It's a Day for Longing. Don't Mess With It!

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Dec 25

How easy it is to let the first words in Handel’s Messiah—“Comfort ye”—go whizzing by, especially if your ears are somewhat dulled to it by long association.

The text for the opening recitative is from the Prophecy of Isaiah:

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.

I note, without pretending to know why, that the translators appointed by King James use the formal “your,” not the intimate “thy”: your God. And then, twenty-some minutes into Part One—the section that treats of the prophecies concerning the birth of Jesus and their fulfillments recorded in the gospels—an alto assures us in recitative that “a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel.”

St. Matthew when he quotes this, and librettist Charles Jennens when he chooses to use St. Matthew’s appropriation of Isaiah, might both be worried that we will miss an important point. Thus comes the translation of Immanuel: “God with us.” In short order, and in an extraordinarily lovely musical phrase—short, simple, mellifluous—a soprano declares, again in recitative, “for unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior, which is Christ the Lord.”

At the syllables “city of David” Handel’s score calls for D-D-C#-A-A, but the common alteration to whole steps, C#-B-A, is a beautiful improvement, and by then you just know that at the air, “Rejoice greatly,” the soprano is going to give you an earful. And if she’s good she does. She’s a soprano, after all.

Not a bad way to start this long and somewhat peculiar oratorio: succor, peace, forgiveness, and a savior born pro nobis in the dear city (or about five and a half miles south). This savior is called, variously, “Wonderful, Counseller, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace—all of that apparently bound up in “God with us.”

Our benefactors, the Comparative Religionists Who Know Better, kindly inform us that the idea of “God with us” is not so novel. The pagan world is full of stories in which the gods cavort with humans. And this is true enough. It even seems to happen in Genesis 6. Remember those sons of God dallying with the daughters of men? Remember the giants in the land?

But Jove doesn’t cavort in the way of Immanuel; no epic poet ever assigned to Hermes those epithets and sobriquets that Isaiah spoke and the chorus sings of concerning The Annointed One. Something novel is afoot. The word in English for this is “incarnation.” The Homeric gods often disguise themselves; they’re all as protean as their pal Proteus. But this God takes on flesh; this one—fully God and fully man, as the Chalcedonian formulation has it—is actually carnal, maybe even a carnivore. (Are we allowed to suspect a little ironically that even Jesus, if he had been a vegan, would have told everyone about it? Because that really is a good joke.) This carnality, this incarnation, is the Church’s central mystery, and like all mysteries it is not to be reduced in the manner of Lucy to “ho-ho-ho and mistletoe and presents for pretty girls”—however much we may approve of mistletoe and pretty girls, especially in combination.

I can hear myself being accused of three misdemeanors: rank amateur musical analysis, unprovoked cracks against vegans (and sopranos), and scrooginess. The first and the third are legitimate, so I’ll answer them. (The response to the second is simple: “bone-in standing prime rib with an internal temperature of 135 F.” If the cattle are lowing and you’re going to turn your nose up at them once they reach your plate, still lowing, so much better for us omnivores.)

As for the first accusation: I began with those remarks on Handel’s Messiah only to say that a little bit of thinking about it, a little bit of ordinary attentiveness, suggests to us the richness of what is in the air today, which, whatever else it is, is a day like none other. That richness far exceeds the sentimentalism of “Silent Night” and Cindy-Lou down in Who-ville, who liked Christmas a lot.

Now no one blames Cindy-Lou for her preferences. We all like Christmas and agree that Cindy-Lou is cute in her way. But for the great depth and mystery of the day we need, at some point, something better than what Culture Lite and our Snap-Crackle-Pop Religion provide. We sure as hell need something better than “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” and “Santa, Baby!”

You see I’m already well into the second accusation. But I promise I’m not scrooging. I’m attempting a little bit of ordinary attentiveness. Remember the slow plaintive yearning air for soprano:

and he shall speak,
he shall speak peace,
peace,
he shall speak peace
unto the heathen.

This and the music it is set to are stately, not silly. They honor the mystery. This ain’t “Last Christmas”—one of the greatest aural offenses ever to pierce, and in piercing defile, the ear of man. (I say nothing of the musical yuletide crimes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.)

The effect of that air for soprano is to stir the coals of desire in us so that they flame into the longing that is proper to the day. We forget to our minishment that the libretto and the score of Messiah have been reminding us that a profound longing is being fulfilled. “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: and they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined”—so the air for solo bass. If you’ve ever abided a cold dark night in anticipation of the light and warmth of dawn, you know something of the anticipation expressed here, except of course yours is isolated and short; this is cosmic and eternal.

Likewise the very nature of liturgical rhythm: fasting prepares us, and helps us prepare for, the feasts. Anticipation and consummation are each part and parcel of the other. We don’t need to be reminded of the anticipation we felt as children; we especially don’t need to be reminded of it if we are blessed to be around children and young couples who are having children. But we may need to be reminded of a paradox intrinsic to longing itself: there is something about it, there is something in it, that makes the longing more pleasurable than the satisfaction of the longing. Certainly we would not have it always Christmas Eve and never Christmas Morn; we will suffer no White Witch to make it always winter and never Christmas. But we do know, at least intuitively, that longing is in a sense its own satisfaction. It is fulfilling to be the kind of creature who isn’t entirely fulfilled. It is salvific to yearn. Perhaps the yearning can be compared to a certain kind of itch: scratching at once relieves and exacerbates the irritation. Exacerbated irritation calls for more vigorous scratching; more vigorous scratching leads to intensified relief, intensified relief to greater irritation, and so on. I’m told poison ivy sufferers know something of this.

