I’m jumping the gun a tad today; tomorrow being Advent II
is the one focused on peace. But I’ve been thinking about peace for a while and
it is at the forefront of my mind right now.
“It Is Well with my Soul” was written in 1873, by a
lawyer-hymnist named Horatio Spafford. Spafford had experienced multiple
losses—death of his four-year-old son, financial collapse following the Great
Chicago Fire and then the deaths of all four of his daughters when the ship on
which they were sailing to England sank.
That’s a lot of grief for anyone to carry.
But we none of us get out of this life without grief. Even
in Advent. And even though “It Is Well with my Soul” isn’t Advent-specific,
this is what I’m hearing in my heart this weekend. Here is the choir of the New
Apostolic Church of Southern Africa singing it.
Today is the feast day of Saint Nicholas, when we commemorate
the Fourth-Century bishop of Myra, one of the participants of the
Council of Nicaea. This is actually the day he died, which makes a
bit of a change for celebrations.
(Although his death is kind of a thing; at least his corpse
was. Because about 600 years after he died, Italian merchants robbed his grave
in Myra and took his body to Bari. I’m not touching the issues around what
possesses a group of people to do that kind of stuff and expect to remain in
God’s favor.)
He’s the patron of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant
thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers and students. I’m trying to think of
what commonalities connect those groups, but without luck.
We of course have conflated Saint Nicholas with major gift
giving (which might explain the children, merchants and pawnbrokers; possibly
the repentant thieves, too), via the Dutch version of his name, Sinterklaas.
And today is the day (instead of the 25th) when children in a number
of countries get their gifts (if they’ve been good; if they’ve been naughty,
they get coal or switches, depending on the local custom; you might even
be eaten
by a giant cat).
To honor the good bishop, we’re having the “Little Saint
Nick”. I must confess that I don’t find this the best example of the Beach
Boys’ oeuvre, but it serves the purpose.
Today’s Advent offering should probably come closer to Christmas, because it’s about the shepherds. But I feel shepherdy now, and I want to remind y’all about how the son of God appeared to humanity: born in a cow stall, among working beasts, and first visited by shepherds. If there’s any occupation that screams “working stiff” louder than shepherd, I don’t know what it is.
(Okay, factory workers, hotel housekeepers, migrant crop pickers. But these came about centuries after the Nativity, so we have to work within context. Shepherds had lonely lives, out in the raw elements with just their sheep and dogs for company. That the Almighty chose to let this lot in first on the secret of his manifestation says something about the whole point of the exercise.)
“Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow” was sung by African-American slaves in the ante-bellum South. It was first published as “A Christmas Plantation Song” in Slave Songs of the United States, in 1867. The songs in this collection were gathered during the War Between the States, and the melody is probably from the coastal islands off South Carolina and Georgia. A lot of those songs would have been call and response, which is how “Rise Up, Shepherd” is framed.
Back in those days so glorified now by Republicans, enslaved people were property, to be used and disposed of at their master’s pleasure, like cattle and sheep. White owners, almost always professing Christians, were conflicted about converting their slaves. In one respect, it made no more sense than spreading the gospel to their cattle or sheep; property’s property, duh. But in another, preaching Christ’s teachings was downright radical—all that talk about all of us being one under the Lord kinda runs contrary to the whole master-slave thing. What if—and bear with me on this for a minute—what if all those black people got the notion that spiritual liberation should be followed by, you know, actual physical liberation? Scary stuff, right?
So it was not at all uncommon for colonial legislatures to enact laws to ensure clarity on this issue: white guys = free; black guys = not free. So ordained by both God and man; end of. Maryland was the first colony, in 1664, to legislate that baptism had no effect on the social status of enslaved people. Southern theologians intoned that slaves had no soul; ergo treating them as property was copacetic, whether baptized or not.
Just like cattle and sheep.
(For the record, there are no reports to my knowledge of plantation owners baptizing their cattle or sheep. It could have happened, I suppose, but they didn’t document it in the parish ledger.)
Generally speaking, enslaved persons were also kept illiterate; no need to be able to read to pick cotton, tend babies or shoe horses. Also—man, that Gospel; you do not want anyone in captivity to have free access to that sucker, to parse and to ponder and to come up with weird-ass conclusions like Jesus preached to the poor and had no particular love for the rich, and what do we make of that? No, no—none of that Protestant notion of putting the Bible into everyone’s hands so s/he can build an individual relationship with God. You might as well give the field hands guns.
Also, slaves were forbidden to gather in large numbers, where they might talk with one another, share information about their conditions and maybe discuss things that property owners would prefer that their chattel goods didn’t discuss.
