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Advent Calendar Day 21: O Come, O Come Emmanuel

Posted in Music, Religion with tags , , , on December 21, 2012 by bradellison

This song is old, far older than most of the other musical trappings of the season, and far more solemn.  The English words come from the 19th century, but they’re a translation from the medieval Latin, and the music is not less than five centuries old.  An Advent hymn, it’s a cry for deliverance from those in darkness.

We have heard the prophecy of salvation, redemption from captivity, and we believe it, but nothing is certain save that here and now we’re in darkness, beset on all sides, exiles in the night.  And so we cry out for our redeemer.

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Advent Calendar Day 20: Bless Us All

Posted in Music, Religion with tags , , , , , , on December 21, 2012 by bradellison

Not even gonna front here: I tear up single time I watch this.  Every single time.

The Muppet Christmas Carol was the first major Muppet production after the passing of Jim Henson, and it’s a good epitaph for him, ranking among the best work the Muppets ever did.  Henson appeared to Steve Whitmire in a dream the night before Whitmire was to record Kermit’s songs, and told him he’d do fine, so there’s a Christmas Miracle for you.  Henson’s characteristic warmth, optimism and compassion are certainly showcased in this film as much as they were in the ones he made himself.  It’s got Michael Caine doing arguably his best work portraying Scrooge, whose creation was arguably Dickens’ best work.  It’s a startlingly faithful and affecting adaptation of what’s probably the best Christmas story since the original.  And it gets that Tiny Tim’s “God Bless Us, Every One!” is a fulcrum on which the whole thing swings.  Here’s the moment where the last walls around Ebenezer’s heart fall like the gates of Jericho.  It’s in this scene, not the final horror of his tombstone, that Scrooge’s salvation is assured.

I dare say this may be the finest plea for blessing in the English language, and someday the Archbishop of Canterbury will be swayed by my demands to incorporate it into the Book of Common Prayer.  This, not the Prayer of Jabez, is what should be on our lips and hearts every day.  This is a prayer for blessings far more valuable than the expansion of our borders; for love, for family, for virtue, for light, for reason, for peace and for grace.  For everything, indeed, that Scrooge (who had his territory enlarged a great deal without ever praying for it) sorely lacked.

I’ve heard a lot of sermons that failed to express such a clear understanding of what really matters.

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Advent Calendar Day 19: O Little Town Of Bethlehem

Posted in Music, Religion with tags , , , on December 20, 2012 by bradellison

You know I think one of the reasons people love Ol’ Blue Eyes is that he was decidedly a sinner more than a saint.  He made into The Godfather through the conductive medium of Johnny Fontane, a character whose Corleone-assisted contract re-negotiations were inspired by the stories about certain incidents early in Sinatra’s career.  Classic bad boy, undeniably cool as a cucumber, and he is, ushering us into the Palestinian night with words lade down by an Episcopal priest who spent some time as Bishop of Massachusetts.  Of these two men, Frank Sinatra and Phillips Brooks, one was the son of a lightweight boxer from Hoboken and one came from a long line of Boston clergy, and you can guess which was which.

On the streets of Bethlehem, and in the eyes of Jesus, they stand equal, and so do all the rest of us.  And mark it, we do stand on those streets.  The hopes and fears of all the years, met in thee tonight.  O Bethlehem Ephrathah, least of the clans of Judah, from you comes the one who is to rule Israel, the one come from the days of old long gone.  Here’s the fulcrum hope may swing on, in this backwater of backwaters.

How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given!

No ear may hear His coming,
But in the world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him still,
The dear Christ enters in.

Ah! happy day they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?

So these nights find us, insignificant motes in a big universe, walking the narrow streets of an insignificant town, looking for a little quiet redemption.

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Advent Calendar Day 18: O Tannenbaum

Posted in Music, Religion with tags , , , , on December 19, 2012 by bradellison

The popular legend, which I believed until I sat down to do my traditional pre-post Wikipedia sweep 10 minutes ago, has it that Martin Luther wrote this song, a legend presumably established by poorly educated Protestants who knew that the song was German, Luther was German, and what more do you freaking want, anyway?

