Christmas is an emotional time. And depending on what has been going on in my life over the year, it is experienced accordingly. Who is around? Who is no longer around? What has been gained? What has been lost? Christmas is a time where the weight and the release of life's fullness is absorbed and processed for me.
So how do Christmas carols fit into all this? I must confess that the first thing that moves me about a carol is the music. If I like the music, I'll sing it with feeling even if the theology is second-rate. But when I think about my favourite Christmas carols I experience a combination of beautiful music, usually in the minor key, with beautiful words.
By far my favourites are: Lo, How A Rose E're Blooming (Book of Praise 151) and Of Eternal Love Begotten (BP 163). A close second to these two is It Came Upon A Midnight Clear (BP 148).
It Came is all about a song; the one angels are said to have sung when the shepherds encountered them in the fields outside Bethlehem. The song is taken as a promise, a prophecy, yet to be fulfilled. In the five verses we are taken through the great joy of Jesus' birth, through the history that follows, without prettying it up — “But with the woes of sin and strife, the world has suffered long” — through our own personal lives, which are not pretty at times either — “And ye, beneath life's crushing load, whose forms are bending low” — to a final place of hope against hope — “when peace shall over all the earth God's promised splendours fling, and all the world take up the song, which now the angels sing.”
Of Eternal Love Begotten has a certain sad but high nobility to it. Singing it brings me to a place of inner peace. It helps me meditate on the God who is at the centre of my life, but is not always easy to access in the midst of life's chaotic struggles. Its theology is high, rooted in the ancient creeds. It's all about Christ, but a Christ who “Of eternal love begotten uncreated One-in-Three … Christ, the Alpha and Omega, Christ, the Source, the End will be of the things that are, that have been, and that future years shall see, evermore and evermore.” Even though some may think this theology remote from everyday life, there is a certain grounding it provides for those of us with faith, a trust that we are held by a love much greater than all the turmoil and turbulence in and around us, revealed paradoxically, in “that birth forever blessed when the virgin, full of grace, by the Spirit's power conceiving, bore the Saviour of our race.” Capturing the paradox between eternity and fragile temporality is not easy to do. Where words falter, music goes the distance.
Lo, How A Rose is unique in using the metaphor of a rose to convey something of the beauty and fragility of God's way of salvation in Jesus. How can a vulnerable little child embody universal redemption? How does a beautiful rose survive the tsunamis of life? And yet, the mystery of the gospel is that only a “child who felt our human woe … Who dost our weakness know…” can also “from sin and death [save] us and [share] our every load.” And so, for me, the metaphorical aesthetic works beautifully. “Lo how a Rose e're blooming from tender stem hath sprung, Of Jesse's lineage coming as prophets long have sung. It came, a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter, when half spent was the night … This flower, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air, dispels with glorious splendour our darkness everywhere.” These words combined with the music, in a minor key, bring me to tears every time, tears of release and of peace.
