More Meditations on Christmas Carols
What Child is This?
William Chatterton Dix, c. 1865
GREENSLEEVES
English melody 16th century
By Rebecca Osborn
A CHILD has a unique ability to bring you into the present. This is truer the younger they are. Children live in the present. For a baby, there is no past or future; there is only the present of needs and feelings. Anguish is hunger or loneliness; comfort is food and closeness; happiness is a beloved face. There are no plans or schemes. A baby has no power to meet its own needs, and is at peace with that, never having known otherwise.
A baby brings you into the present, not only through its perspective, but also by our knowledge of how quickly he or she will change. When I look at my youngest baby, already over nineteen months, I drink her up with my eyes. Those soft cheeks, chubby feet, easy laughter, and ready comfort will pass away as she grows older.
My baby’s latest word is “wow.” Whenever I open something, whether a box in the mail or a Tupperware from the fridge, she says “Wow!” in a slow, reverential tone. Her wonder brings us pure joy; why shouldn’t leftover sweet potatoes be worth our awe-filled thanksgiving?
“What Child is this, who, laid to rest, / On Mary’s lap is sleeping?” The hymn invites us to a sense of wonder. We can nestle into happy complacency at the familiarity of this story unless we turn and question it. This hymn, in asking questions, returns us to wonder at the immensity and paradox of what took place in a Bethlehem stable.
What child is this? For he is, indeed, a child, with soft cheeks and large eyes, a firm grasp and a need for milk. It is easy to treat a child as something less than a person, as unformed. It’s easy to take their ignorance and innocence for granted. But each child contains in them just as much weight of glory as any adult, and contains within them a profoundly unknown future. But we know where this story is going. He is the promised one, the Messiah king. We know him as the Son of God incarnate. Still, he is no less present, no less a child, and the paradox of infant immanence is infinitely staggering.
Granted that he is a king – what is he doing here? Oxen and donkey are all well in their way, but seeing a child raised in poverty has a note of tragedy. If it were anyone else, seeing a child raised in this setting would invite pity. But it doesn’t even occur to us to pity the omnipotent. The Father chose to send his Son here, in this mean estate. He chose shepherds for his first human news-bearers, and brought them together with foreign kings. He brought high and low together, already turning human kingdoms upside down.
Human dignity and equality are values we should not take for granted, nor are they self-evident. They are values stamped into Christendom by the Incarnation, which has remained as the stories themselves are being forgotten. But without the story to remind us, we will slide back into hierarchy, hungry for power and security. We try to shape the future with our plans and machinations.
But this baby invites us back to the present–the present where God is, living outside of time, present at all times at once. In this baby, in owning him as our king, we join the Son of God in his chosen weakness, and find strength we could never possess on our own. There’s nothing to do but give him our praise, enthrone him with our thanksgiving, and do what the witnesses to this remarkable event couldn’t help but do: tell the world. TAP
Rebecca Osborn is an Assistant Priest at the Church of the Holy Comforter in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. Her husband Jared is the rector, and together they have three daughters.
In the Bleak Midwinter
Christina Rossetti 1872
CRANHAM
Gustav Holst 1906
By Ross Hebb
WHAT A WAY to begin a Christmas carol – In the bleak midwinter! But this is exactly how poet Christina Rossetti opens her powerful ode to the Christmas story. Canadians, more than most, know just how bleak, inhospitable, and depressing winter can be. There is the darkness, the howling wind, the penetrating cold and the snow. Rossetti invokes these images of cold, frozen barrenness in her opening verses. Although an English poet, she seems to know a thing or two about winter. For her, snow is not light, flaky and playful but hard, cold and barren. She further emphasizes that snow does not just come once but continues and persists. In the end, snow predominates and the landscape becomes a desolate, windswept wasteland – snow on snow.
And thus, her poignant contrasts begin. Our God whom heaven cannot hold, nor earth sustain has come and a stable place sufficed. But Rossetti is not content with simple contrasts – the uncontainable deity and a stable stall; Rossetti insists on inversions as well. She references His second coming as Judge and Ruler first – before any mention of the Lord God Almighty in the stall. It is this stroke of poetic genius that gives her second verse such imaginative force.
And the contrasts continue. The third stanza highlights the heavenly worship by Cherubim and the prostration (falling down) of the other angels with the earthly realities of the manger. But it is not as straightforward a contrast as it first appears. The point is to emphasize the condescension of the Incarnation. Heaven is His proper realm and worship and adoration His right and due, but that has been all left for this extraordinary coming forth to us. Now the throne has been left behind for a human form that requires swaddling rags, soft hay and that hungers for mother`s milk. And the worship of angels has been substituted for the adoration of sentient, but irrational, beasts: ox and ass and camel.