So the shiny penny of truth has derailed the express freight of my original intentions, which would have allowed me to post the song that the hard-drinking poop-flinging* founder of the Protestant Reformation actually wrote, the awesome anthem “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”  Which hymn, it should be noted, has much more interesting lyrics than this Christmas tree business.

Of course, the other part of the legend is that Luther invented the Christmas tree, to commemorate Christ’s birth in a manner entirely free of papist idolatry.  Once again, history says nope.  This is in fact just one more pagan ritual, like the mistletoe, the holly berries, the Yule log, and so forth.  Dig up the foundations of the cathedral, and you find the remains of the temple that preceded it.  If you can’t handle it, you can always go sit in the fun-hating no-Christmas-having corner with Cotton Mather.

The Fir tree is evergreen.  Like Christ (and Balder, Mithras, Osiris, the Green Man and company), it does not die, reborn anew each year.

It endures.

It keeps the faith.

It may be slightly perverse, actually, to cut down a symbol of eternal life and display its corpse to commemorate this holy festival, but all that means is that there’s a little Good Friday waiting for us if we look at Christmas close enough, and I say that’s all to the good.  In the midst of life, we are in death.

Of whom can we seek succour but thee, o Lord?

Jesus Christ, evergreen, ever faithful.  Chop him down, and he comes back up.

It’s a Christmas Miracle.

*In fairness, to the best of my knowledge he only threw poop at the Devil, who certainly had it coming.

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Advent Calendar Day 17: O Holy Night

Posted in Music, Religion with tags , , , , on December 18, 2012 by bradellison

He knows our need, our weakness is no stranger.

His law is love and His gospel is peace.

Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother.

And in His name all oppression shall cease.

And that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

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Advent Calendar Day 16: Mary Did You Know

Posted in Music, Religion with tags , , , , on December 17, 2012 by bradellison

There are two moments in noted anti-Semite Mel Gibson’s brutally ugly (but ferociously compelling)  Passion picture that brought some tears to my eyes.  First, when Mary of Nazareth mops up her son’s blood from the courtyard.  Second, when she watches her son stumble under the weight of his burden on the Via Dolorosa, and her eyes fill up with memories of her baby son stumbling as he took his early steps.  The mother’s pain was a lot more effective than the recreation, blow by bloody blow, of Jesus getting the shit beaten out of him could possibly have been.

I think one of the most compelling statements made about the Nativity by the Four Evangelists is from Luke’s second chapter.  “Mary treasured all these things, and pondered them in her heart.”  Simple country girl, as near as we can tell, and here she is being shown signs and wonders.  Not even married, and here’s the Herald of the Lord God on her doorstep.  Wrung out from the hard work of producing an entire human person from inside her body somewhere furnished solely with a feed trough, and here’s a bunch of filthy sheep-smelling strangers babbling about angelic choirs.  Navigating the chaos of the Holy City for her first-born’s bris and she can’t even get up the steps of the temple without being accosted by prophets overwhelmed by the presence of the babe in her arms.  Minding her own business after all the fuss has died down, and all of a sudden there’s a caravan of stargazers from way, way out of town showing up at her door like Thorin and Co., and shortly after that her husband gets a dream warning that Herod’s gunning for them and they need to split for Egypt, where their ancestors were slaves.

Even setting aside all the madness of the non-canonical smiting and resurrecting and dragon-taming and so forth that the boy got up to in his youth according to the infancy gospels, the wife of Joseph went through some strange stuff.

And all this she stored up and pondered.  Eventually she and her newly formed family go back to Judea and settle down to a quiet life of carpentry and household management.  The boy goes to the Synagogue to learn his Hebrew from the rabbis, and while his mastery of the Torah and the Prophets was astounding, he was just a boy.

And then he goes off, preaching an astounding and revolutionary message, effectively declaring himself the fulfillment of prophecy, healing, exorcising, commanding the elements.  And all this time, this ordinary woman who’d been pondering these things for so long, what must this have been to her?

And then they take him, throw him in front the lynch mob, and tear him apart in about the most brutal and degrading manner possible, and there she is to see it happen.  Standing at his feet, next to her boy’s closest friend, she watched her son die.  What must that have been like?  Words can’t bind that kind of grief.

