Like many British people of my generation, I was brought up going to church, and with Christian worship every morning in school. Today, I do not see myself as a believer, although I subscribe to a set of values which some would call Christian. I visit churches from historical interest, but apart from the occasional funeral or wedding, Christmas is the only time I attend a service. So why do I go then?
Christmas is different. Because, whether or not one believes the things organised religions say, it is the one occasion in the year when we get to experience one of the greatest creations of humanity. I get to encounter again this huge, complex and paradoxical body of myth and music, built by human communities across nations and centuries.
The philosopher Wittgenstein said, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” But he was wrong: when we cannot speak, we sing, and make myth, as a way of touching on those profound questions of human existence which lie beyond the probings of rational thought.
And so, like thousands of other non-believers, I sing the carols and attend the Christmas Eve service. It is, and always has been, a magical time. After 60 odd years, I can still feel the sensation of coming in as a twelve-year-old, from the noisy cold and fog of 1950s London, to be embraced by the quiet, warmth, light and music of a school carol service.
The power of myth
The ceremonies of Christmas are part of a very ancient way of thinking about and understanding the great mysteries of life and death. That is the function of myth. Its tool is a very simple story, endlessly elaborated over the centuries, and especially in the music.
You don’t need to believe in the historical accuracy of the story, or the tenets of Christianity, to be moved by that music. To ask whether these stories are ‘true’ is to misunderstand their function. We sing texts and tunes which have been sung by people like us for a thousand years or more, alongside others written in our lifetime. In doing so, we share the experience of those generations of people, ordinary and extraordinary, in their struggles to make sense of life itself, going back before Christianity itself.
‘All out of darkness we have light’
Christmas merges Christian stories with much older celebrations, not just the birth and death of a man, but of the end and beginning of the year. It is a myth full of opposites and contrasts. We sing of the bleak midwinter, but also of decking the hall with boughs of holly. We sing of the precious fragility of the child in the manger and the vast spectacle of the ‘angelic host’ above. Three kings are brought to their knees by the miracle of birth, and some ‘poor shepherds’ are brought to the presence of their God.
And in the music, we hear those contrasts. Out of dark and silence, we hear the lonely voice of a single child opening ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, but later, with hundreds of others, we roar out the triumph of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’.
The music, and the stories which it tells, are hugely diverse. Some, like ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, tell the Bible story fairly straight, while others translate bits to other contexts. It doesn’t matter that no ship ever ‘sailed into Bethlehem’. When ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ tells us of heavy snowfall in a middle eastern town, where snow is almost unheard of, it tells us something about the fragility of human life. Other carols, like ‘Good King Wenceslas’, remind us of Christian virtue. Many tell of binding a community, through shared faith like ‘O Come all ye Faithful’ or through more secular celebration, like ‘We wish you a Merry Christmas’. Some, like ‘Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day’, express simple delight at the birth of a baby.
Birth and death
And at the centre of the myth is the mystery and miracle of birth itself, and the image of mother and child, of joy and fear. The birth is followed, only days later, by the massacre of the innocents: a genocide with which we are still all too familiar. And many of the texts remind us that when we celebrate a birth, we begin a course which must lead to death. In many depictions of the nativity, Mary is already in mourning for what is to come. We sing of ‘The Seven Joys of Mary’, although the sixth ‘joy’ is ‘to see her son upon the crucifix’. And as they approach Bethlehem, T.S.Eliot’s Magi see the ‘three trees on the low sky’, which prefigure the three crosses of the crucifixion.
Evolving Christmas
And Christmas continues to evolve, as it has always done, alongside the formalities of the Church. Probably the best known event of Christian Christmas today is the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols. But that has no place in the Anglican Prayerbook. It was created in Cambridge in 1918, as a memorial to all its students who died in the First World War. Later, it was adopted to comfort a nation in mourning for the thousands more who fell. A century later, on radio and television, it now unites a community of millions worldwide.
Joining ‘that multitude which no man can number’
Whatever we believe, or don’t, about the stories themselves and the structures which organised religion has built around them, the myth remains powerful in helping us to wonder at the mysteries of birth and death, and to feel our kinship with others, near and far, living and dead.
This edifice of myth and music is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. Nothing else we take part in as a community goes back so far, binding us to people like us over more than a thousand years. It is rich, complex, and sometimes contradictory. It was there long before us, and will be there long after we are gone. We are privileged to have inherited it and be able to carry it on.
And it is good to have one moment in the year to be moved by, and reminded that, for all our science and knowledge, there are things which we really don’t ‘know’.
I wish you a very wonderful Christmas.
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