Joyfully Singing

           This past weekend I got to spend a delightful weekend with dear friends in Tennessee. Since the poster event was a costume 40's Noir LARP party, we spent that Saturday morning laughing over costumes, walking around in each other's high heels, trying on ridiculous hats and clip-on earrings, doing each other's hair, experimenting with Russian, British, and New England accents, and generally having a hilariously good time. You know what it's like when you're so engaged in the moment, and having so much good, honest, simple fun that you are no longer thinking about living, you're just doing it. Time doesn't exist. Pain, problems, and perdition have become void. You're functioning no longer from one moment to the next, you simply are .  I wonder if that's part of what God means when He calls Himself the "I AM." He is perfectly sufficient, satisfied, and serene. If anybody knows best how to just be, it is God Himself. There is ...

        Each year I like to pay a bit of tribute to one of the more sobering elements of the Christmas story. We're all familiar with Lully Lullay , the lament over the baby boys of Bethlehem and, in our grief over slaughter of dozens of innocents, we often forget, I think, what a heart-wrenching thing it must have been for Mary and Joseph to pack up and flee to Egypt for an indeterminate amount of time.            We know that Jesus was about two-years old when they left. They'd obviously decided to stay on in Bethlehem, which worked out since that's where the magi were directed to when they reached Judea at about that time. People in those days didn't just up and move like we do today. To travel from Bethlehem to Egypt would have been unpleasant for multiple physical reasons, not to mention it would have been a humiliating journey by nature for a Jew, and especially for these two were both descendants...

         One of the singing traditions unique to North America is that of the shape-note singing tradition. This was a strategy that differentiated notes on the staff by shape in order to help non-educated people learn to read music. It went hand in hand with solfege which was simply the visual format.        The handbook for shape note singers was a large, horizontally positioned volume titled "The Sacred Harp" after the philosophy that the voice was a harp of the highest and most holiest kind: a Sacred harp.       The Carol I wish to share with you today is from that lovely tradition. It was a tradition with simple words and even simpler melodies. The harmonies were straight-forward and easy to learn. Combined, the sound was unusual but not unpleasant to the ear and gained a distinctive quality that one learns to recognize after a while.        I have done some shape...

         I guess because the Bible talks about Shepherds being in the fields "that night" keeping watch over their flocks, a lot of people just assumed that Jesus was born in the dead of night. Maybe he was. Maybe there wasn't any space to lay him in the inn because they got there late and it was all packed out for the night. Then again, maybe there wasn't any space because the emperor had just decreed everyone back to his home city and the little town of Bethlehem was suddenly bursting at its seams.          The fact remains, we really don't know at what time Jesus was born, yet Christ's mass was traditionally held at midnight, and people over the centuries have made all sorts of prognostications regarding the ungodly hour at which Jesus entered the world to save us.         Not least of these is one of my favorite secular Christmas carols, "Past Three A Clock."   ...

          Here we go! Those of you who have been my friends for at least one past Christmas know I cannot let the season pass without sharing at least one carol by John Rutter. Even if it means recycling it must happen. However, I don't think I've shared this one before. Published in the '90s, this, like many of John Rutter's carols for which he wrote the lyrics himself, evokes the feel of Christmas and brings together that beautiful imagery that marks all of his Christmas carols.        Rutter's Angel Carol and Shepherd's Pipe Carol remain some of my all time favorite Christmas carols to this day, and the theme of those two holds true for this one. Rutter has captured the aura of Christmas in his carols. I might say that, in many ways, he is the Thomas Kinkade of choral music. He writes things of beauty full of color, texture, and heart that never fail to sweep you away every time you listen to them.  I know many people d...

         Getting babies to sleep can be quite a tricky thing. This particular photo was taken after I had finally succeeded in getting my exhausted nephew to close his eyes and take deep breaths instead of bawling to me about all his troubles as he had been for the past hour.         Experiences such as this have taught me to be sympathetic to the mother and definitely makes me appreciate the sheer number of times lullabys or songs more or less encouraging little babies to sleep, pop up in traditional literature. One of my favorites for the Christmas season is, more or less, excellent in terms of lyrics despite the fanciful nature of the song. And then you get to that one line that reminds you how Catholics like to add a fourth person to the godhead, and you wonder how many other otherwise excellent songs they spoiled. I usually tweak the second line of the last verse to something that isn't heretical. I suppose we protestants ...

