For the first time in 31 years I have had no part in choosing carols for Christmas Day, Eve, Carol Service or those many other occasions listed in the previous post, ‘Simply having..’ . I am not sorry about that, for several reasons, though it might be frustrating when I come to Midnight Mass and have to sing what I’m given!
The particular issue troubling me this year relates to carols referring to ‘Bethlehem’ and ‘Israel’. Throughout my ministry, which has taken in the Oslo Peace Accord, 2 Intifadas, the erection of the Israeli Govt Security Wall, a few wars between Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah and many other outrages, I have struggled with place specific language in carols, especially when cloaked in Victorian sentimentality. In Jan 2017 I showed the powerful film ‘Open Bethlehem’ in one of my churches three months prior to my own Holy Land visit (see ‘the Great Catastrophe’), -a film I would thoroughly recommend, though it is now a little out of date- , arousing the approval of some and the condemnation of others.
This year it has all come to a head again and, given the intensified ferocity of the Israeli assault on Gaza, more voices than ever have been raised on the matter. There will be no traditional Crib in the West Bank town of Bethlehem itself, but instead the baby Jesus will be hidden amongst rubble, with Mary and Joseph trying to find him. In solidarity with this, some Christians at home are calling for their cancellation here and refusing to light Advent candles to symbolise the extinction of light and hope in Gaza. ‘Maybe we, as Christians in this country, might forgo our pretty Christmas cribs…in solidarity with our greatly suffering brothers and sisters in Gaza, the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem,’ wrote Rev Sue Parfitt to the ‘Church Times’ (15.12.23)
What do I think of all this? On one level, I would cheerfully fast this year from singing ‘O come, O come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel’ and ‘O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.’ There are many other carols, including the great ‘It came upon a Midnight Clear’, with this verse omitted, scandalously, from many modern renditions:
But with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring; –
Oh hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing!
(A churchwarden in my last parish used to rail against this carol as ‘non Christian’ since it was written by Edmund Sears, an American Unitarian minister, which, to me, rather begs the question, ‘what is Christian?’ Lots of talk about sin and Jesus the Saviour or his teaching about peace? )
In truth, there are many carols, ancient and modern, so, it wouldn’t be hard to choose others , even though it might anger some. However, I do rather think this talk misses a few important points. First, the so- called ‘Holy land’ has always been fought over, frequently being a place of occupation, though the occupiers have changed. The whole Bethlehem story recounts a Roman imperial diktat for people to return to their place of origin. This is followed by a birth in squalid conditions and mass infanticide committed by Herod to kill the new King. This is raw, stark stuff. Instead of forgoing the Crib, why not resolve to emphasise these realities in our presentation of Christmas every year? Christmas has political ramifications.
Secondly, the people of Bethlehem, Gaza and many other places around the world have been enduring indignities for years which are rarely mentioned in church. In lighting the Advent Candles we are saying that Christ’s light can come into the darkest of places every year and for all nations. In Christmas 1914 a little beam of humanity shone into the trenches during the brief, never to be repeated Christmas truce, as the guns fell silent and ‘Stille Nacht/ Silent Night was sung by both German and British troops.
Even though the situation in Gaza is uniquely hellish, people suffer their own problems, their own lesser hells in this country. Since starting to train as a Telephone Adviser to Citizens’ Advice I have already come to see what need there is here at home. Advent Candles can shine a light into other people’s despair and churches have a responsibility to keep t heir eyes open for them while praying for situations further afield. ‘In thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light.’
Finally, places like Bethlehem have a spiritual meaning which transcends its physical location, more metaphorical than geographical. The town as such is only mentioned in two out of the four Gospels, and it played no part whatsoever in the early Christian message, which was far more focussed on the events of Easter. Christmas did not become a Christian festival till the 9th Century and the Crib, which depicts the birth story recounted in Luke’s Gospel, was an invention of St Francis of Assisi, 800 years ago in 1223. In most carols Bethlehem represents an idealised (some might say sentimental) picture of birth, as befits the Son of God. That birth far transcends the birth of Jesus around 4 BC, wherever that birth took place. AS the carol concludes in its last verse:
O holy child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us we pray
Cast out our sin and enter in,
Be born in us today.
Christmas is as much about us now as about Jesus then.
Other biblical names carry different metaphorical meanings. When William Blake wrote ‘Jerusalem’ and the WI, the old Labour party and other English patriotic groups sing it, they are not really speaking about the Middle Eastern city, but an idealised dwelling, referred to in many Old Testament psalms, a city ‘at unity with itself,’ which the actual city has never been. When black American slaves in the 19th C sang Spirituals about the River Jordan, they were using it as a metaphor for freedom, harking back to the Israelites’ crossing over from Egyptian bondage into the Promised Land as recounted in the Books of Exodus and Joshua, in the light of the Emancipation Act of 1863. When people in despair call up the Samaritans, they will not expect the phone to be answered by someone in Northern Israel, but by a compassionate listener who (after the example of Jesus’ ‘Good Samaritan’ in the parable), has chosen to stop and care, irrespective of the caller’s background. And so on…..
The metaphor persists irrespective of the physical place of origin. So whilst I understand the desire to bring the suffering of Gazans, other Palestinians (and, I hope Israelis) dramatically before people’s minds this Christmas, I would not advocate the abandonment of the Crib or non-lighting of Advent Candles which seem to me a rather prosaic response to a Festival which calls upon our deepest reserves of poetry and shared silence.
Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night;
Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth. (Richard Crashaw, The Holy Nativity of our Lord.’
Hugh's Views 