Happy old year

Being conscious of time, last days and first days matter to me. What I seek most is significance, which in these days, first and last, is innate. On its last day, a year is gone forever. All its doings sink into the past and we put on a fresh one. Yet it's a significance that's hard to realise, since the sun will come up tomorrow just as it did today; at one minute past midnight we will be exactly the same as we were a minute before. Perhaps that's what surprises (disappoints?) us year by year. But these peregrinations of clock and calendar are our invention, the “little circles of the humanly known and believed.” Better, as this poem suggests, to break them open, and leave off counting. This is Wendell Berry, “2007.IV” from the collection “Sabbaths.”

In our consciousness of time
we are doomed to the past.
The future we may dream of
but can know it only after
it has come and gone.
The present too we know
only as the past. When
we say, “This now is
present, the heat, the breeze,
the rippling water,” it is past.
Before we knew it, before
we said “now,” it was gone.

If the only time we live
is the present, and if the present
is immeasurably short (or
long), then by the measure
of the measurers we don’t
exist at all, which seems
improbable, or we are
immortals, living always
in eternity, as from time to time
we hear, but rarely know.

You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river
or the swallows flying, you see
a beloved face, mortal
and alive, causing the heart
to sway in the rift between beats
where we live without counting,
where we have forgotten time
and have forgotten ourselves,
where eternity has seized us
as its own. This breaks
open the little circles
of the humanly known and believed,
of the world no longer existing,
letting us live where we are,
as in the deepest sleep also
we are entirely present,
entirely trusting, eternal.

Is it concentration of the mind,
our unresting counting
that leaves us standing
blind in our dust?
In time we are present only
by forgetting time.

How silently, how silently

“After an early dinner, we took our horses and rode to Bethlehem,” wrote Rev Philip Brooks of Philadelphia in December 1865.  “It was only about two hours when we came to the town, situated on an eastern ridge of a range of hills, surrounded by its terraced gardens. It is a good-looking town, better built than any other we have seen in Palestine...Before dark, we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star. It is a fenced piece of ground with a cave in it (all the Holy Places are caves here)...As we passed, the shepherds were still keeping watch over their flocks or leading them home to fold.”

Three years later, he wrote the hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem” for the Christmas service of Holy Trinity in Boston, where he was now Bishop. After the service, it was reprinted on leaflets and sold in a little book store on Chestnut St. By 1892 it was included in America's Episcopal hymnal.

Among the usual carols sung at Christmas, this one is my favourite. It's romantic, lyrical, magical. It sounds like a song from Midsummer Night's Dream. You can see in it Bethlehem in gorgeous miniature, where mortals sleep under a canopy of spinning stars.

O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie;
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight

For Christ is born of Mary,
And gathered all above,
While mortals sleep, the angels keep
Their watch of wondering love.
O morning stars together
Proclaim the holy birth,
And praises sing to God the King,
And Peace to men on earth

How silently, how silently
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive him still,
The dear Christ enters in.

O holy Child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin and enter in,
Be born to us today.
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell,
O come to us, abide with us
Our Lord Emmanuel.

Light, which made the angels sing

The Sussex Carol was so called because it was recorded in Sussex in the late nineteenth century, but by the time Ralph Vaughan Williams heard it and set it to music, it was already centuries old. The first record of it was in Bishop Wadding's collection A Small Garland of Pious and Godly Songs, published in 1684, but whether he wrote it, or only wrote it down, is unknown.

On Christmas night all Christians sing,
To hear the news the angels bring,
News of great joy, news of great mirth,
News of our merciful King's birth.

Then why should men on earth be so sad,
Since our redeemer made us glad,
When from our sin he set us free,
All for to gain our liberty?

When sin departs before his grace,
Then life and health come in its place;
Angels and men with joy may sing,
All for to see the new-born king.

All out of darkness we have light,
Which made the angels sing this night:
Glory to God and peace to men,
Now and for evermore. Amen.

Corde natus ex parentis

Last year I found not a few nativity poems with which to mark the season. Rather than repeat the exercise I thought this year I would locate and share some carols. I'm intrigued by their folk-song provenance, their consonance with poetry, and above all their endurance. I'll go fossicking for their histories, and try to turn up some treasures. (“Caroling,” by the way, comes from something Greek choruses used to do, roughly equivalent to dancing in a circle. We don't quite do that at our sedate carols nights, but the impulse of communal joyousness is beautifully present.)

This is one of the world's oldest Christmas carols, written in the late fourth century by a Roman Christian, Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, a provincial governor who later served in the court of Emperor Theodosius I. This translation from 1851 renders the refrain “saeculorum saeculis” as “evermore and evermore,” but this Latin phrase from the Vulgate can also be rendered, as the Prayer Book has it, “world without end.”  I've never heard it but apparently it's still sung in some corners.

Of the Father’s love begotten,
Ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega,
He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see,
Evermore and evermore!

At His Word the worlds were framed;
He commanded; it was done:
Heaven and earth and depths of ocean
In their threefold order one;
All that grows beneath the shining
Of the moon and burning sun,
Evermore and evermore!

He is found in human fashion,
Death and sorrow here to know,
That the race of Adam’s children
Doomed by law to endless woe,
May not henceforth die and perish
In the dreadful gulf below,
Evermore and evermore!

O that birth forever blessed,
When the virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving,
Bare the Saviour of our race;
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed His sacred face,
Evermore and evermore!

O ye heights of heaven adore Him;
Angel hosts, His praises sing;
Powers, dominions, bow before Him,
and extol our God and King!
Let no tongue on earth be silent,
Every voice in concert sing,
Evermore and evermore!

This is He Whom seers in old time
Chanted of with one accord;
Whom the voices of the prophets
Promised in their faithful word;
Now He shines, the long expected,
Let creation praise its Lord,
Evermore and evermore!

[...]

Christ, to Thee with God the Father,
And, O Holy Ghost, to Thee,
Hymn and chant with high thanksgiving,
And unwearied praises be:
Honour, glory, and dominion,
And eternal victory,
Evermore and evermore!