A Maid Peerless

As a mid-Christmastide treat, here is Herbert Howells’ setting of an early sixteenth-century carol in praise of Mary, A Maid Peerless.  This piece had a long gestation: originally composed in 1931, it was revised in 1951 and 1971.  Tom Edney has pointed out the resemblance its radiance bears to Howells’ later choral music, especially Hymnus Paradisi.  The recording below, for upper voices and orchestra, is sung by the choristers of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.

The source of the text is a set of bass parts for twenty part-songs that was printed in 1530 by Wynkyn de Worde; unfortunately the equivalent volumes for the other parts have not survived.  A digitised version of the volume (now at the British Library, shelfmark k.1.e.1, ff. 11–13) can be viewed here.

A Maid peerless hath borne God’s son.

Nature gave place when ghostly grace

Subdued reason.

A Maid peerless hath borne God’s Son.

Alleluia.

As for beauty,

Or high gentry,

She is the flower

By God elect,

For this effect,

Man to succour.

Of Virgins Queen,

Lodestar of Light

Who to honour

We ought endeavour

Day and Night:

A Maid peerless hath borne God’s son.

Alleluia.

The words are more clearly audible, though the acoustic less ethereal, in this version for women’s voices and piano (with David Hill conducting the Ikon choir):

Merry Christmas!

And so another year draws towards its close; another Advent leads us to the manger-side and, we are told, to the fruition of our hopes.  Again the question is asked of us: do we believe that this small bemused knot of being, this wriggling, inarticulate bundle, this tiny brother to us, is the Son of God Almighty, is the answer to our prayers?  This year has been as full as any other of gratuitous violence, of greed, of injustice, of licence, of untruth, of vandalism, of wrong-doing of both the red-hot and the cold and calculated varieties.  It has contained illness, or frustration, or loneliness, or uncertainty.  Or it seems to have allowed our own failures to have defeated us.  And to live in Britain has been to observe continued cultural decline, even a new darkening of the national mood, as fundamental questions about the future of our country are exposed, some for the first time in centuries, and lacking any easy resolution; meanwhile, revolutions both moral and technological pose new challenges to human dignity even as their advantages seem irresistible to many.  Even the talk of a ‘Quiet Revival’ in the churches can seem like small beer in the face of it all.  Sometimes — indeed, often — we long, as the Israelites did, for Christ to come marching over the hills with a massed army, and liberate us by the sword.

But instead we find this child.  This is the shock, the twist, the wit, of Christianity, and of its author: the idea that a baby will have the last word — that already He is the last word.  Is this a joke?  Well, perhaps in a way it is, in its sheer surprise, its drop-shot deftness.  But not in its essence.  For God takes His love seriously: He means exactly what He says and does.  Any humour in the situation is at the devil’s expense, not at ours.  The idea alone — even to a sceptic, even as a proposition entertained merely for argument’s sake — is so shocking as almost to defy formulation in words: that God Himself (and not merely ‘a god’) should be born of human woman, should clothe Himself in our nature, compromised as it is, and take on our humanity entirely, even while remaining entirely Himself.  The very idea that God should consider a human body fit for habitation — or at least that He should choose to make it fit for habitation simply by inhabiting it — shows us that here we are not dealing with spirit-worlds, or Pantheons, or icons of our desires, or even any reasonable human idea of God, but with a dramatic God outside our imaginings: not bribable or capricious or tyrannical, but careful yet surprising, gentle yet deliberate, many-dimensional, knowing His own mind: in other words, real.  This Incarnation, this enfleshment — long before we even consider the Passion and the Resurrection — throws open the door of understanding to us.  Now we see what God is really all about: it is this child, ostensibly needing us more than we need him, who is our longed-for liberator, whose conquest will be final and unanswerable.

It does not mean that we are wrong to ask for an end to the world’s evil.  One day it will all indeed be defeated, and by this same minuscule right fist.  Yesterday’s antiphon at the beginning of Mass, the penultimate of the Great Advent Antiphons, ‘O Rex Gentium’, assured us of this: of Christ’s ultimate supremacy over all things, including temporal, even if the opposition continues to work what havoc it can while it may.  But the gift of a child, not a massed army, shows us that evil will be defeated not only in general but in minute particulars: not only the enormous wrongs with their towering pillars of smoke, but all the snide creeping erroneous whisperings that conspire in ourselves and in our nature.  Hence the confidence and uncompromised serenity of the Star above Bethlehem, sign of the tiny child by whom all despair will be defeated and all loss made good.  Hence, today, the final O antiphon, we acknowledge the true fulfilment of the old promise: ‘O Emmanuel’ — God with us, and far more closely than we can imagine.

Wishing all readers a very merry Christmas.

The choir of Ely cathedral sing David Willcocks’ arrangement of Prudentius’ hymn:

Of the Father’s heart begotten
Ere the world from chaos rose,
He is Alpha: from that Fountain,
All that is and hath been flows;
He is Omega, of all things
Yet to come the mystic Close,
Evermore and evermore.

By his word was all created;
He commanded and ’twas done;
Earth and sky and boundless ocean,
Universe of three in one,
All that sees the moon’s soft radiance,
All that breathes beneath the sun,
Evermore and evermore.

He assumed this mortal body,
Frail and feeble, doomed to die,
That the race from dust created
Might not perish utterly,
Which the dreadful Law had sentenced
In the depths of hell to lie,
Evermore and evermore.

O how blest that wondrous birthday,
When the Maid the curse retrieved,
Brought to birth mankind’s salvation,
By the Holy Ghost conceived,
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
In her loving arms received,
Evermore and evermore.

This is he, whom seer and sybil
Sang in ages long gone by;
This is he of old revealèd
In the page of prophecy;
Lo! he comes, the promised Saviour;
Let the world his praises cry!
Evermore and evermore.

Sing, ye heights of heaven, his praises;
Angels and Archangels, sing!
Wheresoe’er ye be, ye faithful,
Let your joyous anthems ring,
Every tongue his name confessing,
Countless voices answering,
Evermore and evermore.

Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (348–c. 410), tr. R. F. Davis (1866–1937)

Merry Christmas

The lights are on the tree, the carols are on the radio, and the waiting will soon be over.  The dark coats will rustle in the pews, and eyes will flash in the candle-light, and we will come down from the lonely frosted heights of our lives, or out of their raucous thoroughfares, to kneel in the stable’s shelter.  

Soon He will be be born who already by His very presence announces: ‘In the world you will have trouble, but be brave: I have conquered the world.’

Wishing readers a very merry Christmas, and all the best for the New Year.

