Category: Theology

What might we sing at Christmas? – Carol services are in sight…

We used to sing of snow and ice – ‘In the bleak mid winter…’ Victorian sentimentality and sometimes, just sometimes, absolutely beautiful poetry. But a few years ago I was challenged by Rex Hunt of the Uniting Church in Australia. 'When we celebrate Christmas it's midsummer. Could you write some suitable hymns?'

What that challenge did, apart from making me envious of his climate and giving me a sense of meteorological maladjustment, was to make me look again at what ought to be at the centre of our Christmas hymnody, aside from Carols. There is a temptation to echo what others have written: 'Our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man'. But neither could I, or do I, want to compete with Charles Wesley. 

But come on, this is getting a bit serious! Can’t we have some good old carols?

I wonder what that brings to mind. A bit of history. The Oxford Book of Carols described carols as ‘simple, hilarious, popular, and modern’, a bit nearer pop than church. The reason? They began as folk songs – songs of the people and they were not just for Christmas. We’re nearer to Morris Dancing and ‘soul-caking’, more in the pub than the chapel, mixing history, tradition and now. But the carols we sing in churches have, to some extent, been ‘domesticated’. They are less likely to shock, or touch the earthy hilarity and fun of their predecessors. And they often present a Victorian picture-postcard view of Jesus’ birth than anything nearing reality.

Perhaps we should move to safer ground. What of the Nine Lessons and Carols of Kings College Cambridge? Well actually not Cambridge! The first ever ‘Nine Lessons with Carols’ took place in Truro Cathedral on Christmas Eve 1880. King’s only adopted the service in 1918. What the ‘Nine Lessons’ does give us are relevant scriptures in a semblance of order though not always setting them in their original context, or relating them to ours and often edited, or the service will go on too long. This is some way from the reality of Jesus birth, or of our world today.

Of those carols we might hear: some people would rather not sing the line in, ‘Born in the night, Mary’s child’, ‘go to your cross of wood’; or the third verse of ‘Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child’, which speaks of Herod the king, in his raging’, calling for the death, the ‘slaughter of the innocents’. What more appropriate text for the 28th December which falls on a Sunday this year, and how pertinent for the world in which we live? Too gruesome, but simply look at the world around us.

So a re-think of what we might sing in today's context at Christmas... one of a few texts…

We use to think of snow and ice,
of children making merry;
of trees bedecked with shining lights,
of holly bright with berry.
But as we celebrate today
the baby in a manger,
remind us how you loved, in life,
both enemy and stranger.

We spend and hoard to comfort us
within the chill of winter.
Remind us of each present pain
you challenge us to enter;
then hand in hand with those in need
and sharing in their coldness,
we might proclaim with louder voice
the gospel in its boldness.

And only when the world is fed
and all oppression ended,
when songs of joy replace the screams
that human war extended,
can we in honesty of heart,
with Mary in her wonder,
reclaim our faith's integrity
as alleluias thunder.

Andrew E. Pratt (born 1948)
Words © 2006 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.
Metre:8 7 8 7 D
Tune: BISHOPGARTH