Christmas music annoys me. For a month, beginning in November, the playlist at Starbucks consists of about eight songs — “Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Winter Wonderland,” and a few others, including your favorite, “Jingle Bell Rock” — that you can’t escape if you spend much time in stores or restaurants. They could double the size of their selections, and thereby halve the amount of time we have to hear “Here Comes Santa Claus,” if they mixed in some traditional hymns, but they won’t. They won’t play “Silent Night” because it’s Christian, but if only they would — or, even better, if only they learned from it and created their own silent night.
Shoppers and diners might appreciate the respite. It would be a favor to their over-stimulated ears. The more music that’s made in the world, the smaller the odds that, with any given performance, the music makers will get it right.
Though when they do . . .
Listening to the choir sing Christmas hymns last night before midnight Mass, I was surprised to feel the emotions — awe, solemn joy — that the music was intended to stir. The singers meant what they sang. I heard it. I hear it rarely. (Usually what I hear is virtuosity. It’s a weakness among church organists especially. They like what they do and throw themselves into the technique, forgetting that it’s only ancillary — a “handmaiden” — to the sacrifice on the altar. Their performing a concert on top of the Mass is not added value. It’s subtracted value. It’s worse than a distraction. It’s bad manners. It’s irreverence.)
The singers who meant it last night sang the glory of the Nativity, of course, but also of small-n nativity, yours and mine, everyone’s. Birth is part of the larger package that includes gestation (the child’s perspective), pregnancy (the mother’s perspective), and maternity. The relationship between mother and child, unborn and then newborn, is almost unspeakably intimate.
Everyone experiences it from at least one side. Women who are mothers have experienced it from both. They inform us that it’s not all a bed of roses. Pregnancy is physically strenuous. Labor, more so. It’s an asymmetrical relationship, only one party having the ability to end it. Should she? The question is grotesque in light of the Christmas message, but we live in a fallen world. The most personal dimension of our lives in human bodies — our origins in the wombs of our mothers — has acquired a political edge. Call that development horrific and evil, if you wish. It’s also sad.
It’s as sad as the truth of which it’s a distortion is beautiful and engrossing. In the Christian imagination, particularly on the Catholic and Orthodox side, Jesus’ Incarnation is a seamless process. In the Roman calendar, it begins, logically, on March 25, the feast of the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and she says Fiat, “Let it be done.” This is the first mystery of the Rosary. In the second, we meditate on the Visitation: Mary, pregnant with Jesus, travels to her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist, who, Elizabeth exclaims, leapt in her womb at the approach of Jesus, the fruit of Mary’s womb. In the third mystery, we meditate on the Nativity.
For 15 to 20 percent (it depends on how you calculate) of the Rosary, which, after the Mass and the Divine Office, is the heart of formal Catholic prayer and devotion, Jesus in utero is the topic. From various perspectives, primarily his mother’s, we imagine him during his life between his conception and his birth. In the Christian imagination, the Nativity is not an isolated event. It’s a node in the sequence of events that we call the Incarnation, and its backstory is infinitely rich. Grasp that and you’ve grasped half of social conservatism in America in the past half century.
Jesus’ Birth: Christmas Has a Backstory