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An unlettered shepherd explains himself to Our Lady:

The Shepherd’s Carol (1945)

We stood on the hills, Lady,

Our day’s work done,

Watching the frosted meadows

That winter had won.

The evening was calm, Lady,

The air so still.

Silence more lovely than music

Folded the hill.

There was a star, Lady,

Shone in the night,

Larger than Venus it was

And bright, so bright.

Oh, a voice from the sky, Lady,

It seemed to us then

Telling of God being born

In the world of men.

And so we have come, Lady,

Our day’s work done.

Our love, our hopes, ourselves

We give to your son.  

Clive Sansom (1910–1981).

 Set to music by Bob Chilcott (b. 1955):

Fear Not

And so we come once again to the fireside of the year, where the strange and lovely truth of Christmas draws us to homely things.  As the years go by, and I find myself less and less at home in the time and place given to me, I cross the threshold of this feast with ever greater relief.

It is not easy to live in, this age of deceptive appearances.  Behind the superficial glass and the liquid crystal screens our sorrows are undiminished.  The Britain in which, for the first time in fifteen centuries, a minority of people now profess to be Christians, is no happier for its loss of faith.  The old ways we tore to pieces are giving way not to the promised utopia, but to a new, sullen, disenchanted, resentful existence.   Not only are things going wrong, but we struggle to agree about what has gone wrong, let alone how to make things better.  Identity politics have captured many formerly trusted institutions and done great damage to their reputations, as well as confusing or upsetting many well-meaning people.  And our response to the general economic strain is not, in general, an effort to build up solidarity and courage, or to provide an alternative to rapaciousness and greed, but renewed howling against our forebears and the foundations of our society.  That old, gentle Britain to which we owe so much, and for which I still stand, has become our scapegoat.

This is now a Britain in which many shared things are no longer well-made or looked after; in which even those trying to do well seem unable to overcome the shoulder-shrugging culture around them.  Wherever we go, any expectations of high standards seem to be frustrated.  Thoroughfares and public spaces are tatty and uncared for; lifts and escalators are broken or vandalised.  Or things will not be as they first appear.  The Internet, for instance is full of false promises: websites will co-operate for a moment before the sentence you were reading disappears behind a salvo of pop-ups about cookie settings or newsletter subscriptions.  A special offer will turn out to entail endless and spurious terms and conditions.  Sorry, all our operatives are busy at the moment.  Sorry, this desk is unstaffed.  Sorry, this machine is out of order.

It is a Britain in which language itself is often used insincerely, too often more for the purposes of manipulation than anything else.  Euphemisms and weasel words and empty slogans are so prevalent that it is a constant effort to pare speech of them, to speak or write plainly and truthfully.  We often feel patronised and tricked and taken advantage of.

It is a Britain in which people of good will increasingly bear the brunt of the selfishness of those of ill-will; in which those in positions of responsibility are often unable to exercise their offices with principle and clarity; in which those who shout loudest tend to get their way.  Only amongst a few is there even a sense of embarrassment at our irreverence, our arrogance, our squandering of our inheritance.  It is a Britain which, I now see, is indeed mortal.

It is an old and noble nation forgetting her honour, and learning anew the barbarism that the old faith once kept at bay.  There are grave misdeeds and acts of calculatedly barbaric violence at home and abroad, an ebbing away of civility and common decency, and the unabated undermining of marriage and the family and of the Christian vision of the dignity of the human person.

But amidst all this, even as the darkness presses in, another voice, another kind of language.  And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields… Words which, strange as they are to the ear, are not evasive, do not deceive; which have that unmistakable ring of truth:

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.  

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

They are words which contradict all the smirking arrogance and squalid tragedies of our time, but not as we would have supposed or dared to have hoped.  Something different is going on: something strange and also sweet… Something so strange and sweet as the call of our true and longed-for home.

The darkness presses in on us, often as intensely as it pressed in on the Roman province of Judaea and on Bethlehem; pressed right down on the stable-roof and sought entry.  But from within that stable it was repelled and defied, as it is repelled and defied tonight, and for ever, by light — by the one Light which, as we have often been told, the darkness cannot overpower.  And our liberation is both more cosmic and more intimate than instant deliverance from hard times or a faithless epoch could ever have been: we are freed from the very foes that blight us most: sin and death.

This year is the 110th anniversary of one of my favourite Christmas poems: Noel: Christmas Eve 1913, by Robert Bridges.  Gerald Finzi set it to music in his Christmas cantata In Terra Pax (see above) though for the third stanza he substituted the verses quoted above, from the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel.

Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913

Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. 

A frosty Christmas Eve
when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone
where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village
in the water’d valley
Distant music reach’d me
peals of bells a-ringing:
The constellated sounds
ran sprinking on earth’s floor
As the dark vault above
with stars was spangled o’er.

Then sped my thoughts to keep
that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching
by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields
and marvelling could not tell
Whether it were angels
or the bright stars singing.

Now blessed be the tow’rs
that crown England so fair
That stand up strong in prayer
unto God for our souls:
Blessed be their founders
(said I) an’ our country folk
Who are ringing for Christ
in the belfries to-night
With arms lifted to clutch
the rattling ropes that race
Into the dark above
and the mad romping din.

But to me heard afar
it was starry music
Angels’ song, comforting
as the comfort of Christ
When he spake tenderly
to his sorrowful flock:
The old words came to me
by the riches of time
Mellow’d and transfigured
as I stood on the hill
Heark’ning in the aspect
of th’ eternal silence.

Wishing all readers a very merry and restful Christmas.

Merry Christmas!

The lullaby ‘Sweet was the song the Virgin sang’ (words by G. R. Woodward) from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ cantata Hodie (1954)

Wishing all readers a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

‘Blessed be the time that apple taken was!’

A contribution to a virtual Advent Calendar of art, music and poetry compiled by members of Deo Gratias, a circle of Catholics in their twenties & thirties meeting fortnightly in London to discuss artistic and cultural expressions of the Christian faith.

Adam lay ybounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter
Thought he not too long.

And all was for an apple,
An apple that he took.
As clerkës finden 
Written in their book.

Ne had the apple taken been,
The apple taken been,
Ne had never our ladie
Abeen heav’ne queen.

Blessed be the time
That apple taken was:
Therefore we moun singen
Deo gratias.

