A New Blog for the Holidays (I resisted naming it The Yule Blog)…

Happy Advent! During these weeks that lead us to Christmas, I’ll be posting primarily from a new blog I’ve created for the season. I welcome you to stop by The Advent Door for some peace and quiet in these days!

Music and Mystery

Like lots of folks, I rely on music to help me cross into the holiday season and to navigate its terrain. During Advent and Christmas we anticipate and celebrate the incarnation, the Word who became flesh, but sometimes it takes more than words alone to evoke and enter into the mysteries of the story of the God who came to be with us.

Over the past few years, I’ve gone in search of Christmas music that takes my ears beyond the customary holiday fare. Although there are some contemporary songs in my stack of holiday CDs, my collection leans pretty heavily toward music that reaches backward in time. This is music that draws the listener deep into the layers of stories and legends surrounding the birth of Christ, music that echoes with the ancient human longing for light and celebration in a dark time. These are songs of signs and wonders, with words and melodies that beckon us to enter into the audacious, mysterious, hopeful, and wild tales they have to tell.

Here’s some of what I’ll be listening to as this holy season begins.

Wolcum Yule: Celtic and British Songs and Carols
Legends of St. Nicholas
On Yoolis Night
Anonymous 4

The women of Anonymous 4 are masters of reaching into the treasures of centuries past to offer sustenance in the present. These three CDs are now available in a boxed set titled Noël: Carols & Chants for Christmas; the set also includes the CD A Star in the East, a collection of medieval chant from Hungary. (As a single CD, A Star in the East is now available under the somewhat more mundane title Christmas Music From Medieval Hungary).

La Bela Naissença: Christmas Carols from Provence
Patrick Vaillant, et al.

Ooohhh, I really love this one; it’s one of the newest in my collection and is among my all-time favorites. I first heard excerpts from it on Harmonia, the splendid radio show that features early music and offers archived shows on its web site. “La Fugida en Egipte” (The Flight into Egypt), with its wry alleluia, is worth the price of the CD, and Patrick Vaillant’s liner notes are a big slab of icing (chocolate) on this Christmas cake. He writes,

the Nativity is not just a series of images. A whole imaginary world is stirring behind them, and it is this that carries the entire story and all its little meanders, giving a bit of legend here and a measure of familiarity there to the whole mystery. The music is there to reveal, to unfold the tale, to give these images their dimension in sound….Christmas carols are witnesses.

The Bells of Dublin
The Chieftains

A great CD with a big dose of Irish flair. Here the Chieftains mix it up with such folks as Elvis Costello, Nanci Griffith, and Marianne Faithfull, plus Jackson Browne with his song “The Rebel Jesus,” which should be part of the Christmas carol canon.

Christmas
Bruce Cockburn

One of the first CDs I purchased when I started searching for nontraditional fare. It’s actually very traditional, in the sense that it draws on lots of old carols, including the haunting “Iesus Ahatonnia” (The Huron Carol, written by a Jesuit missionary in the early 1600s; Cockburn says it’s the first Canadian Christmas carol) and “Down In Yon Forest” (of which Cockburn writes, “If there were a contest for the title of the spookiest Christmas carol, this ought to win hands down”). Though filled with traditional fare, the Canadian Cockburn puts a spin on it that makes it feel like a different animal entirely.

Christmas Through the Ages
Various artists; the composers include Arcangelo Corelli (how could he not have written Christmas music, with a name like that?), Benjamin Britten, and John Rutter

Aside from the tasty Christmas fare this contains, I couldn’t resist having a CD with a cover that features a fantastic depiction of the wise men wearing what look like particolored stockings, from a 6th century mosaic in the basilica of San Apollinaire Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy. (Here’s a link to a photo of the spiffy magi.)

The Black Madonna: Pilgrim Songs from the Monastery of Montserrat
Ensemble Unicorn

This isn’t specifically a Christmas CD, but this wondrous collection of medieval pilgrim songs from Spain begins with a song about the Annunciation to Mary and ends with a Catalan round that makes mention of the magi. Sandwiched in between is a festive array of songs that tell some of the stories and miracles of the mother of Christ. The CD includes a couple of selections from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, an enormous collection of 13th-century songs in praise of the Virgin Mary. Written in Galician-Portugese during the reign of King Alfonso X, known as “El Sabio” (“The Wise”), a number of the songs are attributed to El Sabio himself. The interaction of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions often exerted an intriguing influence on the culture of medieval Spain. The songs included in The Black Madonna bear witness to this; they convey the sense that something very ancient and complex is at work in them.

