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PAGE TITLE: http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
ARTICLE TITLE: A Christmas
Meditation
DATE: Monday December 23,
2013
AUTHOR: Peter Hitchens
AUTHOR: Peter Jonathan
Hitchens (born 28 October 1951) is
an English foreign correspondent and author. He has published six books,
including The Abolition of Britain, A Brief History of Crime, The
Broken Compass, The Rage Against God and The War We Never Fought:
The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs.
Hitchens writes for Britain's The Mail on
Sunday newspaper, and describes himself as a Burkean conservative. A former
foreign correspondent based in Moscow and later Washington, Hitchens continues
to work as an occasional foreign reporter, and appears frequently in the
British broadcast media. He is the younger brother of the late writer
Christopher Hitchens.
Peter Hitchens was once an atheist like his
late brother Christopher Hitchens, but he became a member of the Church of
England and an advocate of moral virtues founded on Christian faith and
institutions such as marriage, which he argues have since the 1960s been
undermined by social liberals and cultural Marxists. Hitchens defends the use
of the Church of England's 1662 Book of Common Prayer and King James Bible. Of
the latter, he has written "it is not simply a translation, but a poetic
translation, written to be read out loud... to lodge in the mind and to disturb
the temporal with the haunting sound of the eternal".
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If
you are quick you can still hear most of Jeremy Summerly’s superb Radio 4
series ‘A Cause for Carolling’, by going here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03m34d8/episodes/player,
but I warn you that (for some obscure reason) the BBC doesn’t plan to keep them
available for long. It’s exceptionally good, thoughtful, full of new things,
joys and surprises. You’ll be a better person after you’ve heard it than you
were before, which is most of the point of art and culture.
The
title is a quotation from Thomas Hardy’s marvellous poem ‘The Darkling Thrush’
, and the programmes explore the very, very old beginnings of the English
Christmas carol, the 19th century creation of so many of the carols
we now love so much, and the birth and growing power of the ‘Service of Nine
Lessons and Carols’ broadcast to the world from the Chapel of King’s College in
Cambridge and now copied in thousands of towns and cities, especially in North
America.
It
is very good on the ‘Bidding Prayer’ which, in that service, follows
‘Once in Royal David’s City’ and which has, since I first heard it, always
given me a lump in the throat and a prickling behind the eyes. I don’t really
know why. Haunted prose like this cannot easily be analysed.
It
runs : ‘Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmas Eve our care and delight to
prepare ourselves to hear again the message of the angels; in heart
and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass,
and the Babe lying in a manger.
‘Let
us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purpose of God from
the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by
this Holy Child; and let us make this Chapel, dedicated to Mary, His most
blessed Mother, glad with our carols of praise.
‘But
first let us pray for the needs of his whole world; for peace and goodwill over
all the earth; for unity and brotherhood within the Church he came to build,
and especially in the dominions of our sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth, within
this University and City of Cambridge, and in the two royal and religious
foundations of King Henry VI here and at Eton.
And
because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us at this time
remember in his name the poor and the helpless, the cold, the hungry and the
oppressed; the sick in body and in mind and them that mourn; the lonely and the
unloved; the aged and the little children; all who know not the Lord Jesus, or
who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.
Lastly,
let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another
shore and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose
hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom, in this Lord Jesus, we for
evermore are one.
These
prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the throne of heaven, in the
words which Christ himself hath taught us…’
The
programme reveals that this prayer has been described as the greatest to be
written in the English language since the Prayer Book of 1662 (which really
dates to 1549 in most of its words and cadences). I am inclined to agree. The
key to it is in the very last part, which refers directly to the multitude of
the dead in the First World War (since the prayer was first introduced in
1919). This is moving enough anyway for ( as A.S. Byatt says in her ‘Virgin in
the Garden’ series of books) the dead are very present at Christmas. But the
knowledge that the grief is being expressed for an entire generation of young
men makes it far more poignant.
The
whole thing is a narrow bridge between our world and the one before 1914. It
couod not be written now. Nobody would have the knowledge and experience which
allowed him to do so. Every word of it contains a Biblical knowledge
reaching back deep in time through the Victorian era and then on back into the
earthy, ancient past of our country and its language, culture and faith ( a
past which is briefly and faintly accessible in some of the older carols we
sing at this season). It is the last expression of that, before restless
modernism took charge. Eric Milner-White who wrote it, had I think been an army
chaplain during the war. He later became Dean of York and was probably the last
of the Anglican clergy to continue to write prayers in the tradition of Thomas
Cranmer, plain yet poetic and full of thought and wisdom.
About
20 years ago now, in fact rather longer ago, I attended a carol service
in the newly reopened Anglican church in Moscow, an Edwardian or
Victorian red brick building stolen by the Bolsheviks and turned into a
recording studio for decades of neglect and casual vandalism (Many orthodox
churches, if they survived at all, suffered much worse and more deliberately
desecrating fates than that, under the rule of the League of the Militant
Godless).
It
was an enjoyable moment of restoration, but I have always remembered the
parson’s sermon, in which he described the great Christmas festival as the
moment when ordinary time falls into step with eternity.
And
I do have a strong feeling that something of the kind is taking place when, as
the light thickens on the afternoon of December 24th, the carols
begin at King’s. For some days before that, England has been growing quieter,
gentler and calmer.
And
I always think of Carol singing as the essential prelude to this. I try to
observe Advent (which begins for me with the superb Anglo-German Advent carol
service, hymns, bible lessons and prayers partly in English, partly in German,
shared with a Lutheran congregation which has been in Oxford since 1938) .
It’s supposed to be an austere season, and so I find the Christmas spirit
elusive for much of December. But by the 15th December I am ready for my
first Christmas carols, and by the Sunday before Christmas, even more so. My
great and beautiful city of Oxford has a very old tradition that the Lord Mayor
leads carols in the Town Hall that day. And he or she is expected to sing one
part of the exchange (depending on sex) between Prince and Page in ‘Good King
Wenceslas, in front of a room full of 400 people. It’s an act of great courage,
but it raises a lot of money for charity. The occasion is wonderfully civic in
an old-fashioned way, from the days when town halls were places we were proud
of, rather than regulation-issuing centres of bureaucracy. Oxford’s is a riot
of Victorian plasterwork and unhinged pseudo-Jacobean turrets and curlicues,
and the Lord Mayor is still preceded by a mace-bearer (whose giant silver-gilt
mace was a present to the city from Charles II, who knew he owed loyal Oxford a
great deal)
The
county youth orchestra plays, a superb primary school choir, and a fine
voluntary adult choir, lead the singing. It mists the eyes a bit to see
something so completely traditional, though I’m not sure all those present sing
as hard as they would have done 30 or 40 years ago, singing being something
that the unchurched rarely have a chance to do.
And
when it was over and we spilled out into the dark street and the strong wind, I
felt that Christmas was really approaching. And so it is, that odd mixture of
jollity and deep thought, birth and approaching death, which seems to me to be
more profound and moving every year I experience it. I’ll mention here, for
those that like that sort of thing, that if you are still awake in the early
hours of the Feast of St Stephen (Boxing Day if you must), you will be able to
listen to my ‘Christmas Meditation’ on BBC Radio 4 FM at about 15 minutes after
midnight, once the news is over. In any case, a Very Happy and Blessed
Christmas to all my readers, whether you agree with me or not.
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