So being unable to write or congregate, generations of men, women and children developed a musical code for communication with one another, across geographical and chronological boundaries. This code would be spirituals and gospel music. When you dig into some of these songs, they’re about as incendiary as it gets; they’re just cloaked in metaphor. “Follow the Drinking Gourd”, “Jacob’s Ladder”, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—they all sound kind of meek and pious, but they’re built on pain and anger and aspirations.
And so is “Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow”. I mean, how on earth did slaveholders even hear those first two words without the hair on the backs of their necks standing up? The response to the call—twice in the verses and twice again in the refrain—is literally telling the listeners to rise up. And follow that star to freedom.
This is really clever—the star followers in the Nativity story were the wise men, the three kings, the guys who’d have been identified with the slave owning class; not shepherds, who clearly align more with the slaves. Also, the star in the song is in the East, and the one slaves followed was in the North, so a bit more subterfuge. No, no, massa—don’t worry your white head; this song isn’t about slaves escaping or rebelling or anything like that. It’s all about your blue-eyed Jesus.
The song urges the shepherds/slaves to ditch their responsibilities to follow that star. I have to admit that it seems irresponsible and unshepherdly to abandon their sheep; I feel bad for the animals. But if we’re talking tobacco and cotton fields, I can totally see slipping away and hoofing it north of the Mason-Dixon line. Massa can bloody well get up and milk the cows himself. Or pay someone to do it.
In addition to the call/response framework, I also notice that “Rise Up, Shepherd” has what I call a work rhythm to it. Like sea shanties—it’s steady with a strong beat, which you could use to coordinate repetitive labor, like swinging a scythe or pulling ropes.
I do not know why I can’t find a really good recording of this for you; all the versions out there are way too far removed from the slave quarters—all laundered and pressed, with no dirt or sweat in sight. Here’s the best I could manage, from a Belgian choir.
You have to admit that the Victorians were aces at writing
Christmas carols and songs. “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, “Away in a Manger”,
“We Three Kings” and “It Came upon a Midnight Clear” all date from the years
when that little woman reigned over the empire and set the standards for middle
class stuffiness and rectitude that still pervade the Anglo-Saxon world today.
She also jump started Ye Olde Christmas Traditions
(including the Christmas tree that her husband brought over from Saxe Coburg)
that pretty much define what the holiday should be in a the minds of millions
today. Between her and Charles Dickens, we have a lot to live up to.
“Once in David’s Royal City” dates from 1848. And since we’re
still in the first week of Advent—what I like to call the “holy moly, he’s
coming” stage—this is a good anthem for midweek. It's also a reminder to those who call themselves Christians and yet eagerly await the criminalization of the homeless and the indigent of Christ's human birth in the lowliest of circumstances, because there was "no room" for his parents.
My pals at King’s College, Cambridge, begin their Christmas
Eve service with it as their processional. The arrangement they use
has a boy chorister sing the first verse solo and unaccompanied; second and
third verses are the full choir; and the congregation and organ join in on the
fourth. It’s truly stunning, especially the last verse with the descant.
Perhaps not traditional (yet), but one of my favorite pieces
for the season is Jackson Browne’s “The Rebel Jesus”. Written by Browne
for and performed here with The Chieftains on their 1991 Christmas CD, the
lyrics pretty well cover the shift in Christianity in the past few decades.
They certainly apply to the state of Christmas and evangelical Christianity
today—where the money-changers that Jesus threw out of the temple have taken
over mega-churches to preach the gospel of prosperity. Well, prosperity for
them, at least. Guarding the world with locks and guns—check. Guarding fine
possessions—yepper. The kill shot, though, is the line about anyone interfering
with the business of why the poor are poor: “they get the same as the rebel
Jesus.”
If anything, that’s only got worse in the decades since
this song was released. That gospel of prosperity’s added an amendment: if I
can’t be prosperous, please, God, at least make someone else worse off than me.
In the case of a brown baby born in a stable in the
backwater of empire, the idea of churches spending millions to cover up
long-term crimes against the most vulnerable of their parishes, of
televangelists in $3000 suits barely visible behind the pay-by-credit-card
logos and of Bible-spewing maniacs spraying innocent people with death on
full-auto is just surreal.
Moreover, it’s not clear to me when, exactly”, “spread the
word of the good news” morphed into “convert or die.” I mean, Jesus told his
disciples to go forth and preach, but if they came to a town where the people
weren’t receptive, they should move on and “shake the dust from their heels”.
He didn’t tell them to grind the disbelievers into dust.
