Note: From The Art of Living in Season (IVP 2024). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
The landscape of Provence embraces several regions from the vineyards and olive groves of the Rhône Valley and villages like Gordes that cling to the rugged hills of the back country among rustling pines and the incessant calls of cicadas to the looming mount Sainte-Victoire and the threshold of the Basses-Alpes. Any of these sites can serve as the backdrop of the crèche scene, but the “authorized version” sets the little clay saints in one Provençal terrain: the Mediterranean coast with its fishing villages and vast horizons, as well as the large city of Marseille, a major trading port since pre-Roman times, which is where the santons first appeared in the nineteenth century.
Elaborate manger scenes feature not just the stable for the baby Jesus but also an extensive village that surrounds it, including shops, cafés, streets, market squares and small harbors. Not all santons in these panoramic scenes can bring gifts from the land to the child Christ. Instead, they make or trade things, offering the kinds of goods and services that are the warp and woof of the town life that grew out of their terroir. Some crèche scenes therefore feature, rather anachronistically, a policeman, a notary and even a mayor strutting around with his official tricolor sash. These extrabiblical figures remind us that everyone is part of the company of everyday saints who follow Jesus, including the educated classes, captains of industry and leaders of society. They also remind us that like the produce from the land, a vocation in the marketplace can also be offered to Jesus.
Of course, to many, the marketplace, never a paragon of virtue, seems far removed from anything spiritual. What does the stock exchange have to do with the “wondrous exchange” in which Jesus becomes like us so that we can become like him? These seemingly secular santons prompt the question: Why are there merchants in the manger? We can generalize: What does the marketplace of Marseille have to do with Jerusalem?
Key Term for Everyday Saints: Santonnier (One Who Makes Santons)
Artist Jean-Louis Lagnel, a santonnier before the term ever existed, inched Marseille closer to Jerusalem when he first came up with the idea two centuries ago of crafting santons to populate the crèche. Through his creative appropriation of the story of Jesus’ birth, he reintroduced the traditional Christmas mangers at a time when the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution prohibited such public displays.
We cannot say for certain whether Lagnel was reacting to this prohibition or simply trying to preserve endangered local crafts. However, I like to imagine him deliberating: “Since we cannot have public displays, let us make smaller, private ones. Let us sculpt the holy family in miniature, small enough to put in people’s homes and let us situate them in Provence, in our own time and place, among the various merchants at their daily trades and occupations and our neighbors with whom we daily interact on the streets of Marseille. And let them bring presents representing their respective trades to the child Christ.” And it was so.
Lagnel did more with his santons than keep the Christmas story alive in a time of repression. He creatively juxtaposed the Christmas story and the simple, ordinary working women and men of his time and place. One small figure of a man; one giant leap for French-kind. For through his art, he effectively inserted the world of the nineteenth-century Provençal village into the biblical text. Lagnel worked a wondrous exchange, representing Marseille as the place to which the baby Jesus had come – call it everyday contextual theology. Secular and sacred trade places in these manger scenes too. Blue-collar workers now rub shoulders with the holy family, showing in a tangible albeit miniature way that everyday work is not separate from but rather intricately related to our faith. This is true even of work that at first glance seems unspiritual (perhaps especially there). Every home that has a Provençal crèche houses a central Christian truth: Jesus came not to abolish but to sanctify everyday life. This is why these simple workers who come to adore the baby Jesus and, as I imagine, follow him out of the manger, are aptly called santons: little saints.
An Everyday Vocation
Look closely at the santon that represents the marketplace, the fishmonger: la poissonnière. She also represents the santons’ birthplace of Marseille, home to Provence’s leading fishery. The fishmonger is a regular fixture in the crèche, typically holding a basket of fish in one hand and a hanging scale for weighing them in the other. Fish figure prominently both in le Vieux-Port (the Old Port) of Marseille and in several of the Gospel stories; the fishmonger therefore represents a tangible connection between biblical Jerusalem and village life on France’s Mediterranean coast. Like the farmer, the fishmonger is an important link between her place and her product – not farm but sea to table – for example, the tuna in a salade niçoise. Like all the other crèche figures, la poissonnière is the santonnier’s workmanship, predestined to come to the manger with her gift of fresh fish for the child Christ. The scales she carries make her a fitting representative of the shopping district.
The scales are there to weigh her fish, yet they also stand for fair measure: the scales of justice. We assume that she conducts her affairs virtuously (Proverbs 31), that she aspires to be faithful in small things and in large. Like vines that symbolize steadfastness, clinging to their support in all seasons, everyday saints show up at their post every ordinary morning, clinging to Christ in order to abide in the Vine (John 15:4).