         Christmas personified. Is it a legitimate thing to do? I suppose what happens is one gathers the essence of Christmas and bundles it into a single individual. That's rather what Saint Nicholas and Father Christmas are supposed to be. My personification always materialized out of Charles Dicken's description of the ghost of Christmas present in A Christmas Carol crossed with the Green Knight from Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. Whatever image one has in his head, I've noticed it tends to be a jolly middle-aged or older gentleman wearing bright colors and speaking good cheer to everyone about. If nothing else, it makes for a jolly good set of imagery.  The song for today is based off of this personification which predates the middle ages. It's a song that conjures up the image of great halls and roaring fires with a noble stranger coming by to wish  the inhabitants good cheer and proclaim the good news of Christmas. A noble song, stor...

         I really think everyone understates the shepherds in the Christmas story. Frankly I find the whole thing much more interesting than even the visit of the Magi. I love the fact that of all the people in and around Bethlehem that night, God chose shepherds, the lowest of the low, to be the first to know about the Saviour's birth. I know it's been talked about before, but it's easy, I think, growing up and hearing the Christmas story all one's life, to forget about just how peculiar a step this was on God's part.  If I were attempting to herald the news of a saviour born in Bethlehem in the first century, Shepherds would have a lot wracked up for them in the cons list and not much on the pros in terms of potential announce-es. Shepherds had multiple issues; one, about the only education they had consisted of courses on sheep. Two, while several of them probably did have families of their own, being a Shepherd in those days required you to be...

           When you think of the birth of Christ, and that night spent with the newborn child lying in a manger, has the question ever presented itself: what was Mary thinking?          I know it has for me. We're not Catholics, we know better than to worship Mary, but, it also behooves us to acknowledge that she was quite a courageous young woman. I doubt she fully understood the import of who Jesus was and what He came to do...then again, maybe she did. Either way, however, she knew something about the whole thing seeing as babies don't conceive themselves, and most people don't receive visits from angels.  Ultimately when I think about what might have been going through Mary's head, or, at very least, what would have been had she known all, could be summed up in a set of lyrics set to a lovely tune by Bach. I have posted this several years ago, I think, but it's been so long, I wish to remind my...

       One thing I've begun to understand only recently is that there is a clear separation in traditional liturgy between Christmas songs and advent songs. Christmas songs speak to Christ having come while advent songs celebrate the preparation and look forward to Christ's coming. For example, "Silent Night" is a Christmas carol, while "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" is an advent carol. We tend to use the terms interchangeably, at least here in the states, but there is something to be said for the distinction.        I title my blog posts after the twelve days of Christmas, though, in technicality, the twelve days of Christmas come afterwards while what I have are really "the twelve days of advent."  Ah well! Today, I want to share a lovely advent carol I learned recently. We sang it as a choir not too long ago and I love the imagery it uses. I'm always looking for the songs, many of them older which utilize a different(and good) pe...

        I have yet to do a set of these blogposts and have someone know all of the carols I post. I think there might be some sort of award for anyone who did. However, today you get a freebie. I'm sharing one probably everyone has at least heard of and has probably listened to multiple times.          I'm sharing this one because I realized something about it for the first time this year which I've never noticed before. I don't know about you, but I have spent a lot of time over the past ten years watching the King's College choir Lessons and Carols services from both present and past decades, as many as I could find on youtube. Often I would watch two or three services a year. This has stood me in very good stead here in Scotland. I know all the British versions to many of the classic Christmas carols which are sung to different tunes in the States. The selections for the carols were always widely varied from year t...

        Friends, this past Wednesday I had the tremendous pleasure of singing a traditional British Christmas carol service with the University Chapel choir at the beautiful, ancient cathedral of St. Machar. I cannot find sufficient words to express not only the beauty of it, but all the emotion swirling in my head throughout the event.  Music speaks a language too high and too complex to render comprehensive translation into the base tongues of men, and I trust that every musician reading this will know to what I am referring. The rest of you, I ask, to take it on faith. Suffice it to say, that while this begins the start of my annual Christmas carol blogposts, I feel as though I have been steeped very deeply in the Christmas carol world now for the past three weeks. This is a wonderful thing, by the way! Today marks the twelfth day to Christmas. I intended to begin yesterday and, as is my wont, make the twelfth day before Christmas, but alas, there r...