Finally, the contrasts narrow and come to their point but it is again no simple point. Here at the fourth stanza liturgy enters in. With echoes of both the Sanctus (Holy, Holy, Holy) of the Eucharist and the Te Deum of Morning Prayer, Rossetti pointedly focuses the contrast between the heavenly and the earthly. While Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven laud and magnify His name and Cherubim and Seraphim continually cry out His praises, Mary, in her maiden bliss, worshipped the Beloved with a human kiss! The Incarnate God embraces full humanity and receives that which is His due as a child – a mother’s kiss! Such is God`s love in coming thus to us and such is Mary`s simple, profound and infinitely appropriate response!
Rossetti is not done, for the poem and the story are not yet finished. Thus far we have viewed the beautiful, highly emotive scene but that is insufficient. This story demands more. And more is not just possible but more is necessary. We are not meant to be spectators, mere voyeurs of the Divine condescension, for the human nature He assumed is our nature. We are the ones to whom He came. We are the ones He left heaven behind to reach. He came down to us in order that we might be raised to where He came from. This is not divine tale, elevating myth or divine allegory – this is a story about us, for us and to us.
Remember the bleak midwinter, the snow on snow? That is where we find ourselves. In spite of, or perhaps because of, our warm homes, well-fitting clothes and plentiful gifts, there is a persistent barrenness in many lives, a craving for something more. We live in a society engrossed with immediate gratification but one that so often cannot achieve any lasting satisfaction, a culture so given to achieving and consuming here and now that all sense of the Other, of the Transcendent, is missing. We crave true connections and meaningful relationships but we are addicted to relating to one another simply as an audience for our texts, tweets and posts. This story is an antidote to the emptiness of retail therapy; it is a response to the superficial nature of online friendships and the cynical knowledge that we are all being manipulated by algorithms.
The key lies in response, our response to the Divine move at Christmas that this carol celebrates. But our response must be of a different order from all those things our society values. It must be as true, as simple and as sincere as Mary`s. Divine love responded to by love – Mary`s kiss of love and our hearts filled with love returned. TAP
Canon Dr. Ross Hebb is Rector of St Peter’s, Fredericton.
Shepherds in the Field Abiding
G.R. Woodward 1910
IRIS
French Carol Melody
Arr. by Martin Shaw 1928
By Catherine Sider Hamilton
SHEPHERDS! Tell us: what did you see?
So the carol begins, and suddenly we are in a field outside Bethlehem with a few shepherds who one night two thousand years ago saw a startling sight. There they are, fresh from angel song, still shaking their heads, perhaps, in wonder and we say, “What is it? Tell us…we heard there was an angel, seraph bright. Tell us what you saw and heard that night.”
The shepherds in their turn speak right to us. We beheld – it’s true; it sounds incredible but it is true – we saw God. We saw God. King of bliss he is, and he was in a stable. Right there he was in the hay, with the animals, just a child with his mother, swathed and cradled in a stable, God incarnate, King of bliss. And the angel song! Heaven sang, that night, while we stood there beside him with our sheep, while his mother watched over him, there where he lay in the straw. Angels sang “Glory!” Gloria in excelsis deo.
The shepherds leap off the pages of scripture and out of the ancient ages as we sing their carol, and here we are in the midst of them, hearing angel song. Here we are singing the angel song, singing it with the shepherds as they tell us the gospel story. But it is no story. “We beheld,” they say – “it is no fable”: that crucial aside, so hard to sing well! It is no fable, but the one true word at the heart of our lives. For there has been a birth, and we have seen God in the child in Bethlehem, in the child cradled by his mother, swathed and cradled in a stable.
It is true, this story the shepherds tell: our God is the one who reigns from a stable, who walks with us in the Christ Child every night-time of our lives. King of glory, he is, king of bliss, and it is a few startled shepherds who sing his song. What kind of God is this, whom a seraph announces in a field of sheep outside a small Judaean town?
