Joyfully Singing

         Some of the best things at Christmas are traditions. Especially those which have passed down from one generation to the next. Our family has several. One is the yule log, pictured above, which my great aunt used to make for my mother and her family when she was a child. Now my mother makes it for us. Another is our Baklava, complete with a secret ingredient which we don't share outside the family(seriously...if you ask us for the recipe we will exclude that ingredient). I love this part, the passing down from the older to the younger, the transferring of secrets almost like an ancient tryst.          Things like these are what make Christmas what it is for me: the excitement of advent, the beauty of the tree and all the decorations(the only time of year when it is socially correct to have a real live tree in one's house), and the joy of the day itself when I get to feeling as though all the world stands ...

          I hate how much this year's circumstances have managed to fragment all of us. I hate how much current events have made many of us forget about Christmas, Christ, and the whole gambit. I hate the fact that at the beginning of this year I felt things were finally beginning to get better between me and my church, and now I find myself not even allowed to attend. I hate that Christians are looking around at each other with critical eyes, instead of looking to Jesus with loving abandon.          And yet, does this invalidate the truth of the gospel? Does this make all that Christians have proclaimed, lived and died for, of no account?         I think not. "Rather let God be found true, though every man be found a liar." centuries and epochs may have passed since Christ's birth, but still we all must bow before the King of kings and Lord of lords.     ...

       I purposely chose a very inaccurate, but beautiful image for today's post because this is a good illustration of what most traditional Spanish carols are like. They are lovely pieces of music, but love to make things up about Jesus, Mary, and Joseph at a prodigious rate, asserting things like:         "Mary was a baker,"          "Jesus wouldn't stop crying,"         "They gave soup to the child Jesus but he wouldn't eat it because it was so sweet so St Joseph ate it."         "The Child Jesus was so beautiful, all rosy white."         "The virgin Mary's hands are slightly coarse but beautiful."    And, one of my favorites:         "Mary did not even have original sin."  Such statements are all either wild conjectures, or blatantly false, however, the Spanish songs manage t...

       Do you know what great weight hangs on in the incarnation?         The weight of sin, redemption, and eternal life.        Do you know what would become of us if there were no Christmas day?        Death, eternal death for all who have sinned.        Do you know what makes Christmas such a joyous occasion?        Life, eternal life for all who trust in Christ. This is the heritage of Christmas, the dawning of a new age, when "B.C." became, "Anno Domini," the year of our Lord. This is the hope of the living and the salvation of the dead. As Jester Hairston's beautiful Carol summarizes, "Man will live forevermore, because of Christmas day."      Once again, I turn to John Rutter for my music. You can tell what I've been listening to this Christmas season, and this won't be the las...

         Last year I refused to sing a line of a Christmas carol in choir. It attributed all the joys of Christmas to the fact that a "baby could convince us that he was God's son." Worst of all the song seemed intimate that this was okay. I'm not joking...that was an actual line in a carol. I was immediately outraged. If Christmas surrounds what is merely the biggest farce in human history, I don't see how that's worth celebrating. Either you don't believe Jesus was God, or you do. If you don't then you ought to be depressed by Christmas because of the sheer number of people who have been duped by a baby in a manger.         However, if you do fall at His feet and call Him Lord then this is a season worthy of rejoicing, and let us have no carols which proclaim Christ as anything less than the God of the universe.        The carol I'm going share with you all today is a spiritual from the...

       What happens after Christmas day? What will we do? What will happen when all the presents are opened, when the last guest has left? How will we live when the lights have been taken down, the wreaths packed away, the food consumed?        My family has never put up lights outside the house, but a few years ago, we started hanging them inside. When Christmas time came around we strung them along the windows over picture frames, above the doorframes and across the hallways, all around the downstairs of our home.  It brings on the coziest atmosphere when only these and the Christmas tree lights provide visibility while all outside is dark. On Rainy afternoons, on dark evenings, on dusky mornings, these lights comfort and brighten our home. We always took them down after new years until last year. My mother loved them so much that she didn't want to take them down.        I was upset. It was our ...

