I recently became a follower on twitter of a person who goes by the name of “In quires and places where they meme“. For older readers who don’t know what a meme is Wikipedia will tell you it is an image, video, piece of text, etc., which is typically humorous in nature, and is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations. Hence the writer’s name is not “In quire and places where they sing” but …where they meme.
In quires and places where they meme has been having a thread of tweets entitled ‘Harkageddon’. Its object is to go as long as possible without hearing or singing “Hark! The herald Angels sing”. The game ends, the tweet assures us at midnight on 24 December. The last Christmas that I celebrated as a parish priest was in 2019 at St Francis in Simon’s Town. I asked them whether they found Christmas Carols a blessing or a curse? I proudly told them after the 9:30 service on Christmas morning I would have sung Hark the herald Angel sing five times. It has a high tessitura because it is proclaiming an exciting event and by the end of the third verses my throat is all tensed up and I’m wondering if I will ever speak again! So, I was quick to sign up for Harkageddon!
Carols are not all loud proclamations. Unfortunately, in 2021 we all have to be home by midnight in SA, so Midnight Mass is started at 9pm! But usually among the carols sung at midnight are some softer quiet ones expressing the wonderful fact that God is born as a vulnerable human baby here on earth, in Bethlehem. And is asleep in a manger, no crib for a bed. When Jesus ascended to heaven, when he returned to the Father it was in bodily form apparently on a cloud, but when he came, he came, as the early anonymous carol says…
He came all so still
Where His mother was,
As dew in April
That falleth on the grass.
He came all so still
Where His mother lay,
As dew in April
That falleth on the spray.
He came all so still
To His mother’s bower,
As dew in April
That falleth on the flower.
Mother and maiden
Was never none but she!
Well might such a lady
God’s mother be.
And that Baby was placed in a manger in Bethlehem, just as the Baby Jesus lies in a manger in our home nativity scenes we have on display. What we have to realise is that although Christmas commemorates the birth of a baby, as T. S. Eliot says so clearly in The journey of the Magi : ‘There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death but thought they were different; this Birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our Death.’
I believe that we cannot just celebrate a baby being born at Christmas. We have to celebrate Jesus’ whole life. Before Charles Dickens came along and sentimentalised Christmas, early medieval carols did this very thing.
A babe is born I wys,
This world to joy and bliss,
His joy shall never fade and miss,
And Jesus is his name.
On Christmas day at morn,
This little child was born
To save us all that were forlorn,
And Jesus is his name.
On Good Friday so soon
To death He was all done,
Betwixt the time of morn and noon,
And Jesus is his name.
On Easter Day so swythe
He rose from death to life
To make us all both glad and blithe,
And Jesus is His name.
And on Ascension Day
To heaven He took His way,
There to abide for aye and aye,
And Jesus is His name.
I remember many years ago after the Choir had sung carols such as that last one at their Carol Service, my mother said to me; “Why can’t we sing the good old favourite carols and not these peculiar medieval ones.” Well, we can and we do, at least five times in the week before and maybe even after Christmas Day. And some of these old favourites have wonderful verses in them that we can and should memorise and use as short prayers every day and not just at Christmas. Like the last verse of O Little town of Bethlehem…
O holy Child of Bethlehem,
descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin, and enter in:
be born in us to-day.
We hear the Christmas angels,
the great glad tidings tell:
O come to us, abide with us,
our Lord Emmanuel.
Or equally as attractive the last verse of Christina Rosetti’s In the Bleak Midwinter. In the third line of the first verse, she sounds as if she has run out of ideas: “snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,” but then in the final verse comes the sublime:
What can I give him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
if I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
yet what I can I give him: give my heart.
When I was at Theological College in Grahamstown, I was in the Fort England Module. Every Saturday we went up to Psychiatric Hospital and took communion to the those mainly in the dementia word. Every Saturday one patient used to ask, “Can I prayer please?” Of course, we said yes and each week he said:
What can I give him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
if I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
yet what I can I give him: give my heart.
Carols? A Blessing or a curse? I suppose hearing in shopping malls Boney-M singing repeatedly Mary’s Boy Child at a loud volume will make even the most holy of us curse! Man will live for evermore because of Christmas Day say the lyrics. Yes, indeed that is the right theology even if the language is a heavily patriarchal! The coming of the Baby Jesus, his growing up, his teaching, his death, resurrection and ascension, have turned everything upside down. We even number our years from the year he was born.
One carol, however, resonates with me and brings a frog to my throat every time I hear it in a Christmas Service. The words were written by Robert Herrick, who perhaps is well-known by his poem To virgins, to make the most of time, with it wonderful opening verse:
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
Besides love poems Herrick also wrote what he called Noble Numbers, spiritual poems which were short and easily remembered. This one was called What sweeter musick.
What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol, for to sing
The birth of this our heavenly King?
… Dark and dull night, fly hence away,
So for Herrick Christi’s birth chases away the northern hemisphere’s dark winter and he goes on
And give the honour to this day,
That sees December turned to May.
Why does the chilling winter’s morn Smile,
like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like a meadow newly-shorn,
Because …
‘Tis He is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and lustre, public mirth,
To heaven, and the under-earth.
Because Jesus is born Darkness becomes light, December becomes May the frozen ground smells not of snow and mud but of new mown lawn. Why? Because God is Born in a stable in Bethlehem. Now that is something to celebrate, that is something to sing about and as Robert Herrick says “What sweeter music can we bring, Than a carol, for to sing The birth of this our heavenly King?”
Carols? A blessing or a curse? – Oh, most definitely a blessing and what sweeter music can we bring than a Carol for to sing the birth of this our heavenly King.
Full text from the carol by John Rutter
What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our Heavenly King?
Awake the voice! awake the string!
Dark and dull night fly hence away!
And give the honour to this day
That sees December turn’d to May.
Why does the chilling winter’s morn
Smile like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like to a mead new shorn,
Thus on a sudden? Come and see
The cause why things thus fragrant be:
’Tis He is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and lustre, public mirth,
To heaven and the under-earth.
We see Him come, and know Him ours,
Who with his sunshine and his showers
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.
The darling of the world is come,
And fit it is we find a room
To welcome Him. The nobler part
Of all the house here is the heart,
Which we will give Him; and bequeath
This holly and this ivy wreath
To do Him honour, who’s our King
And Lord of all this revelling.
What sweeter music can we bring
Than a carol for to sing
The birth of this our Heavenly King?
Awake the voice! awake the string!
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
Music John Rutter (b. 1945)