Abiding is particularly important in ordinary time. This long season of our Christian pilgrimage is rife with opportunities to grumble about our work, role and place. Indeed, we may even be tempted to give up, for staying the course requires endurance even at walking speed. Yet an everyday saint perseveres and produces fruit, as do the ripening vines and strawberry runners.
Three centuries before Lagnel, Martin Luther was already saying that all vocations, “whether in the field, in the garden, in the city, in the home, in struggle or in government…are the masks of our Lord God, behind which He wants to be hidden and to do all things.” The Reformation brought a new dynamism to society and ordinary time by insisting that workers were to practice their everyday trades as unto the Lord. As Jesus proclaimed all foods clean (Mark 7:19), so the Reformers affirmed all forms of work as holy. All vocations are instruments through which Christians in their respective places and lots in life can demonstrate their love for God and neighbor. When they do, everyday saints become the means through which Jesus again enters the world – not in a manger but in each person’s workplace.
Still, even well-intentioned pilgrims fall into the trap of thinking that sainthood is reserved for a select few, that our mundane occupations are not as pleasing to God as “professional” Christian ministries and that consequently our daily business on earth does not matter to heaven. The fishmonger santon presents a standing challenge to these faulty conceptions: the santonniers were right to include the marketplace in the manger scene.
My Own Pilgrimage
Maman first sent me shopping to the village boulangerie (bakery) when I was in grade school. I had a list, a few centimes that I had learned to add and subtract and her reminder to consider well before I handed over my little fistful of coins. Later, I learned how to do more complicated, even “philosophical” math, especially when Papa got involved: was it advantageous – not just to me, but to the whole community, not to mention the baker – to buy a more expensive single croissant from a master artisan baker or a cheaper, mass-produced one from the newfangled supermarket (hypermarché)?
From the time I joined the company of everyday saints, questions about work, money and what to spend it on have grown only more complicated. I can’t seem to make one shopping trip without asking myself: “Were any people, animals or land hurt in the process of making this food or object?” or “If I buy organic for myself, should I not offer the same quality to food pantries?” or “How can I most glorify God with my shopping cart?” I hear the same voices when I am the seller: “What is a fair price – for my art, my French lessons, my lemon madeleines?”
You don’t have to be a Christian to pose questions about fairness and market prices. What the fishmonger santon taught me goes deeper than the scales of justice she holds in her hands. Because – let’s be serious – the baby Jesus is too young to eat fish! What, then, is it that the fishmonger and her companions are offering to Jesus? On a surface level, they’re presenting gift baskets, which, when given to the poor, are a way of giving unto Jesus. On a deeper level, however, they’re offering their time and energy, the sweat of their brow, consecrating – setting apart – their everyday labor for Christ and his kingdom, just as they, little saints, are also set apart. And, as they present their daily work as a kind of worship offering, Jesus sanctifies their shops, tools, fields and kitchens, acknowledging their respective lines of work as worthy, even saintly, vocations.
The company of little saints may no longer be in the manger, but this does not mean they abandon their spiritual vocation. Yes, they go back to work, but now with Jesus in their midst! Like them, so we, everyday saints, keep on working after encountering Jesus. Like them, we earn a living, but hopefully in a way that glorifies him who sanctifies us. Like Lydia, after coming to Christ, we return to our business with Christ at the center of all that we do, including earning our daily bread.
Everything I am, and have and do can be an offering – a year-round Christmas present! – to Christ. The story of my life, including the story of my work, is ultimately not about me but about the one who calls me, equips me and graciously receives my humble offerings for what they are: gifts from the heart. Learning how to make even drudgery meaningful by doing it as unto Christ is an important part of the art of living in season.
The santons help me to remember why I do what I do, and for whom I do it, even when I play the humble tradesperson eking out a living. My little mentors teach me that in bringing my everyday goods and services to market, as part of my offering to God, I am not only restored but “restoried” – reminded whose story I am living out – and so is my occupation. As James K. A. Smith writes: “Our work and our practices should be foretastes of that coming new city.” What might otherwise degenerate into meaningless routines or selfish ambition is instead grafted into the newer, bigger and better story in which God is doing a new thing, a building project made up of living stones. And I am one of them.
Note: Adapted from The Art of Living in Season by Sylvie Vanhoozer. ©2024 by Sylvie Vanhoozer. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
Sylvie Vanhoozer, author and botanical artist