This carol is one of several medieval lyrics, sacred and secular, that are preserved in a remarkable and unique fifteenth-century manuscript, possibly originating from Bury St. Edmunds, and now held at the British Library (Sloane MS 2593).  Like many medieval verses it is macaronic, combining Latin and the vernacular, and, as well as offering an aching glimpse into medieval Catholic England, it expresses in a nutshell one of Christianity’s great theological paradoxes, the ‘felix culpa’ or ‘happy fault’ — the realisation that, in so far as Adam’s sin led to our redemption by Christ, we may actually rejoice that the sin occurred, so wonderful is that redemption.  We hear it in the Exsultet at the Easter Vigil: ‘O happy fault; O necessary sin of Adam, which won for us so great a Redeemer!’

Wearing its learning lightly, and with (I think) a particularly English humour, this carol expresses the same idea, but this time with respect to Mary.  The carol begins with Adam ‘bounden in a bond’, an allusion to the medieval idea that he lay in limbo until Christ’s Harrowing of Hell on Holy Saturday.  I love the wry humour of the lines ‘Four thousand winter / Thought he not too long,’ which strike me almost as brotherly teasing; the same with ‘And all was for an apple, / An apple that he took’.  It is an acknowledgement of a kind of solidarity with Adam; an admission that he and we are all in the same pickle.

And yet — the poet says — if the apple had never been taken, if Adam had not sinned, Mary would never have been Queen of Heaven (since, implicitly, we would have had no need for Christ to save us).  Hence, strange to say,  ‘Blessed be the time / That apple taken was!’  This is the ‘felix culpa’, and a (surely deliberate) echo of the Exsultet.  And so, one senses to his own amazement, the catechist declares, ‘Therefore we moun singen [may sing] / Deo gratias.’  It is one of the most marvellous paradoxes of Christianity, and here is expressed concisely and with winsome humour, and also with the Marian devotion for which medieval England was renowned.

Several composers have set the carol to music. The best-known setting is probably Boris Ord’s, which has regular outings at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge.  Benjamin Britten also included a version in his Ceremony of Carols.  But I think my favourite is the setting by Philip Ledger, with the words ‘Deo Gratias’ as a haunting refrain.

Merry Christmas

The liturgical year is the Church’s colour-wheel, lending its hues to the year’s seasons, and every year I think I am fondest of the sweet mauve of Advent.  Now its mood of quiet anticipation has brought us to this day, Christmas Day, when, by the quiet marvel in the stable, Christ, the Son of God, entered not only our world but our human family, and so changed everything for ever.  No earthly power can touch this truth; no ideology destroy it; and by it we know — even when life seems to demand of us impossible courage — that all things shall be right in the end.  Purple gives way to white and gold; the triumph of innocence is at hand; the Devil’s works are set unravelling.  A light has shone into the world, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

Harold Darke’s setting of Christina Rosetti’s carol In the Bleak Midwinter, sung by the choir of Winchester Cathedral (conducted by David Hill) to a beautiful string accompaniment.

‘Sing lullaby to Jesus, the Saviour of all’

This has been, I should think, an unsettling year for all of us.  The pandemic has been a tremendous challenge; few of us in Britain will forget that vertiginous feeling that ionised the air in February and March, as the ground under our feet was sucked and drawn away by who knew how great an approaching wave?  And the wave, when it came, broke not so seriously as to overwhelm the health service, as we had feared, but still seriously, and has returned in several successive, sporadic, unpredicted surges.  It has been a hard time for most people, and for some very hard indeed.  There has been sickness, bereavement, ruin, loneliness and fear.

Just as difficult to reckon with, in their own way, have been the strange counsels that are abroad, the contentious political ideas declaring themselves in nearly every corner of public life, insisting with alarming and hyperbolic jargon on a single new diagnosis, a single new solution for our problems.  The intentions may often be good, I know, but in many places a tendency towards intemperate language, an extraordinary willingness to rush to conclusions and sometimes an actual mirthless enthusiasm for outrage has, combined with a lack of level-headed and prudent leadership, brought about a hard, bright, livid atmosphere, one which smothers honest dialogue and, disturbingly, makes Britain feel quite unlike itself.  I think it is no wonder that people are upset and alienated when, for instance, irresponsible use is made of the positions enjoyed by cherished institutions to advocate partisan causes — many seem to have no idea how much damage they risk doing to their own reputations — and the politicisation of whole swathes of ordinary life is so relentless that there seems to be no escape.   There is even the nasty feeling that in some quarters the pandemic is being exploited deliberately for political ends.  Here, too, one feels the ground lurching under one’s feet, the lumbering of great engines of power.

But I think that much of what I mused in March still stands: even amid deepening shadow we have seen where the light is, and how brightly it shines; we have seen the light that darkness cannot overpower.  Many people have been moved to tremendous kindness and generosity, even to heroism, by this pandemic, and even by the unpleasant politics.   And there has been wisdom to glean, too: the long quarantines provided a blank background against which it was unusually easy to see how unexpectedly good days and hard days tend to arrive; how they all dawn alike.  And then there is the Church, which I think has been, in its quiet way, as alive and imaginative under this year’s circumstances as ever, or at the very least has trudged faithfully on.  And I think sometimes of the rededication of England to Our Lady of Walsingham, an event which turned out to coincide so intriguingly with the first, most frightening days of the pandemic.  Perhaps at some point I will write more about this, but it seems to tell us that England is, in the right way, worth loving for its own sake; that, amid this age of anti-patriotism, and a general deep unhappiness and listlessness of a kind that seldom ends well, even such flawed and mortal things as nations can rightly be loved and revered.

And what of ourselves?   What hope is there for us; what fundamental answer is there to the deepest question, the question we cannot even utter?  We who try to follow the Gospel, believing that truth is not merely something we construct or concoct, but is Truth itself, and comes from God, have indeed been given an answer.  It is an answer we could never have designed ourselves, nor ever thought to hope for; it is nothing so straightforward as an explanation; rather, it is a mystery, the same mystery as was given to us two thousand and twenty years ago.  Yet as sure as it is mysterious, it is by the helpless newborn Child in the manger that all the engines of power, and the kings of the earth, sickness, grief, and even death itself are undone.  Every year the wondrous truth is spoken: this is how God chose to enter the world, not by marching en masse against the foe, but by ‘sneaking behind enemy lines’, as C. S. Lewis put it; entering the world exactly like us, in weakness and woe; no less a Lord, but one who is obeyed in love, not fear.

‘Fear not’, the angel had to tell even the hardened, hill-patrolling shepherds; Heaven knows we need telling too.  Power may thrive on fear, but only for a time, and it never expects the one thing that defeats it, Love; it never expects the Baby in the manger.  And so it is by this one Lord’s law of love that the potentates of power are brought low, and, better still, that good triumphs in our very hearts, and in the end shall triumph for ever.

