My parents raised me in the faith, but my mother raised me in museums. When I was still traveling by stroller, she would take me on the Command Express bus from our neighborhood in Canarsie, Brooklyn, into Manhattan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Later, when she recalled these trips, she told me that going between any two points within the Met had taken forever, because I would ask her to stop in front of nearly every painting so she could tell me about it. I can never remember a time when I didn’t love art. Even though I am nearly forty years old, I am still not sure if I love art for my own reasons, or if I love art because my mother loved it, and so it is a way of loving her.

My mother was born into a Roman Catholic family in 1951 and christened Denise Barbara Lanthier. She sang and chanted Latin in the choir in a massive Romanesque Revival church on Flatlands Avenue in Brooklyn. At one point, the parish was so fruitful that it outgrew the sanctuary; her neighborhood was told they would be leaving that grand building and would thereafter celebrate mass in a movie theater. Around the same time, the Second Vatican Council dispatched her beloved Latin chants. And so my mother went from chanting the liturgy in a beautiful ancient tongue, in one of the most beautiful buildings in that part of the city, to sitting in a glum movie theater and hearing the priest drone on in what Brooklynites insist is English. She began to ask questions.

As a young woman, my mother’s escapes were art museums and Judaism. She would wander the galleries of the Brooklyn Museum, enjoying the art and imagining attending parties in its massive halls. Then she would take a short walk from the museum to 770 Eastern Parkway, the global headquarters of Chabad, and wait in line to receive a dollar from the Rebbe because she was looking for the blessings of Abraham. She had loved the Bible stories her mother would read before bed, especially the stories from Hebrew scripture. Her home life could be difficult, and I think she loved those narratives because they featured tales of miraculous escape – God was always choosing people, pulling them out of where they were, and sending them to live more abundantly. At the same time, the things she valued, especially education, made her an outlier at home. She felt better understood by the Jewish families in her neighborhood. Jewish friends even told her she had a Jewish soul. She fantasized about being adopted by a Jewish couple – or maybe she had been somehow switched at birth.

She tried to convert to Judaism, but she was never successful. For one thing, she always had to do the most involved version of everything. She only wanted to join Chabad, the Hasidic movement known for its vocal belief in a coming messiah. The rabbis she talked to were less inhospitable than politely confused. What Chabad will do, (almost) no questions asked, is give you a Jewish education. My mother received an excellent one, but from there she had nowhere to go. She stumbled through a spiritual odyssey, with a lot of almosts – she almost joined an ashram, until the guru announced his intention to arrange marriages among all the members; she almost was kidnapped by members of the Unification Church (the “Moonies”), until she threatened to bang down a door; and she almost married a nice Jewish boy, until he turned out not so nice and she broke off the engagement. She did receive a dollar from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, one evening on Eastern Parkway. I’m not sure how many people leave the Christian church to await the Messiah with Chabad. It cannot be a large number. But my mother wanted a messiah. Her relationship with Jesus was never one of rejection, but of disappointment. The Jews had been promised a king. So far as she could tell, Jesus wasn’t it.

By her late twenties, she was spiritually adrift and living in California, far from her Brooklyn family. She had accepted that she’d never become a Hasidic Jew, though she still held faith. The 1970s were nearly over, and across America, people were becoming born-again, whatever that meant. One evening, during a routine call back to New York, her sister was almost hysterical about something called the sinner’s prayer, saying that if she didn’t accept Jesus into her heart, my mother was going to hell. At the time, my mother took this to be the latest volley in a long history of sibling power struggles. But for the first time in a long while, a particular window had been pried open – even if only a little.

My mother had a wonderful and sometimes confusing gift, which is that even if she had little interest or understanding for something you were passionate about, and even if she disagreed, it didn’t prevent her from encouraging you. She also loved Christmas shopping. That year, while shopping for her sister, she found a book called The Christmas Story in Masterpieces, introduced by David Rossoff. This was a coffee table book filled with reproductions of European paintings from the Renaissance onward. In my mother’s eyes, it was the perfect gift. If her sister was betting everything on this Jesus business, she could at least pick up some culture along the way.

As my mother looked through the book, she found paintings from the nativity cycle, accompanied by quotes from the Gospel of Matthew. She paused over a painting of the Slaughter of the Innocents, juxtaposed with Jeremiah 31: “A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rachel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not.” Then she turned a page and saw Georges La Tour’s Adoration of the Shepherds.

The painting is straightforward enough. The infant Christ, apparently illuminated by candlelight, is shown in a wicker manger, a lamb still trying to pull some hay from beneath the sleeping baby. Christ is surrounded by five figures, mostly shown from the waist up – the Virgin Mary, three shepherds, and Saint Joseph, who holds the candle. The light shines on all the figures, although tellingly, the middle shepherd is mostly in the dark. The adoration of the shepherds was never the most popular motif. If you painted an adoration of the magi, you could do all the gold and crowns and camels – exciting stuff, interesting to look at, and you could charge your patron extra. When you painted an adoration of shepherds, you were mostly painting shepherds – dirty, smelly shepherds. But that was the point. As Philip K. Dick said, “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” In the book my mother was holding, a caption on the opposite page offered a reasonable interpretation of the painting: “A smirking peasant boy in the background touches his cap, as if to a passing bigwig, unable, perhaps, to understand the implications of what he sees.”

