In my series on new art pieces in the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection inspired by episodes in the Christmas story, we come this week to the pivotal moment in the Nativity narrative, when the Virgin Mary "brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger (Luke 2:7, KJV)." In this iconographic image from Cypriot Artist Charalambos Epaminonda, painted on a pottery shard to resemble an ancient archaeological artifact, we see the Mother of Christ laying her cloth-bound babe in a feeding box in a cave, the traditional setting for Nativity scenes in Eastern Orthodox art. Her only companions are an ox and an ass. Although the two beasts are not mentioned in the Evangelist Luke's account of the Birth of Christ, they appear very early on in Christmas imagery, taken from what Early Church scholars viewed as a prophetic foreshadowing of the Bethlehem birth in the Hebrew Scriptures: "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib (Isaiah 1:3, KJV)." This new painted ceramic piece can be viewed in the image gallery of the Charalambos Epaminonda biosketch page in the Sacred Artists section. (John Kohan)