There is a special emphasis in this carol, in the well-known angel tidings: Peace, good will to all on earth. All on earth: there is nothing more earthy than a stable and these shepherds. The wonder is not just that God is with us, but that he is with us in this way, with these people. King of bliss, and a young woman is his mother; seraphim praise God incarnate, and it is night- workers of no particular repute who hear the song. It is they who sing the song: we know the God of glory through their eyes, on their lips. Shepherds are the gospel bearers. This is a God who gives shepherds a voice in the great tidings of his salvation. We beheld – it is no fable – God incarnate, King of bliss. That “we” is remarkable.
Angels sing on Christmas night, and shepherds are given a part in the song. Angels sing the birth of the King…and we are given a part in the song. As we sing, our voices are joined to the voices of those shepherds in first-century Palestine. Our voices are joined to the English shepherds who sang this song in Old Sarum in the year 1078, or so. Our voices are joined to the Norman shepherds who sang this song in France before them. In ancient Judaea, in medieval France, in the Sarum antiphoner, they sang this song, a chorus of praise joining the angel voices through the ages.
Glory to God in the highest! The shepherds bring us the song. Now in a winter land far from Bethlehem we hear their voices and we sing the cradled child, God incarnate, King of bliss. We too, by some gift of grace, have a voice in the good tidings: peace, good-will to all on earth. We too join the angel song:
Thanks, good shepherds, true your story;
Let us go to Bethlehem;
Angels hymn the king of glory
Carol we with you and them. TAP
Dr. Catherine Sider Hamilton is Priest-in-Charge at St Matthew’s Riverdale and Assistant Professor at Wycliffe College, Toronto.
As with Gladness Men of Old
William Chatterton Dix 1860
DIX
From a melody by Conrad Kocher 1838
By Don Harvey
MANY OF the traditional Carols and Lessons which we have come to anticipate and enjoy over the Christmas Season each year (sadly far too early before Christmas in recent times) include this beautiful old hymn, although it is neither a carol nor is it directly pertaining to Christmas – but rather to the Season of Epiphany that follows. Although we usually include the Star, the Magi, and the presenting of gifts with the tableau of the manger cradling the Precious Babe in that crude stable, we need to remind ourselves that these scenes are only indirectly part of the Christmas celebration.
I suppose it’s difficult not to assimilate them all into the one great event because, liturgically, after the 12 days of Christmas the Wise Men, their gifts and their camels are brought into the creche. Indeed, some of our churches will not put “the Kings” and their camels into their manger scenes until January 6th, and technically they are quite correct in withholding them until then.
Nor will turning to Holy Scripture, as we inevitably must, resolve the matter for us. To begin with, only one of the four Gospel writers (St. Matthew) makes any mention of this event at all, and even he does not tell us how many of these unexpected visitors there were. More significantly, he indicates that Jesus no longer was an infant as they, led by the star, “came to where the young child was.” This at least hints that this act of adoration occurred some time after the birth (some scholars suggest as much as two years) and thankfully that the Holy Family no longer was living in the stable.
But this is not the season for arguing over what scholars refer to as the Infancy Narratives. Surely, enough of that has been carried on over the years. Instead, the writer, William Chatterton Dix, reminds us of the wonderful truth that the Epiphany stresses so beautifully, namely that Jesus came not for a single race or nation (who, while expecting Him, failed to recognize Him), but rather to redeem the whole world, so loved by God.
Our hymn then does draw us into the events of Epiphany as well as Christmas, with one event complementing, rather than contradicting, the other.
And then there are the gifts. As this hymn reminds us “As they offered gifts most rare / at thy table rude and bare…” we certainly can get mixed feelings about gifts. It seems that the giving of presents has, especially in our secular culture (although by no means confined to it), usurped the fact that only one gift matters in the long run – God’s gift to us, given through sheer and unqualified LOVE.
So then, this year, as always, I expect to join in singing the touching and challenging words of this hymn, and then, as always, to go home and read yet again O. Henry’s memorable classic The Gift of the Magi*. It is that short but delightful little tale of two young people wanting to show their love to one another in a rather tangible way, in spite of the fact that they were penniless. And when I come to the last line where Jim tells Della “to put on the chops” I again, as always, will weep a little (I find myself doing that a lot these days) and reflect on this hymn. Then, in my mind’s eye I picture these “ancient sages at His cradle” and easily convince myself that Christmas and Epiphany must overlap, and even intertwine, because without it the story of Christmas would be little more than a tribal tale.
After we reach this conclusion then, like the Magi, we should be “filled with exceeding great Joy.” TAP
The Rt. Rev. Donald F Harvey is Episcopal Vicar for the Anglican Network in Canada and lives with his wife Trudy in St John’s, Nfld.
