Recently reunited with this gem from my childhood. I can remember receiving it when I was about eight years old. I was excited to be playing music that I knew. Songs I could recognise, after the endless scales and exercises of an elementary piano student. My excitement lasted about ten minutes after I got home. The words and melodies were so familiar to me. I could see what my right hand was supposed to play; I could hear how the tune was supposed to sound. But putting those together, with the chords and bass of the left hand and the more than ‘just the melody’ in the right hand’ still took practice.
My childhood brain was somewhere between disappointed and agitated because something so familiar was also so complex. There were so many more elements, than my childhood experience, of singing the melody to ‘Away in a Manger’ a thousand times.
Isn’t that also true of the Christmas story? For that is what we sing in these carols and hymns; the Christmas story. There are words that we sing each Christmas that are so familiar. Many of us have them memorized without knowing. We sing them without thinking and our familiarity has bred a little contempt and lost a little wonder. I mean think about these phrases taken from carols we sing each year.
‘Veiled in flesh The Godhead see
Hail the incarnate deity
Pleased as man, with man to dwell
Jesus our Emmanual.’
‘No more let sins and sorrows grow
Nor thorns infest the ground
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.
These are a little more complex than Baa baa black sheep are they not? We seem to sing them with gusto each year. In our exuberance and excitement, I think we forget the depth and mystery and wonder.
Let’s stand back and forget our familiarity in the songs and find ourselves once again wondering at the beauty of Jesus, pleased, delighted even thrilled to become human and to dwell, live and reside with us, that we might learn the best way to be human. That blessing may flow from us to all humanity.
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