When Steve pointed me to Touchstone Magazine, A Journal of Mere Christianity (emphasis mine!), I was considerable excited to find out that they publish some of their articles online. When I read this piece on the darkness inherent to Christmas, the shadowy undercurrents that we typically forget, I knew instantly that a new find had been made.
There are constant reminders of this darkness, if one has ears to hear them, running through the great liturgy of our Christmas carols, with their memorable evocations of bleak midwinter, snow on snow, sad and lonely plains, the curse, the half-spent night. The spooky and antiseptically sterile depiction of winter in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and its cinematic adaptations is, in that sense, very close to the spirit of the older carols, and to the biblical account of the matter—much closer than the hearty merriment of rosy-cheeked seasonal songs like “Sleigh Ride” or “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.”
Go read this piece. The truth of Christmas is dark before it shines.
3 comments:
A little birdy requests that, should you have the desire, you don't subscribe to Touchstone Magazine.
The ancient, stately carols in minor keys have definitely become my favorites. I can't understand why no one sings The Coventry Carol anymore. :) Maybe because it conjurs up images of unpleasant things like death (but, after all, Jesus was born to die [and be raised again]).
Handel's Pastoral Symphony from The Messiah perfectly represents the tension of darkness and light inherent in the Christmas story. I heard it first at a Messiah Sing... then ran out the next day to buy a cd of it. The Pastoral Symphony is the piece that represents the birth, but the deep double bass which hovers just under the melody line is a clear foreshadowing of Holy Week. Handel nailed it if you ask me.
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