Of Carols & Capaciousness
(12/17/22)
[“And all flesh shall see it together” (from Handel’s “And the Glory of the Lord,” Messiah [Is 40:5]).]
O Lover,
Having finally arrived in Christmastide, I acknowledge yet again how profoundly paradoxical is everything in this inimitable season. That You, the Master of the Universe, should come to us in a helpless infant, the Infinite into the finite, The One beyond all forms into the concrete messiness of createdness, is the engendering paradox. And it is as if this core permanently sets into motion myriad derivative secondary and tertiary circles of paradox which both confound and leave us mute with joy.
In this prayer I am pondering a concentric circle both distant, and yet derived from, that common center of Your Incarnátus paradox. This ripple involves the matter of the scale of what one might call Your Solidarity Project, this in the carols—Advent, Christmas, Epiphany—we sing in this season. Living amid Christian communities the entirety of my eighty-two years, not to mention many Minnesota midnight caroling forays in my youth, has imprinted these carols’ texts indelibly in my memory. Now, decades later, I perceive many of these lines as overly familiar and wallowing in sentimentality or otherwise shortchanging Your Incarnátus Project with a Christ largely confined to infancy and the manger. Indeed, there appears to be little room in the inn of this corpus for the Cosmic Christ celebrated by the Apostle Paul (Col 1:15-20) or the author of the Apocalypse (e.g., 5:6-14).
Nevertheless, I am repeatedly taken aback upon encountering lyrics counter-intutitively intimating, hinting of, the massive scale of Your Bethlehem initiative. Allow me to list several examples. At least three different carols—“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”; “Come, O Long Expected Jesus”; and “Angels, from the Realms of Glory”—invoke the universality theme of Your Project in addressing the “desire of nations.” In addition, “Comfort, Comfort, O My People” concludes with “And all flesh shall see the token / that [Your] word is never broken.” The carol “On Jordan’s Bank” startles me with the line “let Your light restore / Earth’s own true loveliness once more,” pointing to the ecological implications of Bethlehem. And how is it that I have sung “Joy to the world” my entire life largely unaware of the profundity of the line “and heaven and nature sing” [EA], a line which I now experience as a thoracic blow?
A last, and perhaps greatest, example pointing to the scale of Your Project is from Handel’s oratorio Messiah (1741), the chorus “And the Glory of the Lord” in particular: “And all flesh shall see it together.” I am invariably moved as I hear Handel’s powerful score wedded with those words taken from Deutero- Isaiah (40:5). That indescribable union, for me both aesthetic and proto-mystical, further opens me to the limitlessness of Your reach, the encompassingness of Your embrace, the definitiveness and decisiveness of Your Bethlehem initiative. Glória!
