This Christmas post is late. Like a few days too late. Of course, if you choose to go by the tradition of the Twelve Days of Christmas, we are technically still in the Christmas period, this being the 3rd or 4th day – depending on whether you start on the 24th or 25th. ANYWAY, I decided that this isn’t really too late, so here we go.
I have always been the over-the-top Christmas observing kinda gal. You know, the one who wears the Santa hat and silly Christmas sweaters. Starting from the moment I leave the house for my forays into Black Friday shopping early the morning after Thanksgiving I am decked out in greens and reds. Christmas music begins playing the moment the company has left after the big Thanksgiving feast and doesn’t cease until the last of the decorations are down on January 1st or 2nd. And the décor around the house? Garlands and nativities and villages and candles and everything festive. In other words, I have always been filled to the brim with the joy of the Christmas season.
Something has happened since Ben died, however. Getting into the holiday spirit has definitely been more difficult this year and the two Christmases previous. I could understand the first two: Elizabeth was on her mission and I was literally (and I mean literally) completely alone on Christmas itself until dinnertime when I hosted the dinner for people at church who didn’t have other places to go. It was a long-standing dinner tradition in our family, and I was grateful for it after Ben’s passing, for it became the only connection with others outside of a few phone calls and the missionary Skype opportunity that I had during the otherwise long day. And without my sweetheart, my daughter, or any family to enjoy the season with I found myself understandably feeling bereft.
But what about year 3? Here I am, my daughter happily ensconced at college and contacting me literally every single day during the season before coming home and joining full-throated into the festivities after finals ended on the 21st. I am surrounded by wonderful neighbors and friends. I am treated very well by all I meet, really. But still, during this season, especially early on, I found myself lower this year at times than in the previous two Christmases. Maybe it was the fact that the season kicked off with our 25th wedding anniversary – an event we had long looked forward to with great anticipation – and Ben wasn’t there to share it with me. Maybe. Maybe the long-lasting schism within the extended family was finally wearing me down without Ben to support me. Maybe it’s the continued effects from my serious illness in the summer. I don’t know. It was just unlike me to be so prolongedly down.
While going through this I would look at myself in some dismay. I used all the tricks to buoy myself up, but to no avail. I wasn’t known as the family’s sunshine girl for nothing, you know, and this case of the blues shook me.
And then one day I was listening to a beautiful arrangement by the King’s Singers of “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”, written by Edmund Sears.
Written in 1849, it has gained recognition for being the first overtly religious Christmas carol that only has a passing reference to the events in Bethlehem. One could argue that “Joy to the World” by Isaac Watts met that criteria first, as it is clearly more about the Second Coming of the Lord than about His first, but many scholars still put it in squarely in the Christmas column. But in a revolutionary style, Sears’ carol goes beyond Bethlehem and makes the Christmas story current and very personally applicable. It suggests the on-going nature of that holy and sacred night.
Listen to the words and look at it in its full story context:
It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth,
To touch their harps of gold:
“Peace on the earth, goodwill to men,
From heaven’s all-gracious King.”
The world in solemn stillness lay,
To hear the angels sing.
Still through the cloven skies they come,
With peaceful wings unfurled,
And still their heavenly music floats
O’er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains,
They bend on hovering wing,
And ever o’er its babel sounds
The blessèd angels sing.
Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.
And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing.
O rest beside the weary road,
And hear the angels sing!
For lo!, the days are hastening on,
By prophet bards foretold,
When with the ever-circling years
Comes round the age of gold
When peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendors fling,
And the whole world give back the song
Which now the angels sing.
Somehow, these verses hit me more powerfully than ever before. Now, Ben would every single year pontificate on the Second Coming nature of verses 1, 2, and 5. Verses 3 and 4 aren’t included in our hymnal. But as I’ve looked at this carol this year I have found something far more profoundly personally comforting.
First, we have the events of that first Christmas with the glorious song sung by the angels. Then we have the assurance that that song as sung by those angels is still hovering and wafting all around us, in spite of our living in this weary world. And despite the suffering borne through “two thousand years of wrong”, we are ensured that if we would but cease our noise – our strife and conflict – we could indeed still hear that beautiful carol of hope. And for those individuals who are worn-down by care and trouble, who find life itself hard to traverse, the invitation is given to “rest beside the weary road” and listen once again to those angels. And what are they singing? They are singing of hope for that time in the not-distant future when peace shall indeed reign over all the earth and we here on earth can return to the Heavens the song of peace that is now sung to us.
Isn’t that a beautiful message?
Often during the latter part of the Christmas season this year I have found myself looking for ways to hush the noise of strife around me so that I can listen to the sweet song of the angels. And I’ve found myself more frequently resting alongside that weary road to take time and listen – and draw strength and hope.
Isn’t that the real reason for Christmas? To give us hope for a much better tomorrow – no matter how far in the future that tomorrow may be – as we journey through this life? All of us find the load too heavy to lift sometimes; too hard to bear. But if we trust in that chorus, in those angelic voices of promise, then we can endure all things. Isn’t it wonderful to have that glorious song of old still hovering all around? I know it is for me!
Look to God and Live... Joyfully! 