A Sunday ritual for the Love family is to enjoy the newest episode of NPR’s “Ask Me Another” as we drive to church. This past Sunday, one of the guests was musician Andrew Bird, who was on promoting his new Christmas album, Hark! (heads up, it’s spectacular). At one point in the conversation, Bird and the hosts began discussing his fondness for the famous Vince Guaraldi Christmas album associate with It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown. Specifically, the discussion centered in on the song “Christmastime is Here” (take a second and refresh yourself if you’re having trouble recalling it–we’ll be here when you get back).
As they discussed the song, noting that it’s in a key that basically precludes most any adult female from singing along, Bird made a comment that the plaintive, melancholy vibe of the song didn’t bother him. Whereas we are used to the jubilant feel of “Joy to the World” or the warm sentimentality of “Silent Night,” he noted that in his estimation, some of the best Christmas music is the stuff that has a touch of sadness and longing to it.
And I think he’s right on that point. Don’t mistake me, I love a wide swath of Christmas music (provided it does not center on a hippopotamus, an Italian donkey, or shoes purchased on Christmas Eve). But for me, the Christmas song that I love most, the one that I have yet to find a version I dislike, is “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” In every iteration I’ve come across, the song always strikes a chord with me. Yet there is no denying that the song is pretty heavy, both in content and in musical feel. Consider the first verse
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
To be certain, the song anticipates an event of great celebration, the arrival of the Messiah–however, it seats that as a future reality to come and does not deny the dire circumstances into which such an arrival is desired. The song situates the hope of the Messiah’s arrival as the promise, but it depicts the existent state that necessitates his coming as one of captivity and exile, tapping into the history of God’s people as slaves in Egypt and exiles in Babylon.
Of course, we do not find ourselves making bricks for Pharaoh or displaced from our homeland being held exiled in Babylon today. And yet, in some ways, we live the same story.
The other day, as we left church, we stopped at a convenience store to gas up and grab a water or two for the drive home. Dressed in our Sunday best and having left the beauty of our church’s sanctuary, we pulled into the gas station and immediately realized that just a few parking spots away from us we were seeing a drug deal go down. A bedraggled man was clearly buying from two men in a gray sedan, and no sooner had he acquired than did he snort whatever he’d purchased. It’s moments like that when I realize what a sanitized existence I live–I don’t begrudge my existence as a white, male, religiously-affiliated middle-class professional, but it certainly does make me notice more when I see things like this happen. And yet they do happen, all the time, even at Christmas.
Some friends of mine are walking through some dark things that have happened in their extended family recently, things that are so heavy and personally devastating that I’ll not detail it further. It’s enough to say that their relationships within the family will never be able to return to what they were; the past they knew has been taken from them. My wife noticed on Instagram the other day that an old friend’s daughter had lost a set of twins. A colleague whose family is very dear to us is currently wrestling with a potentially life-altering diagnosis for their son. A family who is very special to most folks in my town just lost a beloved father and grandfather to COVID. It’s heavy out there, y’all. It’s very heavy. And while we know this heaviness exists in the lives of those alongside whom we live, at Christmas, we’re suddenly inundated by Christmas radio with Andy Williams proclaiming in song that “it’s the most wonderful time of the year.”
Perhaps that’s why I’m thankful for and drawn to the songs that seem to be able to grapple with the earthy reality of longing that exists in the human heart and which we can more acutely sense in the Advent season. With so many Christmas songs that unintentionally pressure us to feel, or to fake, an elation or joy that is almost blindly ignorant of the fractured world in which we live, we need to have songs like “O Come, O come, Emmanuel.” We need them in much the same way that the people of Israel in Babylonian captivity needed Psalm 137, as a reminder that the emotions of forlorn sadness and longing they felt in a world that was broken were not signs of weak faith but rather signs of a holy desire for God’s promised deliverance.
In a world where we see Sunday morning drug deals, where family relationships can be irreversibly altered by secret sins, where a mother’s anticipated joy quickly becomes realized loss, where our bodies, both young and old, can so quickly reveal their own mortality–in that world, we need more than the celebratory songs; we need to be able to look around us at a world full of both beauty and sadness, to acknowledge both the promise and the current reality, and sing with some honest, desperate longing,
O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory o’er the grave.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
I Say Stuff -- E.A. Love 