That shabby stable was a fortress, not of worldly might, but of Love, the real thing: it was a little citadel of Love.   I think of all the millions of such fortresses all over the world in which the feast of Christmas, even this muted Christmas of 2020, will be kept faithfully, and merriment made.  That is where hope lies.

Wishing all readers as merry a Christmas as possible after this hard year.

‘Sing Lullaby’: a setting written in 1920 by Herbert Howells (1892–1983) of words by his friend and fellow son of Gloucestershire Frederick William Harvey (1888–1957). There is an interesting article at MusicWeb International about this carol and its simple but piercing words.

‘A Babe is born, all of a maid…’

I hope all readers are enjoying a very merry Christmas!

Year after year I find my treasuring of Christmastide undiminished.  In this season we really are breathing different air.  Things quieten down; the music in the shops grows merrier and less aggressive, and the world becomes gentler and quieter.  Once the moment arrives, even the forces of commerce cannot touch us.  Britain returns to the common observance of a festival of light and sweetness.  The mainstream feels a little more like home, the great cultural headwind abates slightly, and, more importantly, there is good will and merriment about, and hearts are softened to peace and goodwill.  The season gives us an excuse to wish each other well, to mend differences, to make amends.

Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh has a good article here (published in the Irish magazine The Burkean), observing that the modern world, at Christmas, when it thinks nobody is looking, ‘indulges in a celebration of everything it usually disdains: family, nostalgia, tradition, sentimentality, innocence, festivity, ceremony, and even (albeit usually indirectly) religion’.  And why not?  These are natural things, and we mere mortals can only pretend to be cynical and individualistic for so long.  There was a time, not so long ago, when this sweet sensation of high day and holiday, that heady feeling of living in time outside time, came round several times a year: now only the one ‘festive period’ is left to us.  But even a single chink of light in the year is better than none.  It is better than nothing even if the world only half-remembers that the Creator of all things has taken flesh, lived in the knowledge of our frailty, brought forth warmth into the cold world, and thereby changed the very fabric of the universe, and changed it utterly.  That is no longer a void between our lonely souls, but Love.

Here is an exuberant setting by the Welsh composer William Mathias (1934-1992) of the fifteenth-century English carol ‘A babe is born all of a maid’, one of several preserved in the famous medieval Sloane manuscript 2593 (catalogue record here).  Eleanor Parker writes more about it on her wonderful ‘Clerk of Oxford’ blog: https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2012/01/babe-is-born-all-of-may.html.  The choir of King’s College, Cambridge, is led by the Director of Music, the late Sir Stephen Cleobury (who died on St Cecilia’s day last year; a great loss to the world of music).

Wishing all readers much continued Christmas merriment, and happiness in the New Year.

Merry Christmas!

Now at this time Caesar Augustus issued a decree for a census of the whole world to be taken.  This census — the first — took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to his own town to be registered.  So Joseph set out from the town of Nazareth in Galilee and travelled up to Judaea, to the town of David called Bethlehem, in order to be registered together with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.  While they were there the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to a son, her first-born.  She wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them at the inn.  In the countryside close by there were shepherds who lived in the fields and took it in turns to watch their flocks during the night.  The angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone round them.  They were terrified, but the angel said, “Do not be afraid.  Listen, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people.  Today in the town of David a saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”

Luke 2:1–11

Wishing all readers of this blog a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

   

‘Grant them his blessing that now maken cheer’

Christmas is now the only time of the year when nostalgia is allowed, so we take full advantage of it.  Once a year we modern folk admit, exhausted, that we cannot stand the headlong pursuit of an abstract future any longer.  And we return to sanity: out come the tinsel and the traditions, and the carols and the crackers and the cards.  For once the scoffers win nobody over.  Supermarkets realise that words like ‘magic’ and ‘wonderland’ will swell their sales.  In my London suburb, lights hang from eaves and the innocence of candles is alight in windows: brave beacons of peace and goodwill against the traffic and the darkness.  We think of homely things and home — rightly enough, since that is the meaning of the Greek nostos, from which we derive ‘nostalgia’.  We gather our families for meals and bake Christmas cakes and dig out board games. We remember childhood Christmasses; we mark old customs; we put the radio on for the carols.  ‘And girls in slacks remember Dad, and oafish louts remember Mum’.  We turn homewards.

But in many ways the feast we celebrate today is not really very nostalgic.  The idea that Almighty God in his limitlessness should take on the limits of man, even to the point of knowing a newborn baby’s helplessness, is an unfailingly disconcerting thought, far stranger and wilder than any pagan winter festival; beyond the rationalisation of the secular mind.  And apart from the light and warmth of the manger, and the Lady’s miraculous motherliness, there is nothing particularly homely about the Nativity scene.  The census could not have had worse timing; Joseph had come all this way to his home town only to find the dreadful accommodation of a stable, as we all know, and now his wife was actually having to give birth in it; the town was unfamiliar to her at least, the temperature had plummeted in the clear Middle Eastern night, an infanticidal tyrant was abroad, hopping mad with jealousy and with a plan of pre-emptive retribution to match; safety lay only as far away as Egypt.  And there are the other things foreshadowed, not least in the gifts that were already on the road with three kings: the Passion and the Crucifixion and the seeming finality of the entombment.  ‘He came unto his own, and his own received him not’.

Yet, deeper still, perhaps this mood of Christmas wistfulness is entirely meet and right after all.  The child came at Christmas in order to show us the way home.  And home is what we are all looking for. We are prone to forgetting that we are not at home here on earth; that we do not really belong here.  We may daydream vainly in search of a lost past, an unattainable future or a distant land where we think we could belong, but really we try to suppress our homesickness and have accustomed ourselves to exile.  So our real home, though longed-for, is bound to seem unfamiliar to us.  Strange and disconcerting though the facts of the Incarnation and the Nativity are, our instinctive reaction is sound: this is the way home.  Let us allow the strange homely spirit of Christmas, which is true nostalgia, to break through the cramping walls of our age, and resonate with our inward longing.

We are not the first to feel it.  It is there, hauntingly, in the carols of medieval England, for instance; in the wide-eyed-ness there is about them, and the great depth behind their deceptive simplicity:

 Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting.
 Lullay my dere herte, my own dere darling.

 I saw a fair maiden siten and sing.
 She lulled a little child, a swete Lording.

 That eternal Lord is He that made alle thing:
 Of alle lordes He is Lord, of alle kinges King.

 There was mickle melody at that childes birth:
 Alle that were in Hev’ne bliss they made mickle mirth.

 Angels bright they sang that night, and saiden to that child:
 Blessed be thou, and so be she that is both meek and mild.

 Pray we now to that child, and to his mother dere,
 Grant them blessing, that now maken cheer.

 Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting.
 Lullay my dere herte, my own dere darling.

May God indeed grant us His blessing who now make cheer.  Merry Christmas!

Philip Lawson’s setting of the carol Lullay, myn liking, from the fifteenth-century Sloane Manuscript 2593 (British Library).

Handel’s Messiah at the Barbican

Before Christmas disappears entirely over the horizon, a note on a concert I attended in late Advent.  This is the time of year for Handel’s Messiah, so it was a treat to go to the Barbican Hall in London on Wednesday (20 December 2017) to hear it performed by the Academy of Ancient Music under Richard Egarr.  This glorious evening had an unsettling beginning, though — partly as intended but partly unintended — for the concert began not with old music but with new, the première of a short cantata.  Those of us who had attended a talk before the concert had had some warning of this.  ‘A Young Known Voice’ is the result of a collaboration between the composer Hannah Conway and a group of about twenty-five pupils, all aged between eleven and fifteen, from various schools in London.

The talk preceding the concert had given Hannah Conway an opportunity to explain her approach to the project.  She had wanted to find out how young people would react to the famous oratorio.  Was Handel’s Messiah still relevant today?  The participants had been presented with the libretto and asked to create a work that responded to it in some way; then the composer wove the resulting material into a single piece of music, which they performed for us on the night.  Here is a recording of the performance itself (and its libretto can be read here):

My instinct is always to encourage and wish success to any project like this that involves young people and calls on their creative powers, not least if it brings them into the company of the great works of our musical inheritance.  And indeed I thought the music itself was powerful and well-scored, and the young people’s performance, made to a full house of nearly two thousand, was startlingly confident and vivid; their voices were clear and fearless over the microphones. Yet it was a perturbing piece to listen to.

Of course, to a large extent, this was the intended effect.  Since Hannah Conway gave her collaborators the freedom to react as they wished to the Messiah, there should be no surprise in meeting the righteous anger typical of energetic, uncynical youth.  They are rightly alive to the world’s injustices; they are understandably alert to the perils of the Internet age; they are justifiably angered by the unpleasant speech we hear around us, and so on.  They know what they are against, and to some extent what they are for.  Twice the credo is sung,  ‘Discrimination, persecution, judgement!  Broken by the power to unite’  I suppose it was also to be expected that much of the anger expressed was acutely topical and openly political, rubbing the sores of some of the rawest preoccupations of our time.  I am sure the reader can guess what they were.

Thus, in the libretto: ‘People have free will, but their choices [a]ffect our whole nation.  We chose to leave the E.U.  They elected Trump.  One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’  All of a sudden, we have politics in the concert hall; words are uttered that stop barely short of explicit criticism of those who voted for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union in our referendum the other year, implying that a word as uncompromising as ‘trash’ could be applied to their position, and furthermore lumping them in with the electorate of an entirely different country who were the authors of an unrelated political decision.  Even as the cantata declared war on ostracism, it undermined itself by a general defensiveness against ‘a cynical audience with cynical stares’ (who, us?) and ‘an unjust system breeding frustration,’ and risked conjuring in our minds precisely the thing it cried out against: the spectre of an anonymous and indistinct mass of people, possibly including parents, to be held in suspicion rather than tolerated or understood. This text should surely have undergone some editing, as any other libretto might have done, so that the young people’s ideas could have been expressed in a more measured, more precise and more coherent way without necessarily being watered down.  As it was, we were confronted with the sort of utterance from which many in the audience had presumably hoped to find, in this very concert, momentary escape.  At a time when the national conversation is so bitter, must we taint even a musical concert with political agitation?  Alexander van Ingen, the Chief Executive of the Academy of Ancient Music, explains here that the project ‘allowed self-expression amongst those participating in it’, adding that he is ‘proud that we presented it at the Barbican without self-censor, or telling the participants that they couldn’t say this or that.’  So it was the paying audience that had to put up with the rougher edges of that self-expression.  It might be unreasonable to expect the young people to perceive how weary of such things their listeners might be already, but the organisers certainly had a responsibility to take greater care in this regard.

Yet the cantata was also unsettling in other ways that were not, I think, intended by its creators, and which became plain only when we came to the Messiah itself, to the great oratorio’s old known dawn in the strings, and those familiar words, ‘Comfort ye, my people’… only then did the uneasiness gradually crystallise.  It was suddenly clear that problem lies not so much in the substance of the political views expressed in the cantata, but in the fact that politics appear at all in a composition supposedly inspired by such a work as Handel’s Messiah.  For in the Messiah we are breathing different air, the air of transcendence.  Both Handel’s music and Charles Jennens’ richly Scriptural libretto lift their hearers out of themselves, out of the narrowness of their contemporary preoccupations, however pressing they may seem, into the great drama of humanity; into the trajectory which rises from the Old Testament, culminates in the New, and then turns to look out towards the end of the world with Heaven waiting beyond.  That is how it would have been understood by the people of Handel’s time.  Are we so different to them?  We too hunger for transcendence, even if we would not care to admit it.

We will not find in the Messiah a political solution to the problems of our age.  Neither would Handel’s audience have found any for theirs, though they were equally afflicted by their own social antagonists, crises and difficulties (what is a Foundling Hospital for if not the marginalised and downtrodden?).  This was not Handel’s purpose.  The lesson that great works of art like this teach young and old alike is that, however justifiable our anger at the current state of things, our experience is not unique and there is a higher, a greater picture to be apprehended.  We treasure music like this precisely because it is timeless.

Seen in this light, this question of ‘whether the Messiah is relevant today’ seems a severe distraction.  Yet the organisers of the youth project seem to have made it the chief yardstick by which to measure their success.  The participants ‘debated gender inequality, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, social exclusion and communities rejected by society.’  Poor Handel: I am sure he would have had sensible things to say about these matters, but his oratorio was never intended to address them directly.  Thus I fear the young people were put into a frame of mind by which they would see the Messiah not as their heirloom but as an inanimate artefact, an ancient text that might as well have been written in cuneiform, useful to us only to the extent that we can scour it for the slightest glimmer of a bearing on the problems of the present moment, much as the stones of a ruined medieval monastery might be picked over for some immediate use.

