god, I just love christmas music... the really old-fashioned stuff... it's the only thing that really makes me miss being religious.
I remember the fervor of singing, "O come, o come, Emmanuel..." and believing that someone all-powerful and all-loving really would someday come to wipe our tears away, that someday there would be "no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away" (Revelation 21:4, King James version) (yup, I looked it up).
It was a bittersweet comfort of aching beauty to think: this world, with all its pain, this is not the end of the story—this is not "as good as it gets." The mass graves, the gas chambers, the torturers and executioners, famine and AIDS—horror does not have the last word in anyone's life. To think that somewhere in another world, or someday in our own, there will be justice and healing...
At the same time, there was also the wondrousness of God being born as a human being to feel the pain and suffering of humanity. It doesn't make any sense (as a Turkish Muslim urgently told me, "God no baby, no die!") but it has tremendous emotional resonance. As a 17th-century priest-poet wrote,
That He, whom the sun serves, should faintly peep
Through clouds of infant flesh; that He the old
Eternal Word should be a Child and weep,
That He who made the fire should fear the cold...
--Richard Crashaw (1612/13-1649)
Top five songs for evoking that aching wonder and that bittersweet longing—the God of the ages among us, the hope for healing for a broken world...
1.
O come, o come, EmmanuelO come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
...
O come, Desire of nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind;
Bid Thou our sad divisions cease,
And be Thyself our King of Peace.
2.
Es ist ein Rose entsprungen (Lo, how a rose e'er blooming)I love the phrase, "amid the cold of winter, when half-spent was the night"
3.
Coventry CarolI remember Franklin writing last year that he thought that it was the original lullaby that Mary sang to Jesus. The actual words are all gory, about the slaughter of the innocents... those old-time folks (i.e. during the Renaissance) really liked that kinda stuff!
4.
O holy nightLong lay the world in sin and error pining,
Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope, the weary soul rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
There's that stuff again about the poor world in turmoil, and all the rejoicing and new and glorious morns. *sigh* The line, "Fall... on your knees" still gives me goosebumps, a little... huh, I don't remember the later verses, but here's a stanza that was quite radical in its day:
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother
And in His Name all oppression shall cease.
5.
O little town of BethlehemYet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.
The phrase "o morning stars together" also gave me goosebumps, and I loved the verse about "how silently how silently" the "blessings of... heav'n" are imparted.
oh, god, I'm remembering a version of that that I wrote in 2002, that started with "O little town of Bethlehem, the tanks are rolling by..." It included the line, "and in thy dark streets shineth the merciless searchlights." Yeesh.
Anyway.
Buddhism teaches us that "there is no hand to hold," no babysitter—nobody is coming to save us from ourselves or heal our broken world. The world is full of suffering and that's the way it is: we cannot escape it. If we are lucky enough to be born into a life free of poverty and executioners, we will get cancer or our child will be hit by a car. It seems so hard and cold, in comparison to the blazing light of a church at midnight mass, blazing with "the hopes and fears of all the years"...
And yet, I have found Buddhist teachings immensely useful in recent weeks, coping with all that Rebekah is going through; real reality
is hard and cold and the imaginary babysitter is no match for it. And the teachings are not hard and cold at all. Human compassion, found in my own heart, is the only real healing and peace. Not just empty words: I have genuinely found that the instruction on how to access this healing and peace have been extremely useful in a realistic, solid way.
I may never call myself a Buddhist, because there always seems to be some extra belief required beyond the teachings on meditation and compassion... but those specific teachings of Buddhism have become extremely important to me.
And yet, when I hear the Christmas music I remember for a moment how it felt to long for (and believe in) salvation. "Nostalgia for samsara is shit." Indeed. But sometimes it smells so good.
Of course, Christmas music is also good for general childhood nostalgia.
My parents loved Christmas music and played it constantly... my favorite album from my childhood was "
Christmas with the Trapp Family Singers." (not a hint to buy it for me; I already bought it for myself). That and Mario Lanza (who for years I thought was named Mari O'Lanza). "O Holy Night" has never sounded so spine-tinglingly glorious as it does in his rendition. I also remember Lanza hamming it up on the verses to "We Three Kings," especially the "myrrh" verse: "sorrowing, sighing, BLEE-ding, DIE-AY-AY-AAAYing..."
Now, we have to pause here for a story. My mom for some reason decided that Maria von Trapp (the real one, who bears very little resemblance of any kind whatsoever to Julie Andrews or to Andrews's character in "The Sound of Music") would be the most appropriate role model for me in life, so she read me her biography, her autobiography, and heaven knows what else to properly instill the values and perspectives of my chosen role model.
As a child I was a little sponge (or mirror), soaking up what was around me and sensing what people wanted from me and producing it obediently. I took this hero-worship to a degree my mother perhaps had not anticipated: I decided to "become" Maria von Trapp, memorizing all the details of her life; everyone had to call me "Maria" or "Frau von Trapp," and my conversation was replete with references to the biography of my alter ego. Other children had imaginary playmates; I never did, perhaps because I was my own imaginary playmate.
This ended when I saw
Star Wars, after which I became Princess Leia, and thank god I did, because I'd much rather be a gun-toting attitudinous princess than a psychotically religious control-obsessed matriarch... *sigh* when I was a kid, we had
feminist princesses, boys and girls!
Anyway, I'm digressing too much. I should just stop. I'm getting sort of sick of this post. My moment of nostalgia for anguished religiosity has passed; I'm gonna go pop out "Favorite Christmas Carols with the Westminster Abbey Choir" and put Bing Crosby back in. Then I'm gonna wake Loopy from her drugged slumber and we're gonna eat this kick-ass lasagna that Ang brought us (yay Ang!). Yup.... a good plan. :-)