Then, three days later, she was there to see how things had changed.

 

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Advent Calendar Day 15: I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore

Posted in Music, Religion with tags , , , on December 16, 2012 by bradellison

One of the reasons I’m doing this project is to broaden my idea of what Christmas music is, and to maybe take the dozen or so of you reading this blog along for the ride.  This song’s here because Woodie Guthrie is awesome and because this is one of his best songs, and also because this is a song about Jesus.

Well, it’s mainly about Guthrie and his travels, and the Okies he traveled with, and by extension about any of us who’ve been lost, homeless, or wandering.  Without promising Heaven the way most of those old tent-meeting hymns would, this song fits into that same classic mold of “I’ll Fly Away” and “In the Sweet By and By,” telling about how this world is a temporary and harsh place where we’re not at home.  It tells the story of the folks on the road, lonely and dusty and welcome nowhere, in a world where the sharpsters profit by reaping what other men have sown.

Foxes have dens, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath no place to lay his head.

Jesus and his crew of backwater hicks could lay a claim to being the original Okies, a crew of migrant bumpkins walking aimlessly through an often desolate and inhospitable landscape, no home no job no peace no rest.  If I keep coming back to this point, it is because I believe it is central to understanding the Gospel.  Jesus was a homeless outsider, and he called his followers to leaves their homes and join him on the outside.

This world isn’t home to us.  We do have a home, as is promised, in the world that’s coming.  Our duty, in the meantime, is to walk the earth like Caine in Kung Fu, and to do our part to make this world more like that one.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

The Kingdom of God is within you.

See you on the road, pilgrim.

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Advent Calendar Day 14: God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen

Posted in Music, Religion with tags , , , , , , , on December 15, 2012 by bradellison

I’m not going to talk about Connecticut.  I don’t have the stomach for it.  I’m not going to talk about guns, or gun control, or mental illness, or our irresponsible news media, or America’s culture of violence.  I don’t want to hear your opinions about those things right now, and I doubt you want to hear mine.

I’m going to skip to talking about love, and I’m going to stick to what I wrote last night, because it conveys what I feel this night, as well.  Tonight, tomorrow, and on all the days to come, let’s love each other, hold each other close, and take care of each other.  I love you all.

First off, there is a beauty in in Loreena McKennitt’s voice that almost hurts me to hear.

Anyway, whoever hath ears let him hear, there’s some worthy preaching in the carol as well.

First, let nothing you dismay.  Having spent most of the last year in various degrees of dismay, having suffered grief, frustration, exhaustion, futile anger and the occasional nugget of despair, I need to hear that now more than ever. Let nothing you dismay.  Because it’s true; while Jesus Christ our savior was born nowhere near this day (sorry about co-opting your festivities, ancient pagans!), he was born, and that matters to us a great deal, and now’s the time we fix that into memory.

We were gone astray.  We go astray.  God knows I do, anyway.  Walk away from what we should do, and towards what we should not.  The Apostle Paul said he had the corpse of his old self hanging around his neck to drag him down, and Kanye West said that everything bad makes him feel good while everything they told him not to is exactly what he would.  We do our best, and we pray for grace to cover our inevitable failures, and we try to do better next time.

Satan’s power, the poisonous insinuations of the One Who Accuses, well, we all hear that voice in our ears from time to time, don’t we?  Satan’s power makes itself felt when we’re at our low points, when we feel like we’re not worth anything and never will be.  That’s his voice you’ll here telling you you don’t deserve to be loved.  That you don’t deserve to be happy.  That you’ll never be free from whatever shackles bind you, be they debt or mediocrity or loneliness or unemployment or depression or a pointless dead-end job. Do not heed that voice.  Christ our savior was born on Christmas day, and he loves you.  And if you reading this don’t believe in him, believe in me, because I love you too.  I don’t know who’s reading these words or when, but love from me to you is my pledge on this night, and if that isn’t worth much it’s still not nothing.

Anyone who says Garth Ennis hates Superheroes never read the issues where Superman crossed paths with Tommy Monaghan

“If you knew how you are loved, not one of you would raise a hand in rage again.”

