New Year's Eve

Gas station calendar
from my hometown, with a
New Year's theme.

I don't usually "do" New Year's Eve. Years ago, I was invited by Sunday school friends to their party, but I didn't know anyone but them, and at that time I was too shy to strike up conversations with strangers. So I thanked them for inviting me, went home, and called a friend----who was crabby with me because she was already in bed. Oh, well. The only other time that I remember intentionally doing New Year's Eve was 1999, when the year turned to 2000 (still technically the 20th century, but cool nevertheless), and we hoped all our technology wouldn't suddenly end at the stroke of midnight----an apocalyptic, Cinderella catastrophe. That evening, my wife and daughter and I enjoyed the company of friends at their house. I think we watched Finding Forrester before turning to the televised Times Square celebration.

Since I’m a teacher, I think of the autumn months as the beginning of my life’s yearly rhythms. I started kindergarten in September 1962, and thereafter, except for two years, late summer has been for me the start of a school year, either as a student or an instructor. It's a familiar and reliable pattern: teachers and students return to school after the summer; the fall semester progresses, winter arrives, and then the spring (not only a season but a semester). After spring, the year rounds out with the renewing months of summer before school starts again. No one sings “Auld Lang Syne” in the autumn, unless they really like that song, I suppose…. but still, I do love the fall-through-summer pattern of life.  

The pattern works in a more formal religious way. The first Sunday of Advent—falling in late autumn and traditionally marking a time of introspection and renewal—is the beginning of the Christian calendar. Jews begin their year with the ten-day period of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur earlier in the fall. During those “Days of Awe” (Yamim Noraim), a person does honest soul searching, corrects the previous year’s wrongs if possible, and starts fresh. The year’s cycle of Torah readings draws to a close. The brand-new year brings opportunities for good deeds and renewed devotion—a much better orientation than the ephemeral New Year’s resolutions that many of us try.

Even though my birthday is in early January---and so my own years and the calendar years are virtually the same----I still tend to think of January 1 as just another ol' winter day----a holiday for businesses---in the middle of a three-week pause between the first third of the actual year (fall semester) and the second third (spring semester). Alternately, January 1 is about a month into the actual Christian year----the 7th day of Christmastide.

These are just my feelings----a teacher's feelings. Fortunately the world didn't end on December 21st, at the Mayan calendar supposedly predicted. Otherwise, I wouldn't be blogging this....

The Sacrament of Snow

I always resented the song “White Christmas,” just a little bit. It’s a lovely song, vastly popular, of course. But I thought it set up the yearly, often disappointed expectation of snow on Christmas day. (The seldom-heard introduction refers to the usually snow-free Beverly Hills which elicits nostalgia for snowy holidays past.) What does it matter if snow falls on Christmas or not?

But I realized there is much more to the expectation of a snowy Christmas! The Christmas 2012 issue of BBC Music magazine has an interesting article, “A Christmas Carol” (pp. 27-34) by David Owen Norris. The author writes that, in pre-Victorian England, harvest season was poised to be a more beloved time of year than Christmas; harvest time rather than Christmas had an appealing narrative of well-being, plenty, and human relationships, while Christmas was just a cold winter holiday that elicited painful longing. However, Norris states that Christmas carols began to make a comeback during the early Victorian period, eclipsing harvest-related hymns. Consequently, Christmas grew in popularity during the 1800s, partly on the basis of this musical appeal.

The real innovation, though, came from Rev. John Mason Neale (1818-1866). He and a colleague produced hymn books for churches. A 16th century Finnish song concerning spring and flowers inspired Neale to write new lyrics, which became “Good King Wenceslas.” What was so innovative about Neale’s song, is that it is the first time a Christmas song links the holiday with snow (p. 31)!  You would think someone would have associated snow and Christmas, but according to Norris, other songwriters (even Scandinavians) had made reference to Christmas cold weather (“The First Noel” is an example) but not to Christmas snow.

Neale's association of snow and Christmas was brilliant and influential. From the publication of “Good King Wenceslas” in 1853, other poets and songwriters found inspiration in the image of Christmas snow, notably Christina Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter,” but also many others (pp. 31, 33).

The religion-science debates of the era provided a different kind of inspiration for the theme of Christmas snow. The Darwinian debates that threatened to erode religious belief necessitated new metaphors for spiritual truth. Snow---peaceful, beautifying, and descended from above---became a perfect metaphor; as Norris writes (p. 34), “If science was concerned with facts, religion with miracles, then the Victorians found a snowy bridge between them.”

Furthermore, that affirmation of miracles was better expressed through song than prose. “Only song could convey these new meanings of Christmas snow... The familiar yet fundamentally irrational human act of singing together was the perfect medium. (Irrationality is important to us in matters of the spirit: look at the idea of carols by candlelight, which could only become truly symbolic once electricity had made the candles pointless.)....