Mistletoe and Wine
Mediaeval Baebes

Baebes indeed. This CD gathers up songs from a couple of their previous holiday CDs and includes “There Is No Rose Of Swych Vertu” and “The Coventry Carol.”

To Drive the Cold Winter Away
Loreena McKennitt

Containing a couple of original songs from this distinctive Canadian singer-composer, this CD primarily features traditional Christmas music from England, Ireland, and Scotland.

A Winter’s Solstice III
Windham Hill Artists

For sentimental reasons. This is one of the oldest in my collection of cool Christmas CDs. I still particularly delight in Pierce Pettis’ take on “In the Bleak Midwinter” and Barbara Higbie’s “Lullay, Lully.”

The Night of Heaven & Earth
Gary Doles

I’ve been saving the best for last. This CD makes me think of a passage from the Book of Isaiah, where God says these words through the prophet: “I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places” (Isaiah 45.3, NRSV). Gary (also known as Garrison) Doles is an award-winning singer-songwriter who has entered into the dark and secret places of the Advent and Christmas seasons and has found the riches there. With this treasure trove of utterly original songs, Gary invites us to come and find the delights and the challenges of the God who put on flesh and came to be with us. He also happens to be my sweetheart, and my enthusiasm about this CD isn’t merely a girlfriend’s bias; it’s this kind of amazing stuff that made me fall in love with him in the first place. Check out The Night of Heaven and Earth at CD Baby.

All this talk of Christmas music, I may not be able to wait until Advent to start listening, after all…

May your ears find many delights to draw you into the mysteries of the coming season.

Ho-ho-hold on a minute…

At the church where I worshiped last Sunday, the leaders of the service had decided to get a jump on the Advent season. I understand the impulse. Oftentimes, Advent begins on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and particularly given that the marketplace has had us awash in Christmasy stuff since before Halloween, it’s not too surprising that some folks are raring to get their Advent on, even though the season doesn’t begin until this coming Sunday.

Surprising, no, but a little disappointing.

I try not to get too crabby or soapboxy about the commercialism of Christmas, and how it seems to begin earlier every year. I figure it’s probably not going to change anytime soon, and so instead of griping about it, I work at discerning what I can offer in the midst of it: words, images, spaces in which folks can pause and ponder for a few moments before heading back into the holiday fray.

Still, my liturgical self is casting a vote in favor of church being a place, perhaps the last place, where Advent and Christmas come in their own good time. This sacred season of anticipation, preparation, and waiting is precisely a season that invites and challenges us not to be grabby with time. Jesus, the flesh-wearing God, took a full nine months (and untold millennia) to get here.

I think we can wait a few more days to start the party.

Having said all that, I definitely don’t feel a need to be a Christmas fascist; I won’t listen at your door to see if you’ve already listening to carols on the radio. God knows that most of us could use a good celebration. It’s practically December, we’ve got Thanksgiving (literally) under our belts, and I think it’s a fine and wondrous thing to be getting into the holiday spirit. Moving into Advent, though, is more than that. The season, which prepares us for Christmas but is not the same thing as Christmas, invites us to hear beyond the holiday hype; it challenges us to listen beneath and between and around the copious external stimuli, so that we can begin to discern and welcome the God who is seeking to be born in our midst and in our very own selves.

These last few days before Advent are also the final days of the year, liturgically speaking. In the cycle of Christian time, Advent marks the beginning of a new year. So this week is a threshold, an in-between space that invites us to ponder the year past and to look toward the year to come. As we cross this threshold, what would you like to carry with you from this nearly finished year? What do you want to leave behind? As we lean into the season and the year to come, what do you desire for the days ahead? What will you give your energy to? Where will you look for the God who is yet to be born?

Happy almost Advent to you.

Cover Girl

Okay, maybe it’s true that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I think it’s fair to say that at a literal level, if we’re talking about actual books and not metaphorically applying the aphorism to people, a compelling face often provides a good suggestion about what the inside holds. A comely cover, or sometimes just an appealing spine, is almost always the first thing that prompts me to pull an unfamiliar book off the shelf. While a “good cover-to-good contents” correlation may not always hold true, I’ve learned it’s a better than decent bet that if the face of a book catches my attention, its innards will be worth a gander as well.

