It is an unusual year when Christmas Eve falls on the Fourth Sunday in Advent. What is one to do? St. Joseph’s Chapel in Berkeley combined the services, beginning with penitential Advent with purple vestments and segueing into Christmas Eve, Feast of the Nativity, with white vestments. Within these two services, we sang carols with gusto. We ended up with 2 Epistles and 2 Gospels and one Mass. It was all quite remarkable, and allowed our small congregation – a university chapel during winter break – to celebrate appropriately. And it was a visual feast, even changing out the wreathe candles burning brightly alongside our creche. We essentially sanctified the chapel, adorning it in real time with our liturgies, voices, and prayers. We sculpted a work of art, of living art, which is what we were celebrating, the birth of the greatest of all living creations, God’s son incarnate, coming among us, to love us and to save us from ourselves, sin, and death, and to declare victory over all to bring us with Him to Heaven, to life immortal in glorious majesty.
Our preacher made an important point, that we must practice humility to enjoy life in glorious majesty, just as Our Lord did, coming as he did into such a setting, homeless, fraught with enemies, and yet bearing our burdens, our own Lamb of God taking away the sins of the world.
As the pageantry danced around us, I thought how we were in a new dark age, or darkening one at least, one mirroring Medieval times and earlier. For not only has Christianity been marginalized and threatened, but the general populace is slowly becoming illiterate. Reading and writing has been replaced by images and screens. Sure we can load our phones with books, but that is a temporary measure I sense. Videos are so entertaining, why look at a Kindle page?
And so how was Christianity taught in the Medieval world? The world of an illiterate populace? Through images – stained glass and sculpture – and through song – hymns and ballads. Memory capacity must have been greater than ours today with no touch screens. And so in our Anglican rite we continue those practices, mostly from habit and love of beauty. We memorize Scripture and Creeds and responses in the Mass. We memorize and recite the General Confession, cleaning out our hearts and minds before becoming one with Our Lord in the Eucharist. We sing hymns, from books with stanzas printed on pages and notes that tell us when to go up and when to go down, how long to hold a note, and even suggestions at the top of the page, like “with spirit” for “The First Noel,” or “with marked rhythm” for “Good Christian Men Rejoice,” or “steadily, in moderate time” for “Silent Night.” But we don’t need those instructions, for the songs are so familiar, thank Heaven, that we live the songs as we sing them, and the Chapel delights in being painted by our voices.
The Medieval world and on for many centuries was an illiterate one. Clergy were trained in Latin, but the populace was illiterate. And not knowing Latin, the liturgies were in themselves in a foreign tongue. Bit through the years, with repetition of the oral traditions and with familiar music and with stained glass stories marching up and down the outer walls, the people became educated in terms of their immortal souls and how to love one another.
Of course mankind never gets it right, with the falling back and moving forward and the darkness devouring the light, until the day comes once again and the light allows us to see once again.
So embrace Christmas, the greatest story ever told, and sing the song that angels sang to the shepherds, that the wise men heard from the star in the night sky. Give thanks for the symbols and the signs that we must continue to teach, so that when the last blog post is shut down for lack of readers, we will be able to hear God singing to us.
He calls us tonight, this holy night, to come and see him in Bethlehem, the place of bread, where he enters our world in our flesh, so that we can come and see him in church and in the hearts of others who love him.
It is a silent night, a holy night, for all is calm and all is bright. Advent is over for the advent of Christ is here, the coming of the Lord of Lords to save us from the dark.
Merry Christmas to all! 
Christine Sunderland
Christine Sunderland 