Christmas Joy: Ellis Peters, Tomie de Paola, and C.S. Lewis

Paintings with smiles: Bored Panda

In Ellis Peters' Death and the Joyful Woman, characters in the mystery discover an old inn painting. They come to realize that it is very valuable, being not only an inn sign but an inn sign made from a medieval altarpiece. 

The painting is not only old, it is unique. Rather than a solemn Mary, it is a laughing Mary. Leslie, who found the work, and his professor, discuss the painting:

"I think it is a local work...The only thing out of tradition is the laugh."

"Don't let that worry you. The laugh is one of those things that happen to any tradition from time to time, the stroke of highly individual genius nobody had foreshadowed and nobody ventures to copy afterwards."

"She's a Madonna of the Annunciation or the visitation--something before the birth, anyhow."

"I've brought you the rector's notes and drawings. And here is his latest sketch. There she is. As she was, and as she will be."

The Joyful Woman had put off her muslin fichu and corkscrew curls and the Toby frills from round her wrists and stood in all her early English simplicity and subtlety, draped in a blue mantle over a saffron robe, all her hair drawn back austerely under a white veil. She leaned back to balance the burden she carried, clasping her body with those hands as feeble as lilies and the symbolic image of the unborn son stood upright in her crossed palms. She looked up and laughed for joy. There was no one else in the picture with her, there was no else in the world; she was complete and alone, herself a world.

One of my favorite children's books is The Clown of God by Tomie dePaola. An old juggler comes to a cathedral where he performs before the statue of the Christ child. He collapses at the end, just as the monks or priests run in, shocked at the supposed sacrilege. Yet the Christ child sits on his mother's lap, holding the juggler's "sun in the heavens" and unexpectedly smiling.

Likewise, C.S. Lewis was a true believer that religion, including Christianity, is meant to be joyful. At the end of That Hideous Strength, the last book in his sci-fi series, Jane reflects:

The vision of the universe which she had begun to see in the last few minutes had a curiously stormy quality about it. It was bright, darting, and overpowering...It ought to have been she who was saying these things to the Christians. Hers ought to have been the vivid, perilous world brought against their grey, formalised one; hers the quick, vital movements and theirs the stained glass attitudes...This time, in a sudden flash of purpose and crimson, she remembered what stained glass was really like.