‘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.

‘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).

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)

Three Carols from Old England

Along with their ten favourite pieces of music and a luxury, castaways on the B.B.C.’s programme Desert Island Discs are given three books: the Bible, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and a volume of their choice.  Unlikely though it is that I will suffer that fate (either to be cast away on a desert island or to be interviewed on Radio 4), I have been thinking that my choice might be Sloane manuscript 2593, a collection of fifteenth-century English carols and poems held in the British Library.  A (smallish) digitised image can be seen here.

These manuscripts have preserved something quite precious of medieval England’s character.  Sacred lyrics are mixed with profane in the manuscript, which alone tells us something about faith and life in those days, but it is the carols that I find the most spine-tingling.  I think the best-known are Lullay, myn lyking, Adam lay ybounden and I sing of a maiden, which have each been set to music by various composers.  Not only the meaning of these three texts have survived, and their noteworthy Marian spirituality, but also (as I hear it) their mood, something altogether more fragile.  The lyricist sets off with a catechetical aim but succeeds in amazing himself with his own catechesis.  This amazement is expressed in a restrained, a mild — and dare I say even an English — way.  For instance, I find very moving this depiction of the Adam’s ‘happy fault’ in Adam lay ybounden:

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

Or, in I sing of a mayden, there is the quiet awe of the line 

Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.

which leaves nothing else to be said.  With closing lines like this, the middle three verses can afford to be duplicates (but beautiful duplicates!) of each other.

Or there is the detail of the line ‘as clerkes finden written in their book’, an image which for the original listeners linked the everyday and familiar seamlessly to the song’s spiritual subject-matter, and which for us transmits a flicker of the flavour of their life and worship. (We marvel that clerics had to read Sacred Scripture on behalf of laypeople; these words were written by someone for whom this was normal).  As an Englishman, certainly as an English speaker, I cannot read them as a neutral observer or objective student: I feel I have inherited these carols in a certain way.  This only magnifies the flash of elation that comes with reading any good poem.  Centuries separate the England I know from the England that produced these words, but the feeling that that I know what they meant, or that I think exactly what they thought — which is also an assurance of the unchanging nature of the Christian faith — is, in my view, very precious indeed.

Here are some musical settings which to my mind have captured the words’ mood: Lullay, myn lyking — Richard Runciman Terry:

Adam lay ybounden — Philip Ledger:

or https://play.spotify.com/track/1hDflwTiGeSXvD2hHqLRii

I sing of a maiden —Patrick Hadley: