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Inside
NCR
Madonna
away beyond Bethlehem
The Christmas story didnt
happen as it is written on this weeks NCR cover. The cover was a
leap of imagination. On the other hand, the original incarnation was one of the
greatest leaps ever of imagination. A shiver happened in the universe. A divine
wind blew over creation. Unusual phenomena followed: an extraordinary child,
shepherds hearing things, wise men with a tall tale.
Its there in the Bible. But so little of it is there that we
have been drawing, ever since, on our imaginations to flesh it out. On our
better days, we hint at the magnificence of the story, the all-time interaction
of the cosmic and down-to-earth. Mostly, though, we stumble on the details.
No, Jesus was not born in Shanghai or Chengdu. But neither was he
the pale Caucasian kid most of us grew up with. If Christianity is our story of
how the divine came calling, then its bound to be as diverse as we are,
as parochial as we, as nationalistic -- but also it must be as cosmic. One
wonder God didnt work was a photo of the Holy Family. Maybe its
just as well. This forces us, and gives us the freedom, to imagine and then
fall for a divinity not too alien from ourselves.
Thus the history of Christmases past is a version of who we are,
every culture and nation writing its own chapter, with its own illustrations.
And we didnt stop with the gospels or the Renaissance paintings; we go on
writing that history, year by year and throughout the world.
It is appropriate that our look this Christmas be Chinese. Almost
without intending it, we made 1998 an Asia year in NCR. We covered the
Synod for Asia widely and deeply, while most Western media largely ignored it,
but time will show its stark contrast with the Vatican on the meaning of church
will reverberate for years to come.
We also intensified our coverage of the financial and social
turmoil of Asia that is being felt around the world, and not least in the
United States. The dispatches of Dennis Coday from Bangkok form an important
part of the picture of a global village that we need to get to know and be
solicitous about. And publisher Tom Fox has just returned from a 17-day visit
to China and will soon be reporting at length about church and world in that
immense, enigmatic country.
When Hung Liu, born in China 50 years ago and a child of
Maos Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, paints a Madonna in America in
1992, she is painting fragments of her own history. Lius art is a
tumultuous, sad, glad personal history writ large. One of the first works
painted after her arrival in America in 1988 was Resident Alien, in
which she wrestles with her identity, a woman steeped in such a unique culture
striving to make it in the land of multiculturalism.
A major exhibition of her work, Hung Liu: A Ten-Year
Survey, is on a six-city tour, including The Kemper Museum of
Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo. (followed by La Jolla, Calif., Jan. 24 to
March 16, 1999; Brunswick, Maine, April 8 to June 6, 1999; Chapel Hill, N.C.,
Sept. 19 to Nov. 28, 1999). Essentially realistic paintings but embellished by
streaky paint and adorned by cigar boxes and other mixed media, these are all
based on photographs, suppressed for generations for political reasons by the
Communist regime, which Liu rescued on a return visit to China.
Thus the Madonna of our cover is modeled on a snapshot
of a prostitute taken early in the century. The original photo expresses the
yin and yang of East and West that has become Lius theme. The woman is
holding on her lap a Western statue, which becomes in the context of an
American work called Madonna the universal Jesus figure. When one
recalls the compassion of Jesus for the prostitutes and marginalized of his
real-life sojourn, one realizes how this Madonna brings the
Christmas story full circle.
We at NCR, who plead for peace and justice all year round,
pray now for Christmas peace, which is a special, celestial kind of experience,
for our readers whom it is our privilege to serve.
National Catholic Reporter, December 25,
1998
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