I’m posting this from my parents’ home, where books—and a supply of intriguing book covers—abound. I’ve been hanging out here over the Thanksgiving weekend. This holiday is always a big reunion time for the Richardson relations. These past few days of paddling around the gene pool have included the annual Thanksgiving feast that nearly everyone in our hometown comes to, along with lots of out-of-town folks who come back for the festivities. We normally have our noontime chowdown in the community park, but this year, for only the second time in the feast’s half-century history, we got rained out of the park. Fortuitously, the local United Methodist congregation completed the construction of a fellowship hall earlier this year (its first building project in almost 100 years), and, while eating pecan pie isn’t quite the same indoors as under sunny skies, it was another splendid gathering.

I’ve lingered with my folks in Gainesville, grateful for the chance to spend more time with family and friends over the weekend and to catch up on my sleep. I’ve been poking around my parents’ bookshelves while I’ve been here. Many of the books were part of the landscape when I was growing up; I imagine lots of them arrived in the magical book boxes I wrote about previously. This weekend I pulled out some books whose spines had caught my eye on earlier visits. They contain collections of poems by Ogden Nash, the 20th century poet known for his agile handling of light verse. I first became acquainted with him through some of his short poems that I’ve heard my Dad recite, such as his “Reflection on Babies.” (“A bit of talcum/Is always walcum.”) Nash also brought us “Further Reflection on Parsley” (“Parsley/Is Garsley.”) and “The Cow” (“The cow is of the bovine ilk; One end is moo, the other, milk.”) If you know only one Ogden Nash poem, it’s probably this one, which occasionally gets attributed to Dorothy Parker:

Reflections on Ice-Breaking

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.

The Nash books on my parents’ shelf were first published in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and there’s something about their simply designed covers that my eye finds really pleasing. Even their spines, cozied up together on the shelf, form an appealing line. When I pulled out one of the volumes on this visit, I was intrigued to see that the jackets were designed by Maurice Sendak. It was one of those occasions where I could see it once I knew it; the images are pretty different from his other work such as we find in his famous book Where the Wild Things Are, but it’s certainly kin.

I haven’t spent enough time with the appealingly attired Ogden Nash books to know whether they bear out my general rule that a good cover suggests good innards (although they did provide some enjoyable recitation and conversation at the dinner table tonight). But I’ve enjoyed this confirmation of what good covers can do for good books (and sometimes not-so-good ones), and how books are more than just words slapped on pages sandwiched between two boards. Some books are presences over time, part of the landscape that helps orient us in this world; they offer a visual feast that can sustain us even if we only infrequently partake of what they contain.

This holiday weekend, I give thanks for that.

Could You Become a U.S. Citizen?

Gary and I had dinner at the home of a couple of friends this past weekend. One of them teaches at a local college. As part of a project, one of her students brought a copy of the list of sample questions that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services may ask of someone who is taking the exam to become a citizen of the United States. We went through many of the questions ourselves, which prompted a lively conversation around the dinner table (and a visit to Google).

For you folks who were born into U.S. citizenship, how many of these sample questions can you answer? (The numbering is from the list of questions; the answers are below.)

19. How many changes, or amendments, are there to the Constitution?

26. For how long do we elect each [U.S.] Senator?

27. Name two senators from your state.

28. How many voting members are in the [U.S.] House of Representatives?

29. For how long do we elect each member of the House of Representatives?

35. What is the Bill of Rights?

39. Who is Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?

40. What were the original 13 states?

63. What did the Emancipation Proclamation do?

75. Whose rights are guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

80. Name one right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment.

89. What kind of government does the United States have?

Answers:

19. Twenty-seven amendments

26. 6 years

27. The answer to this question depends on where you live. [In Florida: Mel Martinez and Bill Nelson.] [Visit the U.S. Senate website]

28. There are 435 voting members in the House of Representatives. [This number is figured proportionally based on state population.] [Visit the U.S. House of Representatives website]

29. For 2 years

35. The first 10 amendments to the Constitution

39. John G. Roberts, Jr. [Visit the U.S. Supreme Court website]

40. Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Georgia

63. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves.

75. All people living in the United States

80. The rights of freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, of assembly, and to petition the Government

89. A Republic

I paid a visit to the website of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services this morning. Ever had occasion to wonder what you’d need to do to become a citizen of the U.S., or apply for a green card, or what you’d do if you were a refugee or seeking asylum? Check out the “How Do I?” section at the USCIS site.

On this Veterans Day, I’m offering a prayer for all those who have come to the U.S., for those involved in making hugely complex decisions about immigration, and for our relationships with the wider world. A blessing upon the veterans who have given themselves to helping make this a place that people yearn to call home.