The concert programme goes on to report that the project ‘reflected upon the idea of hope, exploring why and how generations have used various metaphors, images and stories to galvanise “coming together” with strength and direction’.  This is more like it, and far closer to the right order of magnitude, yet this statement, too, with its detached tone, misses the world-encompassing meaning that we are meant to find in the narrative and the figure of the Messiah.  The idea that by the words ‘thy rebuke hath broken his heart’ might indeed be meant my rebuke, or that he hath borne our grief, carried our sorrow or was bruisèd for our transgressions, would have been understood by Handel’s contemporaries.  For them, van Ingen’s assertion that ‘the central themes of the Messiah story’ are ‘persecution, isolation, rejection; but ultimately a positive message of hope’ would have seemed inexplicably watery and vague, if not missing the mark altogether; they would have described it, perhaps, as a musical exposition of the means of their redemption.  Even someone who does not hold the Christian creed can try to imagine how Handel’s Messiah would sound to someone who does, and any intelligent young person could put their mind to it.  Yet the whole work seems to have been presented to the young collaborators in brackets, as something to pick over, rather than lose oneself in.  Who can blame them, then, for going through it forensically rather than imaginatively?  The pursuit of relevance drains away transcendence.  The libretto is reduced to a string of text that sounds just poetic enough to be ‘relevant today’, as is evident from the fragmented quotations from the original which sound good but whose full meaning, out of context, is impoverished.  The vision of humanity’s origin and redemption is reduced to a symbolic yarn by which those long-ago people in olden days figured out their problems; The Messiah, Christ, is of value to us merely as another example in our collection of an individual discriminated against ‘because he believed something different’.  An opera with a religious theme can be called an oratorio just as we can buy cheese-and-onion crisps as well as ready-salted.  Thus was the heart of the Messiah’s meaning missed.

Even to ask whether the Messiah is relevant was to admit defeat.  The very question belies a fundamental lack of confidence in our cultural inheritance.  Never mind that every generation since 1742 has considered the work valuable enough to hand down to the next; let the possibility simply be raised that it might be irrelevant, and that it is how it will be considered.  It would surely have been better to begin by asking, ‘Why has the Messiah been considered so valuable for so long?’, approaching with humility if the reason is not immediately obvious.  Then we can study the composer’s craft, the matching of the music to the words, especially the word painting by which Handel actually illustrates, in his melodies, the valleys exalted, the mountains and hills made low, and the crooked made straight, and the magnitude of the work itself will gradually become real to us.  One of the difficulties of being young is that so many things simply have to be learnt, and there is no way around it.  With Handel’s Messiah it is no different: we have to go up to meet it, and cannot expect it to come down to us.  Still, Handel does give us plenty of assistance; nobody could accuse his music of inaccessibility or aloofness.

For all that so many opportunities seem to have been missed in this project, it is important to mention some of its aspects, perhaps easily-missed, that were evidently quite deeply thought through.  Certain details of the conversation before the concert revealed this.  For instance, Hannah Conway is very alert to the dignity and situation of her collaborators, whom she was careful to refer to as ‘young people’ and not as children; in other words, I think she wanted to give them some responsibility, raise their self-esteem and test their mettle.  Some pupils who were invited on stage spoke well, too.   One girl made the point that young people were not generally listened to; Conway wonders elsewhere ‘why so little trust seems to be placed in the instinctive younger generation’.   It may be an eternal truth that young people have much to learn about the world, but they often have sound instincts which are a reproach to their elders, ‘for,’ as G. K. Chesterton said, ‘children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.’  This is indeed an age in which fairly scant attention is paid to the spiritual and moral welfare of young people.

The composer said that she thought our hearing of the Messiah would be changed by having heard A Young Known Voice beforehand.  This was certainly true in my case, not least since the young people had been invited to sit on the stage, next to the orchestra, in plain view of the audience.  I found myself wondering what would become of them and hoping that the reality of the Messiah, delight in Handel’s art and authentic beauty and truth would find their way into their hearts and spirits, to be treasured always.

‘He cam also stille’

Today is the Epiphany, and Christmas draws to a close.  I hope all readers have had a thoroughly merry feast!

All the same, while it is still in mind… does anyone else feel that Advent in general was diminished or even close to being ruined this time around?  Uglier than ever was the headlong stampede from Hallowe’en to Black Friday to Christmas-gorged-on-too-early, and, worse than this, seemingly inescapable and practically compulsory.

How wearing it all feels sometimes, the post-modern existence that is supposed to be so great, and wearing not least because so many good things are under siege, and the odds stacked so highly against their defenders.  The Church, the family, the garden of childhood, the peace of mind of the elderly, beauty in music and language, kindness in word and deed: all these are under a consistent threat.  To the castle of the mind founded on the old principles, or flying a God-fearing flag, or furnished with gentleness, is laid not a physical or explicit siege, as in other ages, but a moral siege, waged sometimes by proxy or indirectly but waged nonetheless: a war of words, a campaign of noise and the self against the old ways and manners, and laid pell-mell and piecemeal to eyes and ears and hearts.  Down it rains onto millions of houses, battering the roof-tiles, pelting at the windows, hammering at the door.  In it seeps by television and radio and smart-phone.  Every single household must now also be a self-contained stronghold if it is not to succumb to the contempt for all things old and the gormless glee in the new which surrounds it from without, or even to false allies offering short-cuts — or other threats from within, the unwonted doubt, the habit of suspicion which might easily become indiscriminate, or the ambush of envy, perceive the comfort of those for whom the twenty-first century is a warm bath.

And to those who hold her dear it is plainer than ever that England, always fragile, is indeed mortal.  Modern Britain is becoming more and more an unpleasant place, in which islands of goodness remain but are coming adrift from their moorings.  People of goodwill remain in their millions, but they are divided and conquered: the high places are not for them, the roads are hostile to them, the airwaves are closed to them.  Trivial evils compound great evils.  All looks prosperous and healthy at first glance, but by intangible signs and details it becomes clear that the mainstream lives by a different, new moral language which deliberately renders the everlasting one foreign.  We have known this for a while, but sometimes it flashes out with a new clarity and confidence.

Down rains the campaign of noise onto millions of houses, battering the roof-tiles, pelting at the windows, hammering at the door.

Does this sound gloomy?  Yes, I know it does!  Sometimes it is necessary to look squarely at the gloom, and its particular composition in our time.  The consolations, though, are the same as ever: that human nature never changes; that evil has often before foundered on the verge of triumph, and that people are as hungry as ever for the good, the true and the beautiful.  Ordinary people do in many ways seem to be bearing up quite well against all the vanities and inanities that assail them.  I am still regularly surprised by kindnesses even in London’s sullen smugness.  There are genuine smiles and unfakeable goodnesses, and children, at least, are still children.

