Christmas is about a hundred different things, but *one* of them is music. We sing Christmas songs all month long in our home. The
seminary class sings them every school morning. We sing them in church, go caroling and deliver fudge with our chorusing (not carousing). Christmas eve, we spent almost an hour singing them with my Grandma Billie, a new Christmas tradition (which actually mirrors an old Christmas tradition, one I remember doing more than once with Betty and Blen Stoker).
There was a bittersweet moment this Christmas listening to Max perform as an alumnus with the
Maryland State Boychoir for their Lessons and Carols performance last Sunday. I snuck into the hall where they were singing, via a back passage in the basement just to hear him sing "Of the Father's Love Begotten" (a song based on a translation of several passages from Aurelius Clemens Prudentius 5th century poem, "Liber Cathemerinon").
I wept. It was so beautiful, so poignant. It captured, for me, the aching desire we manifest to be perfect, and how we never succeed in that goal, and yet we continue on.
I cannot explain how touching and beautiful it is to hear the layers of voice singing. I loved in the Boychoir arrangement, how after the first verse, one portion of the singers carry a note over at the end of their phrase, and the next line begins underneath of it.
Especially near the end of verse two, when the bass singers go up and down on the word "Redeemer", ending on a solemn B and holding that low reverberating note while the tenors begin singing about Christ revealing his baby face.
How low we go on this earth, how fallen this world becomes, and we fall with it. As low as it is possible to fall! Yet Christ's love and grace carries us back from those deep places, carries us back into the light to feel glorious, new, reborn.
How is it that we can share such beauty and still feel such great anger and frustration with each other?
Yet we continue, we try, we work. Despair is all around us, reasons to stop. I am so glad for Christmas, for songs that inspire and lift me up.
This is a slide show presentation of another mens chorus singing an arrangement similar to that of the Boychoir. "Of the Father's Love Begotten".
"Of the Father's Love Begotten"
by Aurelius C. Prudentius, 413, cento
Translated by John. M. Neale, 1818-1866
and Henry W. Baker, 1821-1977
1. Of the Father's love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega, He the Source, the Ending He.
Of the things that are, that have been, and that future years shall see,
Evermore and evermore.
2. Oh, that birth forever blessed, when the Virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving, bore the Savior of our race.
And the Babe, the world's Redeemer, first revealed His sacred face,
Evermore and evermore.
3. O ye heights of heaven, adore Him; angel hosts, His praises sing;
Powers, dominions, bow before Him, and extol our God and King.
Let no tongue on earth be silent, every voice in concert ring
Evermore and evermore.
4. Christ, to Thee, with God the Father, and, O Holy Ghost, to Thee
Hymn and chant and high thanksgiving and unending praises be.
Honor, glory, and dominion, and eternal victory
Evermore and evermore.