“The very mirage of a white Christmas... became a new way of thinking about miracles, allowing snow to become the outward sign of an inward grace---a secular sacrament. Snow imagined, snow longed for, makes space for a Christmas miracle” (p. 34).

Karl Barth on Christmas & Easter

Nativity and Chippewa St. traffic
at the Catholic Supply Store 

“'The Word became flesh,' εγενετο, we read in John 1:14….'The Word became'---that points to the centre, to the mystery of revelation, the happening of the inconceivable fact that God is among us and with us. If there is any synthetic judgment at all it is this one, that ‘the Word became.’ But can or will the Word of God become? Does He not surrender thereby His divinity?....’The Word became’---if that is true, and true in such a way that a real becoming is thereby expressed without the slightest surrender of the divinity of the Word, its truth is that of a miraculous act, an act of mercy on the part of God…..

“Now it is no accident that for us the Virgin birth is paralleled by the miracle of which the Easter witness speaks, the miracle of the empty tomb. These two miracles belong together. They constitute, as it were a single sign, the special function of which, compared with the other signs and wonders of the New Testament witness, is to describe and mark out the existence of Jesus Christ, amid the many other existences in human history, as that human historical existence in which God is Himself, God is alone, God is directly the Subject, the temporal reality of which is not only called forth, but is identical with it.

"The Virgin birth at the opening and the empty tomb at the close of Jesus’ life bear witness that this life is a fact marked off from all the rest of human life, and marked off in the first instance, not by our understanding or our interpretation, but by itself. Marked off in regard to its origin: it is free of the arbitrariness which underlies all our existences. And marked off in regard to its goal; it is victorious over the death to which we are all liable. Only within these limits is it what it is and is it correctly understood, as the mystery of the revelation of God. …

"In Jesus Christ God comes forth out of the profound hiddenness of His divinity in order to act as God among us and upon us. That is revealed and made visible to us in the sign of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, but it is grounded upon the fact signified by the Virgin birth, that here in this Jesus God Himself has really come down and concealed Himself in humanity. It is because He was veiled here that He could and had to unveil Himself as He did at Easter.”

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. I, The Doctrine of the Word of God, Second Half-Volume (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), 156, 182-183

Laute nacht, heilige nacht

This evening, my family and I are all participating in our church's Christmas Eve service. I anticipate that we'll sing "Silent Night." 

Last year, when we attended the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra's Christmas concert, which ended with a brief sing-along.  We sang the verse, "the world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing," and shortly, we also sang "Silent Night" and its line, "all is calm, all is bright." That set me thinking. The image of a calm, reverent world surrounding Jesus' birth is appealing, but what if the city was busy and noisy as Jesus was born? Bethlehem had no guest rooms available, for instance, in Luke's account. What if Mary gave birth amid noises of the street beyond the stable area, and no one noticed (except the angel-guided shepherds) because too much was going on in town? What if Christ's birth was a "noisy night, holy night"?

I could make a point that a noisy, crowded Bethlehem would be in keeping with our busy, cluttered lives each December. But then I think: even the shepherds were busy! From what I've read, shepherds had many responsibilities with their flocks, including continual surveillance. The great gift was that God interrupted the shepherds' lives and helped them see and understand. We may seek to prepare ourselves spiritually during Advent, but God's initiative is still everything.

Thus, the images of "silent night" and "solemn stillness" are apt poetically: when God does something, we have to pause and catch up in amazement and relief.

Elizabeth the Prophet

Today is the Fourth Day of Advent. The Gospel lesson was Mary’s visit to Elizabeth. Several things we can gain from this story, including the lovely words of the Ave Maria, Benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”

When I wrote a lesson on this passage a few years ago, I focused on the role of Elizabeth. In those days before the first Pentecost, the Holy Spirit empowered only certain people to prophesy, and when Elizabeth heard Mary coming, she was “filled with the Holy Spirit” (verse 41). By the Spirit’s power, Elizabeth preached the Gospel of Jesus before his birth! She recognized Mary as Jesus’ blessed mother. She interpreted her own physical discomfort as God’s sign.

Elizabeth was a prophet, in other words! She was a prophet for this purpose, in a long line of Hebrew prophets which, most believed, had ended centuries before. My question is: If the Spirit came to a person who previously had been perceived as disfavored by God (as childlessness was then believed to be), doesn’t the Spirit now comes to all kinds of persons, whether favored or disfavored in society? What might the Spirit be up to in our present world that might startle us?  