What is the answer to a mass campaign of noise?  The same answer that once appeared in a stable no less vulnerable to its surroundings than a modern suburban terraced house is now.  For England, which in any case has been an unpleasant place before, is no more hostile now than first-century Galilee might have been.  Where all power was wielded by a bureaucratic bean-counting emperor and a power-crazed, infanticidal tyrant there appeared not armed insurrection or military force but, with shocking gentleness, the child who

[…] cam also stille
To his modres bowr
As dew in Aprylle,
That falleth on the flowr […]

and by whom the promise was made that no good or gentle thing would be lost or in vain, and indeed that to the good and the gentle would, in the end, be victory.

A carol written by Herbert Howells, the 125th anniversary of whose birth fell on the 17th October 2017.

Vows and Vocations

At three o’clock — or sometimes shortly thereafter, now that live broadcasts can be rewound — we allow the television to interrupt our merry-making on Christmas Day.  The Christmas pudding having been doused in brandy and set fire to and sung over and most assiduously devoured, we are usually just in time for one of the more unfrenetic and comforting broadcasts left on the main channels: the Queen’s Christmas message.  I find it invigoratingly traditional in spirit, and there is a rare feeling of national togetherness as the Queen invites us to look back on the year.  Gloriously heedless of the BBC’s dull secularist ethos, H.M. always makes unforceful but unambiguous (and therefore courageous) mention of her Christian faith. This year’s message was the fiftieth the Queen has made by television, so it is a well-established tradition in its own right.

But even fifty years of Christmas broadcasts struggle to shine against the seven decades of the Queen’s marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh.  There beside the Queen as she delivered her message, next to the portraits of her great-grandchildren George and Charlotte, are two photographs of Elizabeth and Prince Philip.  One was taken on their wedding day in 1947, and the other in November this year to mark their Platinum Anniversary.  Seventy years separate the pictures, but one reciprocal vow is common to both.

A post shared by The Royal Family (@theroyalfamily) on Nov 19, 2017 at 2:49pm PST

This is marriage, the real thing, and this particular marriage is special because it belongs to us in much the same way as the Queen herself belongs to us.  It is one of the last lit beacons in bleak Britain, whose marital statistics show that a third of all marriages are sooner or later put asunder, and that more and more couples move in under the same roof without entering into marriage at all.  More than three million families have been begun without the security of wedlock.  It is some decades since the State showed any understanding of its proper responsibility in this field, which is to create all the right conditions for stable family life, especially for the sake of its oldest and youngest citizens, without meddling in it.  What has happened instead is that marriage has been undermined so that, from a simply practical point of view, people can hardly be blamed for choosing to set up home in co-habitation.  The social and financial benefits that marriage once brought do not now make economic sense, and to many people the law appears to set a trap, being still just tenacious enough to protract and sour any parting, yet not firm enough to banish the very idea from people’s minds, encouraging building rather than dismantling.  By Britain’s national anticulture, by spectres of the imagination and by the reality of people’s own experiences, many have come to fear the unsunderable vows.  Yet couples who are ready to found a household should surely wish for just such a bond.  Marriage helps couples, before they ever enter into it, by serving as a test or proof: if they do not feel they trust each other enough to marry, then they cannot know whether they trust each other to start and sustain a family.  On the other hand, if their mutual trust does indeed go far enough that children seem a real possibility, then why delay in giving form to the natural truth?  Marriage is for life because children join their parents for life.  The great vow is there to protect first husband and wife, and then their children, against human weakness and the evils of the world outside.

But we have also forgotten not only the practicality and common sense of marriage, but its transcendent, spiritual dimension.  This is another casualty of the dictatorship of relativism — Benedict XVI’s phrase — the tyranny of indifference that surrounds us, unctuously bidding us do as we please but offering no railings of guidance, and certainly no healing, if our desires lead us into wrongdoing and suffering.  The idea of marriage as a calling to high friendship, as a sacrificial mission that elevates the dignity of man and woman, has vanished, and along with it a sense of motherhood and fatherhood as vocations, to be honoured far above mere career or material prosperity or political engagement.  So people no longer know what to hope for, nor what to build, are therefore afraid of commitment, and so settle for too little from themselves and others.

Yet the Church insists not only on its spiritual dimension but on recognising it as a sacrament, that is, an encounter with the explicit presence of God.  Marriage is, indeed, a minor miracle.  I don’t mean this in a facetious way.  It is one of the great paradoxes of life, this unexpected, triumphant treaty of accord by which men and women, in their rival camps with their baffling, amusing, mysterious, undefinable differences, can find not merely reconciliation, nor even simply fleeting pleasure, but actually their highest earthly adventure by pairing up with a member of the other team (the rival team!), and sealing with them an all-transfiguring, world-creating pact, each a match for the other, and each the other’s match.

The impossible union is not only a wonder, but a plausible reality.  A bride will cost a man his life, but, mirabile dictu, it can come to pass that even such a wayward creature as a man will vow to pay, and keep his vow.  The hard-won reward is generous: he finds himself the beneficiary of a vow of equal magnitude, and he finds himself in a unique position to give the gift of self.  Moreover, the happiness and security this brings him overflows into any children the marriage produces, children who encounter no pit of dread in asking two of the most important questions in growing up: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Whom can I trust?’, though many young people do encounter such a chasm.  And the Queen, who in her life has had to make some fearsome vows before God, to her bridegroom and to her realm, is one of our greatest living examples in this regard.  Her own family has not been untouched by the turmoil of marriage in late twentieth-century Britain, but she and her husband have kept their faith and their vows, and quietly encouraged the rest of us to do the same.

In marriage is found, and from marriage comes, the ‘home’ of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas message.  I think it would be a good challenge for the Church and all people of good will to make this a year of promoting marriage, simply the idea, in our tired culture.  The Coalition for Marriage is already doing an excellent job in keeping an eye on the state of things, informing public opinion and encouraging the Government to do the right thing.  But marriage ought to be an urgent topic of conversation.  It needs to be allowed to set alight the imaginations of young people (I write as one) who are hungry for a mission, and the message needs to be proclaimed that marriage is a good thing from alpha to omega and at every scale: national, local and in the innermostnesses of the soul.  It ought to be given a place near the heart of the New Evangelisation; to solve the marriage crisis would be to ease many of the other social, moral and spiritual problems that afflict us.  Along with the other sacraments of mission (Holy Orders and Confirmation), it is the antidote to the dictatorship of relativism’s shrugs of indifference, and the soundest, least wasteful vessel into which to pour, with generosity and joy, the fruit of one’s sacrifices.

Meanwhile… Merry Christmas!  Keep feasting!

(Malcolm Archer’s setting of the Linden Tree Carol)

Merry Christmas!