God rest ye merry.

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Advent Calendar Day 13: Lord of the Dance

Posted in Music, Religion with tags , , , , , on December 14, 2012 by bradellison

Weren’t expecting that, were you?  Not actually having anything to do with Ireland, the Celts, or Michael @#$%ing Flatley, “Lord of the Dance” borrows from the tune of the old Shaker dance tune “Simple Gifts” (which is not a hymn, for the record, although the Shakers didn’t draw a dividing line between the sacred and secular as near as I can tell), and was written by Sydney Carter. Spoiler alert, the titular Lord of the Dance is Jesus, not that Flatley guy, who as far as I know is a cool dude in person, so in the charitable spirit of the season we’ll just skip the insults and jokes at his expense that littered the first draft of this post.

But turning our attention back from my unfortunately being a sarcastic dick, here we have the a depiction of the Christ rooted in dance.  Not entirely defensible within the narrow confines of a literal reading of the Gospel, mayhaps, but how beautiful and appropriate an image it is!  It was God who made the stars into the first choir, and set the planets to dancing at the First Dawn, when all this wondrous universe exploded forth at His word.  FIAT LUX!  And so came the great bang, the thunderclap that yet resounds through every atom about and within us now!  I tend to imagine the Creation in imagery borrowed from Jack Kirby and Carl Sagan in equal measure, and the dance seems an ideal metaphor for the energy and rhythmic motion of the world around us.

Nietzsche, that mentally unwell curmudgeon with the stubbornly unspellable name, said he’d be a dancer if he couldn’t be a philosopher.  King David danced before the Ark of the Covenant.  Belit danced before Conan on the deck of her fearsome pirate ship in the age undreamed of, after the oceans drank Atlantis.  Even the Jets and Sharks at their most vicious found the purest expression of their rage in dance rather than in actual violence.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?  All of them, and the pin’s dancing too.  The universe is dancing right now, and we’re dancing with it, and all that’s to the delight of the Lord of the Dance, who is the Lord of the Sabbath.  As his forefather David danced before the Ark, so Christ danced for the new Covenant.  Rejoice!

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Advent Calendar Day 12: What Child Is This

Posted in Music, Religion with tags , , , , , , on December 13, 2012 by bradellison

There’s one for my boy Carlton.

“Greensleeves” is a lovely melody, and an old one, and one originally about as holy as Trump Tower.  A classic ditty about a man trying to get a woman to stop giving him the old cold shoulder, it’s the kind of jam that Henry VIII used to bust out on the lute when he was picking up chicks at parties after Sir Thomas More had gone to bed, having in vain told His Majesty not to do anything that he wouldn’t do.  To which the king would simply laugh and say “whatever bro.  Hey, how’s that paper you’re writing for me coming?  I really want His Holiness the Pope to be impressed with my defense of Catholicism against the Protestant scourge.”  And then Sir Thomas would sigh and go upstairs, muttering “douchebag” under his breath so only the king could hear, which just made Henry laugh even harder.*

But it’s a beautiful tune, and a melancholy one, for the sadness of a lover scorned is a potent and piercing thing, and no doubt more than one petticoat got dropped when Henry VIII soulfully crooned the last verse and broke out the bedroom eyes and started gyrating his hips in a manner that Elvis would rediscover centuries later.**  Maybe it makes some sense for that melancholy to fit itself into occupied Judea, on fallen Earth, in the humble manger of the humble town where someone famous once came from.

Melancholy, and desire.  The desire for love, the desire for our desire to be returned, our want to be wanted, the hunger for belonging.  In that hunger, we’re in a place where the profane brushes up against the sacred, because in even the most debased lusts in the human heart, there’s a kernel somewhere of something higher, some trace of our need for the genuine article.  This is probably the C. S. Lewis talking with his hat full of neo-Platonism, but the faintest and most distorted shadows are still cast by something real.

And so we have Christmas, where we see a man crying out to the woman he wants to fill his needs with the same notes that announce the arrival of the Savior, who is the one who truly can fill all our needs.

*You can’t prove it didn’t happen.

**See above.

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