My mother told me this story often enough that I can still hear it in her voice. “I realized I was the peasant with the smirk! I never disrespected Jesus. Why would I? He had been a good moral teacher, and then he was killed. I finished reading the rest of the book, and when I closed the cover I yelled out, almost involuntarily, ‘Oh my God – Jesus is the Messiah!’”

Some people come to Jesus easily. Some get thrown from horses on the Damascus Road, whereafter they are dragged into the kingdom kicking and screaming. And then there’s Denise Lanthier, who had to start over at Abraham and work her way through all of redemptive history, as illustrated by old European masterpieces.

The epiphany completely upended my mother’s life. She eventually did say the sinner’s prayer, and she also moved back to New York and began graduate school in art history – inspired, as you might imagine, by her experience with La Tour. When she met my father, a nicer Jewish boy named David Rubin, she changed her focus to early and elementary education. My dad had accepted Jesus a few years earlier, when someone in a pool hall told him to read Isaiah 53. They were married as Christians, although they said their vows under a chuppah, and the pastor prayed in the name of Yeshua at their wedding. She became Denise Lanthier Rubin in 1983 and a mother in 1986, the same year she earned her master’s degree. I thus grew up in a house where we celebrated Jewish and Christian holidays, and where I was taught from the cradle to love Jesus, the Messiah of Israel.

My mother passed away unexpectedly in the summer of 2025. In the days and weeks after, I found myself thinking a lot about La Tour’s Adoration of the Shepherds, and why it was through this image, among so many, that God had revealed himself to her that Christmas. It may have helped that the painting was unfamiliar. The book she gave her sister was filled with the grandest Botticellis and El Grecos, but she would have known those already. It may have also helped that the painting is just very good. Extraordinary, even. La Tour is hardly a household name, but that’s our failure, not his. His favorite trick was lighting a scene by candlelight, and then hiding the candle behind a figure’s arm or hand, so that the warm glow seems to radiate not from a flame but from the Christ Child, or a leaf of paper, or even from the faces of gamblers. He was clearly influenced by Caravaggio, although at times La Tour’s pictures can feel like a quiet critique of Caravaggio’s melodrama. Caravaggio lights everything like it’s the Conversion of Saul, in a manner often compared to theatrical spotlights. La Tour’s lighting is diegetic, coming from a light source within the painting.

At this point, in the freshman art history paper, you’d spin a theological yarn out of these two different lighting styles. You’d probably mention that the source of Caravaggio’s light is so high and removed from the figures, it must surely suggest God himself, whereas La Tour is focusing on the simple humanity of his subjects. You may even claim Caravaggio’s light is transcendent, but La Tour’s light is immanent. Along with the theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie, I would suggest that setting these categories against each other is boring, first-year theology stuff. Instead, try looking at these artists in terms of two categories proposed by Begbie to explain the vision of divine transcendence revealed in the New Testament: God’s otherness and God’s uncontainability. Carvaggio’s light captures the first category in a fairly obvious way. The light touches the figures, but from somewhere remote, quite literally beyond the frame. The light is other, even if it illuminates everything. But what of La Tour?

In La Tour’s Adoration, the light is both other and uncontainable. Other, because upon closer inspection, the light in his painting isn’t exactly of our world. At first, it’s easy to attribute the warm glow to the candle in Joseph’s hand. But his attempts to shield the light don’t seem to be working, and the light falls mostly on Jesus – so much so, the light actually appears to be coming from the baby. Thus the artist invites a question: Does the light come from the infant, or the flame? Or perhaps both? It’s easy to attribute the miraculous to material causes, even when you have more proof of a miracle than of the mundane. The viewer can’t really see the candle – the wax and the flame are mostly implied, while the infant is completely visible. I think that’s part of the idea behind the painting. If you want a materialist explanation, by all means assume the candle is lighting the scene. Most candles don’t shine that brightly, but then again, neither do most infants. Maybe the baby really is just a baby. Or maybe you’re missing the implications.

This all makes the Adoration a particularly brilliant meditation on the Incarnation, via John’s Gospel. In Christ was light, and that light was the life of men. If the light is divinity, by covering the flame with his hand, Joseph evokes the Incarnation beautifully. Try as he might to control it, the uncontainable light of God still shines through human flesh. (Which reminds me – you know when you were little and you put your hand over the bulb of a flashlight, and your flesh glowed a deep orange, especially around the edges? La Tour was a master at painting that effect.) Looking back, my mother’s quarrel with God was always about the truth of who Jesus was. For most of her life, she had believed he was just a baby. And then, suddenly – the true light shone in darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. Of course Jesus would meet my mother at Christmas.

