Him together at CCA.

Journey of the Magi

by T.S. Eliot

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.