Blue Christmases

My mother passed away on September 30th, and during the subsequent weeks I wondered how the holidays would be. While I had autumn days of feeling horrible, I haven’t done too badly in December. I think that’s partly because I’ve been busy with the semester’s end, and also I’ve tried not to fight the sad feelings when they come; I’ll take a walk (or a nap, LOL), and pace myself through a rough day. Fortunately my work allows for this; if I were still in a job where I had to be "on" all the time, I'd be struggling. I also paced the holidays. For instance, for the first and probably last time, I worked on Christmas cards in November, so that I wouldn’t have that pressure in December. (We send about 120 cards each year.)

But an empty feeling stops me a few times each day. Something interesting happens during the day and I automatically think that I’ll tell my mother----but, no, I won’t. Also, I think about when we can drive over and visit her during the holidays, and I remember again that I'm in a habit of thinking that no longer reflects reality. This morning, getting ready for church, I felt blue and edgy, not wanting to see people very badly. Later, I felt draggy and clumsy, but rallied by the evening.

The fact that Mom has gained the promises of eternal life helps me stay oriented on the religious hope, which is a vast source of comfort. Mom was 93 and very frail. I freely admit that if I were suffering a different kind of grief this season----like the loss of a much younger person, etc.---I would also be struggling spiritually. In fact, a friend has been dealing with "stuff" this month, which in turn has made me wonder to God why some of us have to face adversity. God's promises are true, but much about life we don't understand, and struggle is part of our journey.    

I figured that the internet would have resources on grief and loss during the holidays. Sure enough, there are many. This piece has several ideas for acknowledging your loss and helping yourself during this time. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/22/grief-and-loss-holidays_n_2346372.html#slide=1912741

This piece also concerns ways to deal with grief and loss over the holidays.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/handling-grief-during-the-holidays

This piece was interesting because it concerns congregations that have “Blue Christmas services” http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/21/blue-christmas-grief/1785833/  It’s good to work on grief within a religious context, but when you’re down, a very upbeat church service can feel hurtful and exhausting. An intentional effort of congregations to address the needs of the grieving, as these congregations are doing, can be so helpful.

With Christmas Day fast approaching, I need to think of a few, creative ways to interweave the loss of Mom with the holiday. One thing I’ve already done is to mostly avoid the popular Christmas music---and the sometimes painful nostalgia of loved ones and home---with classical religious music that focuses on Advent and Christmas hope. I think I’ll also make an effort to call some friends tomorrow and Tuesday, especially those for whom the day may be lonely or distressing. Some kind of informal ritual in remembrance of both my parents would be good to incorporate into the observance.

What are some things that help you when you're feeling grief, especially over the holidays?

Discovering New Seasonal Music

Something I love to do during Advent and Christmas is to play seasonal music at home. This year I’ve tried to explore some new (to me) and interesting repertoire, like John Tavener’s “Ex Maria Virgine,” recorded on the Naxos label. The 2005 piece is a 10-part work for choir and orchestra and reflects Tavener’s Orthodox faith in the series of words on Mary. It’s not your usual Christmas music! He uses beautiful melodies but also discordant and dark music, for instance, the sequence when the choir jarringly repeats Ave, Rex!

More meditative but still thought-provoking is a CD “Puer Natus Est” on the Harmonia Mundi lable. The British ensemble Stile Antico performs several Tudor-period works, like Thomas Tallis’ seven part mass, “Puer natus est nobis,” along with several pieces by William Byrd (for instance, “Ecce Virgo, “Rorate Caeli”), John Taverner (“Audivi vocem de coelo”), John Sheppard (“Verbum caro factum est”), Robert White’s Magnificat, and the anonymous piece that is the CD’s title work.

This season I’ve also been listening for the first time to Heinrich Schütz’s “Christmas Story” (“Historia der Geburt Jesu Christi”) which premiered in Dresden for the 1660 Christmas Day vespers. Narrated by the tenor Evangelist, Schütz’s oratorio takes us from Christ’s birth through the return of the holy family from Egypt.

The Christmas 2012 issue of BBC Music magazine has a review of the better recordings of “Christmas Story,” and that issue also has a nice article about Ralph Vaughan Williams, who is always my favorite composer. Although his pieces aren't new to me, I like to think about discovering his “Fantasia on Christmas Carols,” “Hodie,” and “The First Nowell” back in the 1980s, and more recently the ballet “On Christmas Night,” which had its premier on CD on the Chandos label just a few years ago. The author calls RVW a "Christmas loving agnostic" who always had fresh ideas about Christmas music; in fact, “The First Nowell,” a nativity play, was the piece he was working on when he died in 1958.

Another interesting piece for this season is Oliver Messiaen's organ work, "La Nativité du Seigneur," premiered in 1936.  Honoring the birth of Christ via nine pieces (which in turn honors Mary's maternity), the piece is also revolutionary in organ music for Messiaen's tonal and rhythmic innovations.