When does Christmas begin? If left to my own devices, I might put off Christmas merriment and gratitude until my professor’s duties for the fall semester were complete. How can I enjoy decorating a tree or singing carols before I’ve finished grading exams and papers? But beyond or beneath the specific demands of my job, my Scrooge-like tendencies are driven by fixation on the troubles and cares of my little world, my own intractable problems as well as my sorrows for people I love. “Joy to the World” is a nice sentiment, but I’ve got practical demands to meet. Redemption for eternity is a sublime idea, but I am anxious about obligations in the here and now.
My tendency to a cramping practicality is reinforced by the rhythm of the academic calendar I’ve been on for, well, practically my whole life. (I know, I’m lucky to have some substantial free time during the holiday season.) Since my job-related tasks would take me well into the third week of December, it’s a good thing I have benefited for more than 30 years from the irresistible proclamation of the season in the form of a Christmas concert that always comes on a Sunday evening early in December.
My daughter recently took what was long my wife’s place in the Christmas Chorus, a very accomplished women’s choir that performs at the State Hospital in Provo; it has been very ably directed for 40 years by Martha Sargent. The Christmas Chorus has blessed our community annually with a variety of sublimely sacred Christmas songs, but the special mission of the Chorus has been to share Benjamin Britten’s magnificent Ceremony of Carols, with which the concert always concludes.
Britten’s composition sets several very old texts, many in Middle English, in original 20th century music. The result expresses the good news of Christmas with unique freshness and delicacy, as in this song, which evokes Mary’s lullaby for the Christ child:
That yonge child when it gan weep with song she lulled him asleep: / That was so sweet a melody it passèd alle minstrelsy.
I cannot hear these words without conceiving of a song of which the song I am hearing sung is only a type and a foretaste, a song of holy love that surpasses all mortal “minstrelsy.”
Another of the short songs opens with this hopeful declaration: This little Babe so few days old, is come to rifle Satan’s fold …
When I hear these words sung, I sense the powers of evil in retreat.
But the lyric that most moves me is “Deo Gracias,” from a 15th century text:
Ne had the appil take ben, the appil take ben,
Ne hadde never our lady a ben hevene quene.
Blessed be the time that appil take was.
Therefore we moun singen.
Deo gracias! Deo gracias!
(Had the apple never been taken, / Then our Lady would have / Never been a heavenly queen. / Blessed be the time / The apple was taken. / Therefore we must sing / Thanks be to God!)
With a little attention, the reader of modern English will be able to discern the simple and profound message in the Middle English text: The Fall must be good news, because it was part of a plan that gave us a Savior. And so our sorrows, failings and trials — even the tasks that stay with us late into the year — became good news, part of a divine plan, when that little babe came to rifle Satan’s fold. To see the fall of man, the eating of the apple, as pointing to a self-sacrificing Savior and Heavenly Queen is not to dissolve the cares and troubles of the daily life of a professor, husband and father, but it is to see these mortal concerns as a moment in a great eternal drama, one individual soul’s redemptive journey.
Every year Martha Sargent’s Christmas Chorus has reminded me of this beautiful idea of a felix culpa, or blessed Fall, and helped me grade my papers and exams — and find meaning in the trials of daily existence — all in the spirit of Christmas.
Deo Gracias! Indeed. And Merry Christmas.
Ralph Hancock is a professor of political science at Brigham Young University and president of the John Adams Center for the Study of Faith, Philosophy and Public Affairs. His views are his own.