I found the painting years later, in the Louvre, while I was studying abroad in Europe. I had made a pilgrimage to the quiet gallery mostly ignored by the throngs of tourists who come to take bad pictures of the Mona Lisa through bulletproof glass. For me, La Tour’s Adoration was far more important than the Mona Lisa. We never hung a reproduction of the painting in my childhood home, but I suspect the painting had a continuing influence on my mother, perhaps beyond what she shared with me. Or maybe she was drawn to it because of currents already moving within her. When I returned to the painting recently, I began to notice certain resonances not only with her journey back to the faith, but with the vocation to which she devoted the rest of her life – education.

The most profound resonance involves what the philosophical theologian Judith Wolfe refers to as “perceptual training”: exposing oneself and one’s children to God, his word, and his church, in order to form one’s senses to see things rightly. The Adoration was a pointed invitation, almost a challenge, to see rightly – if only you could. My mother was a lifelong educator, primarily known for teaching art and Latin, especially to elementary students. She was working on a Latin lesson plan the night she died, a detail that makes total sense to those who knew her. She cofounded a classical Christian school because she loved classical education, although not the kind tied to contemporary political movements. Instead, she loved the trivium because it taught children to identify and understand what was good, beautiful, and true. She never cared for the jargon of higher thinking skills or “teaching children how to think,” which was very much in vogue during the early part of her career. For her, education was never a disembodied intellectual exercise. It was always about perceptual training, helping children to love the lovely. I think back to her teaching an eighth-grade church history class, the students debating pre-Nicene heresies while drinking tea or hot chocolate and listening to Gregorian chants on a CD player. The senses were always engaged. As Judith Wolfe points out in The Theological Imagination, this kind of education cultivates something akin to what we call “taste” – a taste for God, and perhaps a sense of where best to find him.

If education is about learning to see rightly, there is no better way to learn how to see than by looking at art. But what art should you look at? My mother’s own taste was immaculate. I’ve thought back on what she would show me in those museums, even going back to when I was in a stroller. Her favorite artists were those of the early Renaissance, although she would often point out that the line between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance was really just a piece of Northern Italian chauvinism and myth-making – thank you Vasari. She gravitated toward Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, and of course Botticelli. She loved artists who could pull off particularly sympathetic depictions of women and children, and she loved Flemish tapestries and the insular manuscript tradition. She was often partial to the version of the thing prior to its full development – always early, never late. She preferred the Romanesque to the Gothic, Baroque music over Classical, the Lindisfarne Gospels to the Book of Kells. She collected Shaker furniture and Amish quilts, yet paradoxically she adored Byzantine art – especially the icons, the saints in their jewel-colored robes on warm, gilt backgrounds. She loved altarpieces of all kinds. Most of all, and perhaps predictably, she loved images of the Annunciation, the Nativity, and anything involving angels. Around her birthday, December 29, she would insist on going into Manhattan, either to visit the Cloisters museum or to see “the tree” – which for her was not the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, but the tree in the medieval court at the Met on Fifth Avenue, decorated in stately Neapolitan angels.

The Met was my mother’s favorite classroom, and I was chief amongst her disciples. I can picture her in the Met’s Greek and Roman galleries, her students following her like a flock of ducklings, or maybe on a day trip when I was a teenager. We’d peer through the halogen gloom and perform a sort of differential diagnosis on the image of a saint – an older man, holding the baby Jesus in one arm while holding a hammer and nails in his opposite hand – Joseph, the patron saint of Sicily, her favorite. The best art was art that illustrated scripture. She would tell her students that many Christians in the Middle Ages simply couldn’t read, and so the paintings, the stained glass windows, sometimes even the church building itself were their Bible. Thus, to learn to see Christian art rightly was to comprehend Scripture – to encounter the Word made flesh, and finally understand its implications. Which is not to say she believed images were imbued with supernatural powers – at least, not in the mystical sense of the supernatural. For the most part, she would gently roll her eyes and shake her head if you suggested that contact with icons could heal illness. In the later years of her life, she seemed less dismissive of these possibilities, but they were never very important to her because they missed the point. To say a work of art was capable of healing in this way was to reduce the image to a mere object. The real power of the image was its content and its meaning, and how the artist conveyed that meaning to the viewer.

Looking back, I can see that my mother had been doing theology from the start. Paintings, windows, and tapestries were her texts, but her subject was always her Creator. She knew, from her own life, that you could find Christ in a work of art, or rather that Christ would find you. And while a painting could certainly mediate a transcendent experience, it could also proclaim God’s power unto salvation. That is why she loved art, and why she taught others to love it and to see it rightly – not just to look but to participate in the miracle, lest we smirk and doff our hats, not understanding what we see.