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Thu art His Moder for humylité

My first real introduction to the wild weird world of Early Music came during one a Christmastide past. I suppose there was also my father’s record of the soundtrack to the Six Wives of Henry the Eighth that helped open up that door, but I hardly listened to it that much, preferring to wear the grooves down on an album of national anthems.

Maybe I liked all the flags on the cover, I dunno. Whatever the case, I probably drove my parents mad from listening to Ja, Vi Elsker Dette Landet entirely too many times. That, if you insist on prying, is the Norwegian anthem, which sounds, actually, like Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly on horse tranquilizers. Anyway, the record player broke eventually, which closed off that particular avenue of musicological exploration.

Sooner or later, we discovered the joys of the newfangled compact-disk player, probably about five years behind schedule. Being an amateur Luddite myself, we tended to hem and haw and stall about new gadgets—I remember being convinced during high school that VHS was going to make a comeback and being very cautious about involving ourselves with the infernal DVD. I don’t think we ever fixed the record player.

Anyway, one of the first CDs we bought—after the 1812 Overture, indispensable if you have a militaria freak for a son—was the delightful Christmas album Sing We Noel by the Boston Camerata, which I have profiled in these pages before. I had to admit it was a revelation, all those strange and wonderful and rough and bittersweet harmonies that had been sadly lost over the centuries coming back to tickle my ear. Ad cantus leticie—

Though perhaps it should come as no surprise. Christmas is one of those few times when the layman really gets a crack at hearing some of the music of his forefathers, albeit perhaps strained and synthesized up the wazoo. There used to be carols for Ascension Day, for Easter, and even St. Clement’s day—one with the improbable chorus of going a-clementing, which sounds faintly obscene.

But since nobody celebrates Ascension Thursday on Thursday anymore, or because the marketing attempt to exchange anchor-shaped cookies on Clement-tide failed miserably, those are all lost to history, unless you’re a high-church Anglican with too much time on your hands. Plus, and I am loathe to admit it, in the popular mind Christmas has, amid all its commercialization, hung on to its religious origins with more tenacity than Easter. Santa hasn’t quite eclipsed our (singularly cuddly) newborn Lord quite as much as the equally huggable Easter Bunny has blocked the midday sun of the untouchable risen Christ—noli Me tangere and all that.

But back to Christmas carols, bowdlerized or not. I remember a particularly bizarre and myopic moment during my trip back home, when wandering around the Public School Auditorium Revival-style Song airways terminal of JFK Airport, they were playing what appeared to be a sort of caffeinated eighties remix of the supremely laid-back It Came Upon a Midnight Clear over the PA.

That’s a particularly flagrant case, but you could probably think of others. I’m reminded of the disco version of Good King Wenceslaus on one of those innumerable Mannheim Steamroller albums—do they ever do anything besides Christmas carols? Since they used to play their songs in between holiday specials on PBS during my childhood, I shall let that one pass for now.

On the other hand, at least some of the old carols are still wandering around, if perhaps someone has unkindly tried to spice them up with a synthesizer. There’s always the threat these days they’ll be choked to death by Frosty the Snowman …snowperson…snowpersonage…person of snowness…ah, heck, or survive only as homely curiosities crooned by Frank Sinatra on novelty albums with the explicit lyrics cut out.

Not that I have anything against the Chairman, but I must draw the line somewhere. Even Hannukah’s been reduced to the piddly little Dreidel Song when selections from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus would make more sense. And among the more conventional religious Christmas carols still left standing, one can only listen to Hark, the Herald Angels Sing so many times, or pass out trying to hold that fifteen-odd syllable Gloooria on the chorus.

And now, allow me to get up on my soapbox. What’s the solution to those holiday singing woes? I suggest you—and me—and all of us go and have a peek at some of the old standards that are no longer standard, except possibly among the more antiquarian members of the Catholic blogosphere. The ever-helpful Jane at Catholics, Musicians, Students has already posted the stark and wonderful, and slightly gory Corpus Christi Carol, but there are plenty more.

You read me right, I did say gory (well, listen: Under that bed there runs a flood/The one half runs water, the other runs blood. Hmmm?) But Salvation is gory: look at a crucifix some time. And these carols reflect it. They are undoubted strong stuff, testifying to the infinite poetic capacity and theological depth that permeated even the lowest of popular minds of the Mediaeval epoch. They’re not afraid to tackle tough concepts even amid their simple piety, the two mingling as evocatively as the macaronic mix of antique vernacular and liturgical Latin expressing rude veneration and Scriptural genius. The Middle English text The Nativity is one such marvel:

An angel of cunsel this day is borne
Of a Maide y seide beforne,
For to save that was forlorne,
Sol de stella.

That sunne hath never doun goynge,
Nother his lyght no tyme lesynge;
The sterre is evermore shynynge,
Semper clara.

Right as the sterre bryngeth forth a bem
Of whom ther cometh a mervelus strem,
So childede the Maide withoute wem,
Pari forma.

It’s sometimes too easy to hang on to the cozy side of Christmas and forget the long, hard road that leads from the stable to Golgotha, manger to cross. The medievals knew this; their lyrics, if you strain past the quaint—and sometimes touching—misspellings, show a loving, even easy familiarity with the interconnected web of Jesus’s life and the Christian life of which it is the ur-type. The Nativity does so, showing the seamless continuity of salvation history from Bethlehem to Calvary. Let us continue on that road:

Marie so myelde, that quene of grace,
Hath borne a chielde — scripture seith soo —
To bringe mankyende out of that place
Where is bothe peyne and endeles woo.

Mary so myelde in worde and thought
Hath borne a chielde, Jhesus soo good,
The whiche ayene mankyende hath bought
On the roode tree with his hert bloode.

Mary so myelde, Moder and May,
Hath borne a chielde by hir mekenesse
That shall bringe us at Domes Day
Fro thraldom, peyn, woo, and distresse.

Not only do we have the cross, and, more importantly, upon that cross Christ crucified. We have the Last Judgment, inseparable from the two miracles of Virgin Birth and resurrected rebirth. And most strikingly, we have Mary. There she is, standing beneath the cross just as She rested in the hay alongside Her newborn Son. The Virgin is omnipresent in these verses, but never separated from Her Child, venerated and glorified—

Lady, so lovely, so goodly to se,
So buxsum in Thi body to be,
Thu art his moder for humylité,
Regina celi, letare!

—but not as a goddess, not for something She Herself has done, but for Her God-given purity—and that rarest of virtues, humylité. (And there is that puzzling buxsum bit, but not now, people). The spelling should make us smile, but the sight, the visible incarnation in the Virgin of the words exaltavit humiles should bring us proud, silly folk to our knees. And lo and behold, here comes the next stanza, telling us to do just that.

And therfore knel we doun on our kne,
This blyssid berthe worchepe we,
This is a song: humylyté!
Regina celi, letare!

No better gift to Baby Jesus, I think, than to kneel down to the flesh that gave Him life, the Virgin He Himself chose before all time.