The Hopes and Fears of All the Years: Singing the Carols of Christmas
Photo courtesy David Beale
Joy to the World, the Lord is come;
Let earth God’s praises ring…
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing.
I must confess that I am a Christmas Christian. The world lives by the Incarnation of God, as Alfred North Whitehead asserts, and Christmas is the season of Incarnation. In the birth of a child, and in your own birth, the universal meets the particular and the infinite joins the finite in the wonders of God’s love. Like snowflakes falling on Christmas Eve, each birth is unique and unrepeatable, and with each birth, as Celtic spiritual guide and proto-process theologian Pelagius exclaims, we see the face of God. The Bethlehem Child is the Incarnation of the reality that gives birth to carols, hymns, generosity, and protest.
Photo courtesy Annie Spratt
Photo courtesy Anthony Delanoix
I must confess that I am also a Christmas carol Christian. I am a theologian by training, and I believe that the hymns we sing, even if they are not always “theologically correct,” represent embodied theology and spirituality. When we sing, we pray twice, as Augustine avers, and music, whether sung or instrumental, involves the whole person, body, mind, spirit, and relationships. As we sing, we breathe in the spirit of Bethlehem’s Child, and as we sing, we move, and in movement, images and emotions emerge. Our carols are “thin places,” as the Celtic Pagan and Christian spiritual guides proclaimed, where yesterday and today, infinite and finite, cosmos and cradle meet. The word is made flesh in a manger and in every child in the messy incarnation of the Bethlehem Child. Indeed, as another carol reminds us, in our singing and remembering of the carols of Christmas and the Child of Bethlehem, “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in you tonight.”
Photo courtesy Kolby Milton
No one can ever accuse me of being a liturgical fundamentalist. During my years as a congregational pastor, I began placing carols in the order of worship on the Second Sunday of Advent, sponsored carol sings along with Solstice/Longest Night Services, and sang carols through the Feast of Epiphany. Our Cape Cod summer worship services were punctuated by “Joy to the World” – Christmas in July! – as a reminder that “joy” is at the heart of faith, the non-human world “heaven and nature” sings, and that our faith is not in a Second Coming of an absent deity but a Millisecond Coming, the birth of God and the awakening of possibility in every moment and encounter of our lives. The natural state of life is joy, and deep down all things praise God, and, as theologian and Claremont housemate of an earlier era Jay McDaniel exclaims, even the stars pray!
Photo courtesy Eberhard Grossgasteiger
Christmas carols pierce the veil of yesterday and today. When I sing carols, I feel the sighs too deep for words. I smell cookies baking and see the luminescent tree in my childhood home in the Salinas Valley, California. I hear my mother saying, “Let us go to the land of sweets” as she pulled out a box of See’s Candy, a treat we only indulged in during the Christmas season. My parents Everett and Loretta, and brother Bill, are beside me in the Ever-flowing Now as I sing “Joy to the World,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” or “Silent Night.” I remember my first Christmas forty-five years ago with my life companion Kate, and the Christmas Eve I walked with our son to Georgetown University Hospital for his final chemotherapy treatments. In those difficult days, “the hopes and fears of all the years” met. My heart is filled with joy and tears of remembrance and joy flow.
Photo courtesy Annie Spratt
Consciousness, as Whitehead says, is the tip of the iceberg of experience, and when I listen to carols or sing them in church, I am in touch with unspoken memories and find myself deep down connected with the communion of saints, the good ancestors of my life and of Christian – and non-Christian – history.
Christmas is the season of Incarnation, and we join our joyful carols with the realities of life in Bethlehem in the first and twenty-first centuries. The Galilean vision has been stifled by Caesar’s lust for power in the church and government. The realism of Christmas is revealed in the commitment to rejoice – and be empowered to be incarnational people and agents of the moral and spiritual arcs of the universe, helping to further the teleology of the universe in its aim at Beauty – while presenting an alternative to white Christian nationalism in our nation, consumerism and greed, and war-making in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and Sudan. We can play “Silent Night,” and pray for a time when “all is calm, all is bright,” as we listen to the “seven o’clock news,” with Simon & Garfunkel,[1] and know that there is a deeper hymn as we hear the bells on Christmas Day, pealing “more loud and deep”:
"God is not dead, nor doth God sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to all."[2]
[1] “Seven 0’Clock News/Silent Night,” Simon & Garfunkel. (1966)
[2] “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Photo courtesy Lex Melony