          We spend a good deal of time in our Christmas songs focusing on Christ's birth in Bethlehem, his first bed being a manger, the visit of the shepherds, the coming of the wisemen, the star, and even the flight to Egypt, but very few songs touch on how it all began. The reason Jesus was born in Bethlehem and laid in a manger in the first place. It is told most vividly in the opening of Luke chapter 2:  "Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth...And everyone was on his way to register for the census, each to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, in order to register along with Mary, who was engaged to him, and was with child." ~ Luke 2:1, 3, 4  Traveling from Nazareth to where we believe Bethlehem to be located would have b...

  How many times have you wished for a new day? I don't mean the phenomenon that happens every twenty-four hours wherein the earth's rotation turns our side of the globe to the light. No, I mean the kind of new day that erases every other day of our existence. We have only the knowledge we've gained, perhaps even some of that is gone...the kinds of things we wish we could forget. We have a whole new life ahead of us. One where we are free to make a new life for ourselves, one where we can spend less time pursuing things we thought mattered, but didn't, and focus on the things that bring lasting joy. If I were giving a talk I'd ask for a show of hands. I'm guessing most of the hands in the room would go up, including my own. Then I'd ask how many of us had wished for that kind of new day on more than one occasion. More than twice? More than thrice? How long would your hand stay up? I know mine wouldn't go down because I've lost track of the number of ...

         I find myself with little time today, and even less inspiration. I also find myself faced, quite dauntingly, with the exuberant Medieval carol, "Gaudete." As a lover of old music, naturally I would find this carol entrancing, but this one in particular is for all those of you who associate Medieval music with droning chants and endless soliloquies pronounced in Latin. I want you to know that while these things are all real, they are no all there is. As with any era we must filter out the dross and take only the precious. Gaudete is one of those gems. It is the type of song which makes you want to dance even if you don't know how, and compels you to sing along even when you don't know the words. Before you decide that old music is boring, try listening to this song. What is it's simple message?      Rejoice! Christ is born of the virgin Mary, Rejoice! There are four verses, each surprisingly sound in doctrine considering tha...

  It's Christmas tide and I just said yesterday that we ought not to consider the incarnation simply as an onerous task that must be completed for redemption.  However, now I wish to look back at the other end of the stick.  Yes, it was a joyful occasion, but also one fraught with difficulty.  Mary nearly lost her fiance due to a rather understandable misconception that she was unchaste. Joseph spent nine months married to a woman whom he did not touch as a husband would a wife, looking forward to a child who would never truly be his own. Two years later, magi appeared to honor the child, and then the whole family had to pack up and flee to Egypt in the night because Herod felt threatened by this new king born in Bethlehem. And we all know that death still occurred while they were gone. The children in Bethlehem, slaughtered without mercy, "A voice was heard in Rahmah, the sound of weeping and lamentation. Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be comfort...

  There's something about dancing that stirs the blood and raises the spirits. Something that calls from beyond with news of wonderful things.  I can't get enough of it. A couple nights ago we learned an English country dance, repeated it, and followed it up with the Virginia reel. At that point everyone there was done. They were leaning on their knees panting for breath. So was I, but I could have kept going all night.  For me a dance is not just about following a set of steps in time and tandem with others, it is a creation, an art, a story communicated through movement.  When I dance I am singing with my feet. What makes it even better is when I'm doing it with other people. It is though we have become one, all of us. Normally disjointed and awkward, we become beautiful when we move in time, one symbol, one being, moving and breathing as one(most of the time!). It is not untoward, then, that some medieval hymn writer should have drawn a parallel between dancing an...

  I could barely keep up with my father's large strides. The snow nearly reached my knees, and I struggled to lift my fee high enough with my legs impeded by thick snow pants, but I did it. Every year I anticipated the first snow big snow of the year. First we would all go out and shovel the driveway and the two walkways, then my father, older siblings, and I would circle our acre of woods, plodding through the crisp, untrod snow which sparkled even in the pale light of a winter sky. What I remember best was the silence that a large snow brings. It really is like a giant blanket thrown over a lot of noisy machinery. You don't hear the cars on the road. You don't hear the rush of the river a quarter mile away. All you hear are the sounds you make, the sound of snow falling from the laden tree branches, and occasional gust of wind, and the chirping of a couple brave birds. In such a snowfall was Jesus born two-thousand and twenty-three years ago? Probably not. We really have ...