A rose of such virtue

We’ve had music about the visitors to the stable, but it’s getting close to the birth, so I think it’s time to bring it back to the person critical to such events.

The mother.

Yes, Mary has been a real trouper throughout the months that led up to the Nativity—fielding visits from archangels, enduring all the village gossip about her pregnancy, morning sickness, retaining water, having to pee all the time… (Look—do you think the presumptively male celestial beings considered maybe cutting her a little slack in this regard, tossing her a prophylaxis against the water retention or the nausea? No, I thought not.) Then, in her final month of pregnancy, here she is, riding an ass all the way to Bethlehem—can you imagine her misery?

Yeah, yeah—carrying the godhead, blah, blah, blah. That don’t feed the bulldog when it comes to the discomfort of being in your 39^th week and having to make a long journey. On a donkey. In winter.

Our Medieval and Renaissance brothers and sisters often referred to Mary as a rose, as in today’s pick, “There Is No Rose”, which dates from around the 15^th Century. It’s interesting to note that the “virtue” in the opening line isn’t just purity or chastity, but strength and even power. The Latin root of “virtue” is “vir”: man, virility. Those Romans might have thought strength and power exclusively male characteristics, but we needn’t be bound by those limitations.

The opening line encompasses this:

There is no rose of such virtue

As is the rose that bore Jesu.

Yeah—the teen-aged rose who made the conscious choice to take on this mission, from the git-go knowing that there was a shedload of pain involved in it for her. Who endured the village gossip, had to explain to her fiancé that she was pregnant by the Holy Ghost, who got on that ass and went to Bethlehem to have her baby in a stable, graciously receive all those gawkers—both high-born and low—and then packed up to flee to Egypt to avoid Herod’s soldiers. And who, in the end, followed him to Calvary to witness his particularly ghastly death.

So let’s hear Benjamin Britten’s arrangement of “There Is No Rose”, sung by the Elektra Women’s Choir, from Vancouver, B.C. Consider the power in these voices as you listen.