Anyone intimately acquainted with me knows that I am a fanatic for Christmas carols. It is a love inherited from my mother (and shared by my sister), a passion which directs itself in various odd directions. As a result, I have a vast knowledge of Christmas carols, both famous and obscure. Add to this my natural tendency towards arrogance, and the resulting alloy can be best described as a certain amount of carol snobbery. In general my tastes run toward the soulful and minor, and away from the maudlin and treacly. Accordingly I have developed a rather fixed rating system. My basic premise is that most carols we typically sing at Christmas are vastly overrated (that piece of festering crap known as "Away in a Manger", which is only slightly improved when sung to the vastly superior British tune), while a handful are criminally underrated ("Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence"). Of course there is a whole raft of wonderful songs which exist in a category well beyond underrated, closer probably to undiscovered. Hands down my favorite Christmas song is "Of the Father's Love Begotten", which is versatile enough to be sung at any time of the year but somehow gets neglected. Then there are the precious few which seem to be rated just right. A minor miracle of the season is that we sing "O Come O Come Emmanuel" as much as we do -- it is easily the best of the super-popular carols.
This post is not really about any of those categories or songs. It is about a new category, one I saw fit to invent myself this holiday season (granted, I suppose I invented the whole system, but bear with me). The category? The overrated/underrated Christmas carol. At this point some of you may scratch your head and wonder if this is merely some semantic game I play; those familiar with my idea of working in a recursive hospital (or my fondness for "meta" in general) know that I do love a convoluted turn of phrase on occasion.
Allow me to put your minds at ease. The overrated/underrated (henceforth known more succinctly as "o/u") category developed 100% organically (yes, it does contain carbon) as a result of my pondering over one carol in particular, "Joy to the World". It is, I argue, the quintessential o/u carol; that is to say, it is overvalued for its weaker points, whereas it strengths lay hidden.
First the overrated. Everybody knows "Joy to the World", especially the first verse. It merits distinction as one of the few carols worthy of playground distortion (who born and bred in public schools can forget "Joy to the world/the teacher's dead/ we barbecued her head"?). It is a staple of Christmas eve services and wandering carolfests everywhere. And it is a good song; solid words wedded to a catchy tune (that countertune near the end is especially fun to sing). But does it really merit its hallowed place in the carol canon? I can list off close to ten underappreciated carols (off the top of my head) that I would sing before I got to "Joy to the World". The other problem as I see it is that it is almost too catchy for its own good. It goes down so smooth and easy that we don't take the time to process what it is actually saying. Most popular Christmas carols are like lagers: we like them because they are smooth and not particularly complex. Joy then, is like an ESB. It isn't rich and thick enough to make us sip slowly (like the Stoutiness of "Let All Mortal Flesh"), so we miss the richness underneath.
And what a richness there is. Much of it lies locked in the wonderful third verse. Here lies the underratedness of the carol: a majority of carolers opt, due to time constraints or laziness, to cut one of the four verses, and it is ALWAYS the third verse that gets the axe. I think this is due to custom -- in church you always cut the verse right before the last, for whatever reason, so we do it without thinking (the one exception that riles my anger is when people cut the third of five verses from "Be Thou My Vision", but I must grind that axe in a separate post). What a shame! It is by far the best of the four verses. Here it is for your reading pleasure:
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.
Doesn't this give such a full, wonderful view of the hope of Christmas? Not merely a baby in a manger; the full hope of mankind coming to us in human form. Beyond cutesy nativity scenes, beyond even the bitter cross: Christ crowned in power and glory, coming to cure the world of that terrible curse, wherever it may be.
This is water for the thirsty soul. I have been longing this year for a taste of that redemption. It has been, of all the years of my life, the most curse-afflicted (or at least the one where the curse has been most obvious). Even more than the year my mother died, it has shown me the awful grasp of the evil one on this wounded planet of ours. This year I have seen families broken; people I looked up to as fathers have fallen far and hard; friendships have drifted or dissolved; I have seen hearts broken and lives in freefall; I have felt the bitter sting of betrayal; and of course I have known my own sin heaviest of all (when I have the wisdom to see it): my failings as a new husband and as an old friend, my neglect of the Word and prayer, the hidden darkness of my heart. The curse is not just widespread, it is all-pervasive. It is why children grow up without fathers and why our oceans are polluted and why old people die alone and even why bullies lash out at recess. The evil of sin which has been passed down from father to son affects all mankind, but it also radiates outward so that "all creation cries out as in the pangs of childbirth".
Enter hope. Christ comes not simply to warm our hearts but to kill the weeds and thorns which infest the ground. In the garden Adam was charged with tilling the soil, but after the fall it was promised that the toil would be hard and the fruit scant. That is what we feel in our lives: we strive and strive and have little to show for our efforts. That is why we cry out in groans like the very earth. And he comes, has come, will come again. The blessings will flow.
Already we have glimpses. I said earlier that this has been the hardest year of my life. But it has also been the richest, most fulfilling. I married a beautiful, wonderful woman. I got a real job which has proved rewarding. I have known the joys of friendship kindled. The blessings have not just trickled, they have flowed. Yet I am left longing for that last fulfillment of the promise. Far as the curse is found. Amen. Come Lord Jesus, come.
Merry Christmas with love to all who read.
1 comment:
I love you Asher! Thank you for this post. I hope our friendship is not one of the ones that you think has died.
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