Wonderful, Counselor

We’re rounding the corner on the big day, so I think we can now declare the birth. We’ve got today and tomorrow to get our ducks (or partridges and French hens) in a row; shepherds are minding their flocks; the caravan of Wise Men is en route (hope they don’t pitch up along the Rio Grande—we could have a whole new ending to this story), Joseph and Mary are within a day of Bethlehem…

Yeah—let’s have “For unto us a child is born” from Messiah.

The text (as is most of Part I of the oratorio) is from Isaiah. (Isaiah 9:6, to be precise.) I love Isaiah—the language and imagery are stunningly beautiful. Pick up any chapter and start reading; that’s balm to the troubled soul. I particularly am taken by the notion that a son is given…unto us. All of us, every nation, every condition, every status. This to me is the real promise of the Christmas story, and I’m sorry that it gets lost in the Christo-fascist evangtaliban’s ramming their vision of Jesus as a White nationalist, misogynist purveyor of the gospel of prosperity with a poker up his butt and hatred in his heart down everyone’s throats.

So listen to the Academy of Ancient Music, VOCES8 and Apollo5 impart the words of the prophet.

 

Jingle bell hop

Hmm, three days before Christmas. Anticipation (and probably anxiety) levels are mounting, supermarket parking spaces are disappearing; it’s crunch time.

So, let’s have Jerry Helms singing his 1957 “Jingle Bell Rock”. It’s kind of like doing CPR to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive”: it helps you get ‘er done.

Let me frame this by saying that “Jingle Bell Rock” will be forever associated for me with the opening of that iconic 1987 film Lethal Weapon. So that’s what I’m giving you:

It’s been probably a decade or two since I last watched the movie, but I was instantly struck by how absolutely 80s’ the woman is—hair, makeup and nails. Talk about yer blast from the past…

Shine over white forests

We’re at the Winter Solstice, that point in the calendar where those in the Northern Hemisphere experience the longest night. For millennia, humans have found ways—physical and spiritual—to defend against the darkness; one of them is to celebrate the turning of the cycle. After tonight, night retreats day by day until balance is achieved at the equinox, and then the tide turns again at the Summer Solstice.

Probably since the origins of humanity, people have celebrated this annual event, giving thanks for the return of the sun, gathering around bonfires, singing, banging on things, eating and drinking. Before the domestication of fire to candles, followed by gas lights and then by electricity, knowing that the hours of darkness would not in fact continue to grow was comforting in a world full of perils.

The festival we know as Christmas was overlaid on older traditions; the birth of the Son of God has perhaps more dramatic impact if it’s celebrated around the Solstice rather than sometime in Spring, which makes more meteorological and astronomical sense. The early Church accomplished two goals with the coopting: subsumed pagan sun worship into Christian rites and gave themselves license to feast away the longest nights of the year.

Our Advent song today is “Jul, Jul, Stralande Jul”, which—as you may have guessed, is from Sweden, written a hundred years ago. It expresses the wish that Christmas bring light and peace. It’s performed here by the Kammerchor Wernigerode, which is composed of singers all over Germany. They meet about once a month to rehearse and perform concerts and they’ve been in existence for 20 years.

 

O Christmas tree

We’re going back 150 years for today’s Advent music. Franz Liszt wrote his Weinachtsbaum Suite in the 1870s, a set of 12 pieces for solo piano. They’ve also been arranged for two people at the same piano.

Liszt dedicated the suite to his eldest grandchile, Daniela von Bülow. It premiered on Christmas Day 1881 in her hotel room in Rome.

Here are Martha Angerich and Daniel Barenboim playing the four-handed version of one of them.

 

A song broke forth

We had angels yesterday for Advent, so today let’s talk star(s). Is it too early? The one we know as the Star of Bethlehem, that shown on the shepherds in the fields and guided the three Wise Men from the East to the manger doesn’t usually make its appearance until the 24^th.