Just a brief note to wish all or any readers a very happy Christmas indeed!  This evening our Youth Choir sang the music for the Vigil Mass and led our parish in south London into the feast.  Now our waiting is at an end; make you merry as our ancestors did!  Pour brandy over the Christmas pudding and set it alight, put the radio on for the Nine Lessons and Carols, and don’t forget the Queen at three!   May the feast glow with the same world-surprising wonder that first brought the rough-hewn shepherds of old to their knees.  We have as much cause to kneel, and to wonder, as they did.

Here’s an ancient hymn — this isn’t our choir! — from the choristers of Ely Cathedral.

On a Wise Queen

One among many Christmas Day traditions in our family is ‘the Queen’ — assembling in front of the telly just in time for H.M.’s Christmas broadcast at three in the afternoon.  This annual broadcast of under ten minutes’ length might be easy to take for granted.  The National Anthem is played at the beginning, the Queen delivers her message, and there is another piece of music at the end.  Its simplicity, dignity and reassuring mood are often thrown into relief by the B.B.C.’s tendency to sandwich it between frenetic adverts for the usual televisual fare.  Yet while the Queen speaks, all is calm. 

I know I’ve written plenty already in praise of monarchy in principle and the person of our present monarch.  But it needs repeating: Queen Elizabeth is a tower of strength, strength that she has proved in endurance and constancy.  And I think in the Christmas broadcasts of recent years she has become — to me — noticeably franker about her understanding of the source of this strength.  I thought this year’s (the whole text of which can be read here) was remarkable in several ways.  Here are the last paragraphs:

When people face a challenge they sometimes talk about taking a deep breath to find courage or strength.  In fact, the word ‘inspire’ literally means ‘to breathe in’.  But even with the inspiration of others, it’s understandable that we sometimes think the world’s problems are so big that we can do little to help.  On our own, we cannot end wars or wipe out injustice, but the cumulative impact of thousands of small acts of goodness can be bigger than we imagine.

At Christmas, our attention is drawn to the birth of a baby some two thousand years ago.  It was the humblest of beginnings, and his parents, Joseph and Mary, did not think they were important. 

Jesus Christ lived obscurely for most of his life, and never travelled far.  He was maligned and rejected by many, though he had done no wrong.  And yet, billions of people now follow his teaching and find in him the guiding light for their lives.  I am one of them because Christ’s example helps me see the value of doing small things with great love, whoever does them and whatever they themselves believe.

This is, as any of Elizabeth’s churchgoing subjects will know, strong stuff by the standards of modern Britain — not least since these words follow a quotation from St Teresa of Calcutta and a reference to her canonisation.  It is well-known, I suppose, that the Queen takes her faith very seriously, but here it is expressed with an ear-catching boldness.  The media hunger for the slightest morsel of the Queen’s personal opinions, but here is one that she has chosen carefully to make known.  There can be no mistake about the bell-clear words, "I am one of them."  And she is speaking not only to viewers who share her faith but, as always, to "you all".  It can fairly be called evangelistic.

There must over the years have been no shortage of advisors wringing their hands at this aspect of the Queen’s person, urging her to water it down lest she appear ‘out-of-touch’, that gravest of modern sins.   But the vows she once made, and has unfailingly kept, were to God as much as to her people.  She has known that she could not be just to the latter without being faithful to the former.  Her faith is the foundation of her understanding of the dramatic, fulfilling idea of vocation (largely neglected by our unhappy, rudderless age) which, in turn, underpins her life and reign.  She has received a calling, and having answered it, has not faltered. 

And there is a remarkable humility and saneness in that sentence, “I am one of them.”  With these piercing monosyllables the Queen punches through the distraction of her extraordinary situation: we should all have the same attitude, she is saying, since we all have our vocations to ‘some definite service’, and this makes us equal.  She has answered hers; we each should answer ours.  It is the proof of her level-headedness that she, one of the greatest women on earth, who has always had to be great, has seen and is able to assure us if we only ‘do small things with great love’, we will have done our part.  I submit, of course, that she has also done a great thing with great love.

People on television often praise the Queen for her ‘service’, which irritates me since I sometimes suspect they are trying to avoid using the word ‘reign’.  Of course she has served, but it is more complicated than that.  She has served us by reigning over us, and in doing so also served God.  And the humble acceptance of a great office is a humbler, worthier thing than even the television personalities are hoping for.

Thus on this feast of the Epiphany I record my gratitude for a living monarch who kneels with the three Kings, and who has been rewarded with a wisdom that makes her worthy not only of her subjects’ loyalty to her office, but of their trust in her person.

‘Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis…’

This atmospheric Christmas poem was written just over a century ago by Robert Bridges, in his first year as Poet Laureate:

Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913 — Robert Bridges.
Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.

A frosty Christmas Eve
   when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone
   where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village
   in the water’d valley
Distant music reach’d me
   peals of bells a-ringing:
The constellated sounds
   ran sprinking on earth’s floor
As the dark vault above
   with stars was spangled o’er.

Then sped my thoughts to keep
   that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching
   by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields
   and marvelling could not tell
Whether it were angels
   or the bright stars singing.

Now blessed be the tow’rs
   that crown England so fair
That stand up strong in prayer
   unto God for our souls:
Blessed be their founders
   (said I) an’ our country folk
Who are ringing for Christ
   in the belfries to-night
With arms lifted to clutch
   the rattling ropes that race
Into the dark above
   and the mad romping din.

But to me heard afar
   it was starry music
Angels’ song, comforting
   as the comfort of Christ
When he spake tenderly
   to his sorrowful flock:
The old words came to me
   by the riches of time
Mellow’d and transfigured
   as I stood on the hill
Heark’ning in the aspect
   of th’ eternal silence.

Gerald Finzi used these very English words in his Christmas cantata In Terra Pax, though the third stanza is replaced by words from the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.  And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.  And the angel said unto them,

Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.   For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.  And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Luke 2: 8–14 (KJV)

Finzi’s decision to quote Luke where he does leaves the identity of ‘the same country’ satisfyingly ambiguous.  For Bridges’ words are set unmistakeably in England — perhaps Oxfordshire, known to both Finzi and Bridges — and the words from Scripture seem to follow the poem seamlessly, as if it had been on the same hill that both poet and the shepherds had stood.  Thus the composer leaves undisturbed that unspoken myth, once wished-for and half-believed by everyone in England, and perpetuated by such carols as ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ or Warlock’s Bethlehem Down, that Christ must have been born somewhere in England, preferably in the Home Counties, perhaps enfolded by a chalky Sussex woodland or a wooded Surrey dene.  After all, where else could He have been born?

Ah, what shall we do with the incorrigible English?  Well, today’s not the day to worry about that.  Glory to God in the highest, peace to people of goodwill, and a merry Christmas to all readers.