At this time of year I sometimes like to reread Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” or listen to a recording of Thomas reading it, or maybe even rewatch the film adaptation featuring Denholm Elliott. Others have their favorite poems and songs and films. To each his own. I hope I’m scrooging no one. But I am suggesting that all of these are acts of longing. They recall previous readings, and to our delight they summon much of the old magic we all once felt. We might be tempted to call them by the name nostalgia, because nostalgia is longing that is also a kind of unfulfilled fulfillment, except of course nostalgia properly understood is a longing for a place, not a time. The Greeks gave us a word for homesickness (nostos + algia: hurt for home), and lucky for us they did: we should be homesick. To my knowledge they did not give us a word for pastsickness or hurt for childhood. But we all have the ailment nonetheless—and I think we’re going to guard it jealously. We will not suffer old acquaintance to be forgot nor days of auld lang syne. A bot might be cut out for oblivion. The latest demoniac instantiation of AI might be cut out for it. We manifestly are not.

There are reasons for this that the minimal attentiveness I’ve spoken of can account for. The grand story that has at its center the event of this very day also has two features built into it that give us cause for longing. And that longing goes in two directions, backward and forward.

Pining for the past is a feature of a real (as opposed to artificial) intelligence. It understands “that there hath passed away a glory from the earth,” as Wordsworth put it. We call this the Fall. It is the loss of both a home and a past, of both Paradise and the paradisiacal condition. In terms of the nursery rhyme it is the loss of both the wall and that egg-like character Humpty Dumpty, who once sat on it whole, happy, and uncracked. (Get rid of the Fall, and with it Original Sin, and then just try to account for the misery in the world.) I would say that the archetypal objects of that “longing lingering look behind” (as Thomas Gray put it in his great Elegy) are Paradise and childhood, more specifically childhood and its specific places: those woods, that tree fort, this baseball diamond, that one Christmas when…! Childhood itself is thus an emblem of Paradise, and we find that we are doubly afflicted: we endure both a home- and a past-sickness.

Pining not for what is lost but for what is to come, by contrast, is a feature of a real (as opposed to artificial) intelligence for which the Christmas text concerning Abraham impinges with all its eschatological force: “he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” The city that we have, as St. Augustine taught, is a picture of the city to come, also distinct to us in its way (“whence all sickness, sorrow, and sighing are fled away”) if obviously unknowable. So there is a glory to look back on, but there is also a glory to look ahead to. Milton said Adam and Eve were dismissed from Paradise “sorrowing yet in peace,” and he had Michael instruct Adam neither to love nor to hate his life. To put it another way: Milton saw that we are on the isthmus of a middle state, at rest and not at rest.

St. Augustine knew something of this restlessness. He implied that it is in fact a very great gift. Longing itself is a very great gift. The poet George Herbert (1593-1633) said we are the beneficiaries of all of heaven’s bounty except rest itself. He meant that one of our blessings is to be afflicted with a “repining restlessness.”

And so here we are. It’s the day of the central mystery, and on it we can look with longing both forward and back. And all the vehicles of that longing are available to us in the flesh.

The prime rib with an internal temperature of 135 F, the mistletoe, the presents for pretty girls—these are all reminders that we’d better not go and get ourselves too spiritual today, for although we are not beasts we are not angels either. St. Athanasius, in On the Incarnation, wrote, “He became Himself an object for the senses, so that those who were seeking God in sensible things might apprehend the Father through the works which He, the Word of God, did in the body.” And again: “He sanctified the body by being in it.”

To put it another way, the creation, which was once declared “good” and then “very good,” has been ratified. (St.Athanasius: “The renewal of creation has been wrought by the Self-same Word Who made it in the beginning.”) I’m glad I still have ears to hear “Bethlehem Down” and “The Best of Rooms.”[*] I’m glad there’s such a thing as sound and melody and harmony, nonharmonics and passing tones, suspension and resolution. I’m glad the world and my sense perceptions are so well suited to each other. And now that I am old I especially love to see young couples in church, sitting thigh-to-thigh, full of yearning. “Do not gainsay the longings of the body,” I want to tell them. “Do not be afraid of them. They have their place. You’re not beasts but you’re not angels either. You just go right ahead and have yourselves a merry little Christmas now—or a big one. Make it a big one.”

It is nutty, isn’t it? The whole unbelievable and improbable Christian view of things? The only thing nuttier is the cold dead world of material causation and the unreasonable notion that amid all this meaninglessness, lost in such a vast frigid emptiness, you could feel actual love for anything at all—and that that love could be a real thing, not a mere chemical reaction, a collision of atoms, or a fired synapse.

No. Give us the Incarnation. Give us the longing. Give us the story that accounts for them. Speak ye comfortably to us.[†]

[*] Note in this short poem how Robert Herrick (1591-1674) treats the Incarnation and honors the unity of man’s flesh and spirit—how efficiently he treats the whole man, who is neither angel nor beast but, alone in all creation, uniquely both.

Christ’s Part

Christ, He requires still, wheresoe’er He comes
To feed or lodge, to have the best of rooms:
Give Him the choice; grant Him the nobler part
Of all the house: the best of all’s the heart.

[†] Bonus feature from St. Athanasius: “He took pity on them, therefore, and did not leave them destitute of the knowledge of Himself, lest their very existence should prove purposeless…. Simply in order that through this gift of Godlikeness in themselves they may be able to perceive the Image Absolute, that is the Word Himself, and through Him apprehend the Father; which knowledge of their Maker is for men the only real happy and blessed life.”