Maybe it was Constantine the Great’s Edict of Milan in 313
CE, which ended Rome’s persecution of Christians. Or Theodosius’s 380 CE Edict
of Thessalonica, which made Christianity the official religion of the Roman
Empire. But somewhere between Bethlehem and now, when they became the dominant
religion in Western Europe and North America, we got to a woman carrying a
non-viable fetus that endangers her life not being able to receive healthcare
because Texas Republicans and “Christianity”.
And those Republicans on the national stage have the
unmitigated fucking temerity to whine that there’s a war on (white) Christians,
and they need government protection from persecution.
Here’s Browne and the Chieftains, laying it out for us.
About 17 minutes after a very difficult conversation with my
sister’s fiduciary on Saturday, an email came into my queue announcing that
an old friend had bought me a Jacquie Lawson Advent Calendar.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Jacquie Lawson Multiverse,
she’s a British designer who’s built an online enterprise around animated
cards; the apotheosis every year is her advent calendar. Twenty-five days of
music, games, recipes and interactive activities, themed to either a location
(Edinburgh) or time period (last year was Edwardian). This year it’s
contemporary (if idealized) Paris, my favorite city.
My sister started giving me the JL Advent Calendar about 12
or 13 years ago. Around the time she stopped, Dick put me on his gift list, so I’ve
been entertained and enchanted for more than a decade. This time, it means so much to me to
have this, because I know Penny’s time is short, and I view every animation and
hear every musical piece with her eyes and ears and her sense of delight. I'm doing it for both of us.
So today’s Advent piece is what Lawson tagged for yesterday’s
activity (bluebirds decorating an outside Christmas tree): “Un flambeau, Jeannette,
Isabelle”. The carol originated in Provence some time in the 17th Century.
It’s all about two farm girls who have found mother and child in the stable,
and rush to tell the villagers of their discovery.
I learned this in a French class, and in fact I don’t know
the English words. But here’s one translation of the first verse:
Bring a torch, Jeannette, Isabelle,
Bring a torch to the cradle, run!
It is Jesus, good folk of the village,
Christ is born and Mary’s calling,
Ah! Ah! Beautiful is the mother!
Ah! Ah! Beautiful is the son!
It goes on to describe a celebratory feast, and to admonish
the villagers to hush because the baby’s sleeping.
This recording is by the choir of Nôtre-Dame de Lourdes,
Maillardville, Coquitlam, British Columbia. It is one of the very few that have
not been John Rutterized.
My gratitude today is to Dick, to our friendship and to his kindness in sending me this gift every year. My gratitude is also to how it reminds me of Penny and her capacity for enchantment.
Well, here we are: fourth Sunday before Christmas, so it
must be Advent. Time for seasonal music as we prepare for the celebration of
Christ’s birth.
It’s hard for non-Christians (and even for a lot of
self-proclaimed Christians; looking at you, evangelicals) sometimes to
understand that Advent is meant to be a quiet period of reflection,
contemplation and preparation, not a frenzy of mandatory jollity, festive
frivolities and conspicuous consumption.
Yeah, good luck with that—we’re swimming against the tide
here. But every year I do my best to pull back some, slow down (ha!) and try to
consider quietude as an option.
This, of course, does not include music, so let’s strap in
and get ready for 25 days of Christmas and other seasonal music. (You know I’m
Catholic, not parochial.)
Most of the ten years I’ve posted for Advent, I’ve mixed
old favorites with new discoveries, as I tried to expand my approach to the
season. This year, given what the American electorate unleashed on the world, I’m
feeling the need to draw in a bit, to focus on comfort and hope.
Which is appropriate today, as the theme of Advent I is
hope—anticipating the arrival of the Messiah, who will flood the world with
light.
Light was a big deal for people whose lives were pretty
much circumscribed by the rising and falling of the sun. Many of the traditions
that have become part of Advent and Christmas revolve around pre-Christian
customs of defying the darkness and cold of winter by burning things, making
noise to wake up sleeping Nature and singing rather bolshy songs about various
types of beverages. Well get to all that later.
My offering for Advent I is “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel”, whose
text dates from Eighth or Nineth Century monastic life. It’s related to the O
Antiphons, Magnificat plainchant refrains sung at vespers (evening worship) during
the final seven days of Advent. However, it seems to me it’s appropriate for
the opening of this liturgical season. It speaks of the advent of Emmanuel—the personification
of “God be with us”—to deliver the world (identified as Israel) from sin,
warfare and darkness.
“Veni, Veni” came to the English tradition via Germany (as
did so many Christmas hymns and carols). We Anglophones know it as “O Come, O
Come, Emmanuel”. The Latin “Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel nascetur pro te, Israel” has
become “Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.”
Here it’s performed by The Gesualdo Six, a small British group devoted to renaissance polyphony. I like their restraint
in a song that often ends up being a Katy-bar-the-door choral blow-out.
