It keeps changing as I hear new ones, though I nearly always return to the old ones. But perhaps I return most often to Mary MacDonald's Child In The Manger:
Child in the manger, infant of Mary,
Outcast and stranger, Lord of all
The image of gentleness that comes through her first words — originally written in her native Gaelic — and through the well-loved Gaelic tune Bunessan is unlike any other musical experience that I know. It brings a contrast to the harshness of the other end of the earthly life of the same child, and it brings back the still-warm memory of being present at a birth in the early hours of the morning, more than 30 years ago. But if you had never heard the story before, what would you make of that second line? So much of the New Testament is in those few words.
I will have to admit to a happily sentimental attachment to the song. Every trip to the lovely little Hebridean island of Iona takes the traveller past a small memorial to Mary MacDonald just before the village of Bunessan, which gave its name to the tune. This is on the island of Mull, and when you pass through there, you know that in a few minutes you will be on the ferry to Iona. It's part of the annual ritual.
The music makes it inseparable in our minds from Eleanor Farjeon's even better known song, Morning Has Broken, also set to Bunessan. It isn't hard to find a connection between them:
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.
Another glimpse of that same child entering our collective consciousness on that journey from the byre to the cross. I don't really care about the historical accuracy of these stories. What I do care about is the way that the story of the beginning of the Christ child's life, the birth of Christianity, is implanted into our own lives through poetry and music. The modern hymn writers (and I count Mary Macdonald as a modern) serve us in the same way as the storytellers of 2,000 years ago by setting down the story in ways that will stay with us all our lives.
You want another favourite?
God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen. It was our wedding recessional march on Christmas Day, 1972.
