Anglican Christmas Eve (En)

This Christmas Eve is feeling less and less Anglican and more and more like my own, personal Christmas. By saying “personal” I don’t want to permit myself to mention my fair share of struggles or any hints of being introspectively sentimental—I guess, given the ongoing circumstances, it would have been lousy: the world is definitely *not* about anything that could be even remotely regarded as obsessive navel gazing.

Yet to go completely contemplative is not a perfect solution either: what else is left then?..

My answer is: A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s. It has a strange and long-lasting impact on me: everything is seen from a distance, good and bad (the latter more this time), marvellous and bleak (yet again, the second is mightier than the first), yet, miraculously, this exact defamiliarization appears to have the greatest therapeutic effect—and this time it is much more enduring and rewarding. Suddenly, you can fully associate yourself with that one trembling boy, a solo chorister from King’s College School, who is chosen immediately before the actual service is about to begin. And here he is, singing the very first lines of “Once in Royal David’s City”:

Once in Royal David’s city

Stood a lowly cattle shed,

Where a mother laid her Baby

In a manger for His bed:

Mary was that mother mild,

Jesus Christ her little Child.

You can hear how his voice, at first somewhat feeble (still heavenly beautiful) is getting stronger and more confident. Once you were timid, and downbeat, and weak, and sad—and you have all the right reasons to be like that—yet something changing with each second, and you cannot even fully comprehend what it is. Were you just uplifted by the divine music? And is this utterly realistic explanation the clearest answer to what is going on inside you? Or is it something else? You (I, of course: it is always about us no matter how hard we try to think otherwise) are not the best Christian out there: you are lukewarm, and indifferent, and desperately lacking in the serious engagements you once promised yourself (years ago) to be devoted to. But here is a thing: despite losing hope, and, partly, faith, and being that average “ok person who is doing fine” (meaning, doing badly), you are still waiting for redemption as eagerly as before, if not more. Will it be healing? You don’t know, since nobody does. But this very sense of the necessity to pull through the bleak mid-winter is very much alive in you.

After so long an absence

At last we meet again:

Does the meeting give us pleasure,

Or does it give us pain?

The tree of life has been shaken,

And but few of us linger now,

Like the Prophet's two or three berries

In the top of the uppermost bough.

We shall proceed. We must. Merry Christmas to us all.