Although, obviously it had been doing its guiding job for weeks, at least, because those Wise Men came…from the East. (Question: did those guys only travel at night? If so, what’s up with that? Or did it also shine during the day? If so, how is it that no one else remarked upon the anomaly?) And they didn’t actually arrive at the stable until two weeks after the birth. (Another question: Isn’t two weeks a long time to bunk in a stable? Is that how long it took to recover from giving birth? I mean—Mary didn’t have Blue Cross nagging at her to get out of the birthing place because they were only going to pay for one night…)

But back to the stars—they’re another metaphor for driving back the darkness. We who live in light-polluted urban areas don’t really appreciate a clear night where the stars truly are a canopy of light, so it may be a bit of a challenging notion for us. But stars were a major element in the world view of humans for millennia, really. I’ve always wondered how astronomers saw a cow or a woman or a crab in sidereal arrangements; I feel like I’ve joined the Titans just by recognizing Orion’s belt (and, actually, it turns out that what I see is the sword hanging from the belt). Maybe they were distilling wine long before the 12^th Century CE.

But what they saw in the stars guided them in traveling beyond the(ir) horizons, on land and at sea, so of course stars would figure in the story of the birth of the Messiah. Stars are critical to us reaching to become better. (Although there is the danger of putting too much emphasis on their influence; I think we’re still struggling with that balance.)

So today we have “Behold that Star”, written by Thomas W. Talley (1870-1952), chemistry professor, ethnographer and director of Fisk University’s Mozart Society. Fisk is a Historically Black institution in Tennessee. We don’t know when it was composed, but when Marian Anderson sang it, it was an arrangement published in 1912.

I’m giving you a recording of the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus singing it.

 

Gratitude Monday: Wing your flight

At the “Joyful Time” party she threw last summer, my friend Jacquie gave everyone an angel, to carry with us at all times. I couldn’t figure out how to attach it to my mobile phone, so I hooked it to one of the zipper pulls in my backpack. It’s next to my Aurora pen, which I bought in a pen shop down the street from Primo Levi’s house in Torino. So, in a sense, it’s looking after one of my most treasured possessions, even when it’s not on me.

We all need angels—whether or not you believe in heavenly creatures, we all need to know that someone is looking out for us, caring for us. Doesn’t have to be supernatural or even physically manifested. Just has to be.

One of my greatest and most constant gratitudes is that I have those presences in my life—Jacquie’s one of them. Someone who listens with love and makes time for me. I  

And also—I’m grateful that I can be an angel is other people’s lives. An inept one, to be sure, but I can listen with love and make time.

So today’s Advent music is “Angels from the Realms of Glory”, because angels were all over the Christmas story, from the Annunciation in a house in Nazareth to the shepherds on the slopes outside Bethlehem and beyond.

It’s a bit of a challenge to find a recording of “Angels” that doesn’t crib off of the music to “Angels We Have Heard on High”; this one should rightly be set to “Regent Square”. And I’m sad to say that the YouTube is infested with arrangements of “Regent Square” by one Dan Forrest, and they just suck. So this rendition by the First Presbyterian Church of Davenport, Iowa, in 2009 is the best I can do.

 

Drive the dark of doubt away

The theme of the third Sunday in Advent is “rejoice always”. If you remember that this particular season is meant to be four weeks of quiet contemplation and solemn preparation for the birth of the Savior, then you’ll see that breaking it up with one day of joy is a way of helping people get through this period of mini-Lent. That's why the candle changes color from purple to rose.

Our music today is based on the fourth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Nineth Symphony, the one where he set Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” to spectacular music. Schiller’s poem praises the brotherhood of man (which, in itself, is something we might think about in Advent 2023), which was something Beethoven passionately believed in. The Nineth Symphony premiered in 1824.

In 1907, American writer, educator and Presbyterian minister Henry Van Dyke wrote a poem to be set to the Beethoven music, called “The Hymn of Joy”. I confess that I rather prefer the original version to Van Dyke’s, but we’re at Gaudete Sunday and it’s time to bust loose in anticipation.

So I’m giving you the Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit version. Crank up the volume.