Lessons & Carols
Linda and I opened our favorite Christmas present early. In November, our friend and fellow vocalist, Rebecca, had invited us to sing with her choir for their Festival of Lessons and Carols this fourth Sunday of Advent; their small group was dwindling in size and they had no tenor. Becky is a director of deep sensibility and infectious joy, and her husband Eric is a virtuoso organist and musicologist. If a naturalist is someone overcome with wonder at the organization and life history of tiny wildflowers and beetles, then a musicologist is one who discovers wonder and creates joy in the ecology of music.
The Lessons are a series of readings from Old and New Testament that reveal God’s presence in the world: creation; prophecy of the Messiah and the promised kingdom of peace; the arrival of Immanuel, God With Us. Each lesson is punctuated with music, the Carols. For this year’s service, Eric compiled a sequence of early American hymns and folk tunes, melodies that were once on every tongue but through the decades have largely fallen from familiarity and favor: Shape Note, Shaker, Appalachian, Moravian. We practiced, we rehearsed, and on Sunday morning with the Corda String Quartet and thundering pipe organ, we sang.
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THIRD LESSON: The king is coming and will usher in a reign of justice for the poor and peace for all of God’s creation. There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. (Isaiah 1:1)
Behold a Lovely Vine
. . .
Shall feeble nature sing
and man not join the lays,
O may their throats be swell’d with notes
and fill’d with songs of praise.
. . .
++++++ Jeremiah Ingalls (1764-1838)
If nature itself sings the praises of earth and all it holds, how can we help but join in? Lays are medieval ballads, songs sung by minstrels. This hymn from 1805 retells Old Testament prophecies using metaphor and symbolic imagery. Interwoven is the theme that Nature fulfills its purposes and exists in harmony with the flow of creation. May we humans hope to be restored to that same harmony and oneness? Nature may become our “spiritual training ground.” Poetry and song throughout the 19th century reflect this vision of the perfection of nature as an example for humankind, as in the book length poem Wilderness and Mount by Ellen T. H. Harvey:
Here is the field: the insects in the grass
Sing praise as by their little tents we pass.
They are in harmony with all God’s move:
Ah, why can man do any less than love?
++++++ Ellen T. H. Harvey, 1872
Observation, identification, contemplation: is it possible that these insignificant grasses and insects reveal wisdom? Is it possible that I might see past the fractures and trials of my daily preoccupations to discover a truer purpose? To love?
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NINTH LESSON: John unfolds the great mystery of the incarnation. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (Gospel of John 1:1)
Surely at my age, threescore and ten, I have discovered my life’s purpose. I have degrees in biochemistry and medicine; I’m a trained and certified naturalist. Where is God in all of this? Where is the natural theology that integrates quantum reality and molecular genetics and the transcendent experience of oneness with the universe?
Word – Logos – is intrinsic and essential to every atom and its component quarks, to nucleic acids infinitely recombining, to each minute dust-like spore of the luxuriant fern, to tangles of neurons from whose organized chaos arises thought. Word is that which calls us; that which explains and enlightens; that challenges and assures; that speaks the inchoate and expresses the ineffable, uncreated and continuously creative.
Word is the beak of the finch and the long tapered nectary of the orchid. Word is Hawking radiation and Planck’s constant. Word is the affinity of carbon to bond with nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and most wonderfully of all with itself. Word is the specific heat of water which permits a planet the proper distance from its star to moderate its climate.
Where is God? In all of this. There is nothing that is not God.
We have words, paltry words, but we use them the best we can to express Word. Sometimes we call it poetry – non-linear, condensed and rarified, transcendent. Ponder the individual words and they scatter like grains of sand running through your fingers. Cup them and hold them whole, lift them on the wings of music, organ and strings, melody and harmonies. In this fullness and flow of words we might hope to experience Word.
A crescendo sung by a choir – a goldfinch plucking down from a thistle – a speck of grey-green lichen on a metal post: O may our throats be swell’d with notes!
Behold a Lovely Vine
Behold a lovely vine
her in this desert ground;
the blossoms shoot and promised fruit
and tender grapes are found.
It’s circling branches rise
and shade the neighb’ring lands;
with lovely arms she spreads her arms,
with clusters in her hands.
This city can’t be hid,
it’s built upon a hill;
the dazzling light it shines so bright
it doth the vallies fill.
Ye trees which lofty stans
and stars with sparkling light;
Ye Christians hear both far and near,
Tis joy to see the sight.
Shall feeble nature sing
and man not join the lays,
O may their throats be swell’d with notes
and fill’d with songs of praise.
Glory to God on high,
for His redeeming grace,
the blessed Dove come from above
to save our ruined race.
++++++ Jeremiah Ingalls (1764-1838)
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And of course the most important and utilitarian facet of the word Lays is that it rhymes with Praise.
Thank you to Central United Methodist Church, Mt. Airy, NC.
Thank you to Rebecca Cook – she lifts her arms and we raise our voices.
Thank you to Eric Cook, master of multiple manuals, for devising this inspiring program and equal thanks for his copious and enlightening notes.
Ellen H. T. Harvey, Wilderness and Mount: A Poem of Tabernacles. John Bent, Publisher; Boston, 1872.
Brett Malcolm Grainger, The Vital Landscape: Evangelical Religious Practice and the
Culture of Nature in America, 1790-1870. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Divinity School (2014).
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