The world’s celebration of the Nativity of Christ is surrounded by Song. No secular artist puts out a Thanksgiving CD or an Easter Album, but almost everybody tries to “cash in” on Christmas, either with new songs or old favorites. Christmas songs fill the malls and stores and radio playlists from early November until Christmas Day. And the question arises: What is it about Christmas that causes the heart to sing?
It was like that from the beginning. In Luke’s Gospel: Mary sings The Magnificat, Zechariah celebrates the birth of his son John (to be called the Baptist) with a song that points to the birth of another child, the “Coming One.” Of course the angels sing to the shepherds on the night of Christ’s birth, and at the dedication of the child old Simeon sees the baby and bursts into a song of praise.
Again, what is it about Christmas that causes us to sing? We have lots of good Easter hymns, but the secular world is much more likely to know “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” than “Thine Is the Glory.” Not so with Christmas carols. Almost everybody can sing at least one verse of “Away In a Manger” or “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and can at least recognize the tune of a dozen more. Is it just the vast exposure on Radio and TV, or is there something about the Birth of the Christ Child that makes us want to sing?
A couple of things occur to me. First: the only really appropriate response to mystery is adoration, and what better way to adore than to sing. The story that we celebrate at Christmas is a “something more” mystery. Underneath all the theological baggage and argumentation there is this for all of us: life can be very ordinary and difficult and painful and short and depressing. The birth of a child as the Son of God, a message from beyond that God does love us after all, that this world is not “all there is,” that Peace and Love and Joy are real and are really important and are really possible is a message we all need to hear.
So even those who have their doubts about God, and Jesus, and the Church can believe in the “something more” that Christmas represents to them: the potential for good in a cold and lonely world. And that mysterious possibility is something to sing about.
Second: for those of us who receive the story as a true story, a story about how the God of the universe let go of all the trappings and power of Heaven to come and be born in a stable, taking on, as the Eucharistic prayer says, “our nature and our lot,” well, that too is a mystery beyond words. We cannot comprehend a love that big, and that deep, and that complete. So, when ordinary words fail us, we, like Mary, and Zechariah, and Simeon, and the angels; burst into songs of joy and gladness.
Peace, Delmer