Faith: December 2023 Archives

For your consideration during New Year's Resolution Season:

A little over a year ago, I decided I needed to do a better job of feeding my mind and spirit. I notice that my bedtime habit of listening to old British radio comedies (particularly Hancock's Half Hour) to help me drift off to sleep had committed many of the lines and scenes to my memory, without even trying. I thought I ought to seek some more edifying material to listen to often enough that it embeds itself in my memory.

The Psalms are the only divinely inspired hymnal. They cover the gamut of emotion and sentiment in the believer's life, teaching us to set our hopes and affections on God in every circumstance. They challenge us to strive for holiness and express our constant need for forgiveness and mercy. They express awe at God's wondrous works in the past and hopes for his just judgement and deliverance in the future.

Over the last year or so, I have been listening to a series of 60 YouTube videos of someone reciting the complete Book of Psalms -- all 150 -- in daily morning and evening portions for each day of the month, in accordance with the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer.

Psalm-chanting was a common monastic practice, but Thomas Cranmer and the leaders of the English Reformation believed that the people should read or sing the psalms in their own tongue. Starting with the very first Book of Common Prayer (1549), a schedule was set out for reciting the entire Psalter every month as part of the daily office -- the daily services of morning prayer (matins) and evening prayer (evensong). The daily office was another transfer by the Reformers of a monastic practice in Latin (the canonical hours) to lay worship in the vernacular. The Book of Common Prayer also included a schedule for reading through almost the entire Bible over the course of the year. These were retained and refined in subsequent editions, leading to the official 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which is still the official prayer book of the Church of England.

The 60 Psalter portions are intended to be roughly equal in length. Some portions consist of a single lengthy psalm (e.g., Psalm 37), and some contain as many as 6 short psalms (e.g., Psalms 120-125). The longest psalm and longest chapter in the Bible, the great acrostic Psalm 119, is divided across five services, reading 4 to 5 of the 22 8-verse stanzas at each service.

The Psalter used in the BCP is Myles Coverdale's translation, as contained in the Great Bible, the first English translation authorized for use in the Church of England. Although this translation was supplanted by the Bishop's Bible in 1568, which was supplanted by King James I's Authorized Version in 1611, the C of E retained for use in worship the translation of the Psalter which was already familiar to two generations of priests and parishioners.

I chose the BCP version, rather than a modern translation, because I thought the less-quotidian diction and vocabulary would stick better in my memory and because some of the language was already familiar to me from years of singing choral anthems with texts drawn from the Coverdale Psalter. Of this translation, C. S. Lewis wrote, "Even of the old translators he is by no means the most accurate; and of course a sound modern scholar has more Hebrew in his little finger than poor Coverdale had in his whole body. But in beauty, in poetry, he, and St. Jerome, the great Latin translator, are beyond all whom I know."

I found two sources for listening to the Coverdale Psalter, both projects apparently undertaken during Britain's pandemic lockdowns. Paul Edmondson has recorded the 150 Psalms as individual files on SoundCloud. He reads well, steadily at a conversational pace, without pauses. He has also done readings of Ecclesiastes, John's Gospel, Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and passages from Shakespeare.

On YouTube, I found a channel called Cambridge House of Prayer (CAMHOP), which has produced 60 videos of the Coverdale Psalter, each containing a single morning or evening prayer service's portion of the Psalms. The channel's self-description states:

Cambridge House of Prayer is a prayer and worship community of people of all ages and backgrounds that passionately pursues the presence of our God: Father, Son & Spirit.

On this channel you can join us in Morning Prayer (Wednesday 8am), Compline (Friday 9pm) as well as other expressions of prayer and worship throughout the week.

'He brought me out into a spacious place, he rescued me because he delighted in me.'
Psalm 18:19

There are links to a website (camhop.uk) that is online, but also to social media profiles that are no longer active. In addition to the Psalter readings, the YouTube channel also has recordings of morning and evening prayer services and readings from the Gospels, accompanied by singer and harpist Lucy Bunce. The last update to the YouTube channel was in May 2021. There's more information about CAMHOP here.

The CAMHOP Coverdale Psalter videos are narrated by Alistair Rouse. He reads slowly, with pauses after each phrase, ideal for someone to listen and repeat after. Videos typically run about 8 minutes. The visual consists of title graphics and static images from old psalm books, so there's nothing you need to watch. The official CAMHOP playlist has a few of the portions out of order, so I built my own, which is available publicly.

I first came across the CAMHOP Coverdale Psalter videos and began using them in 2022. I listen and repeat after the reader as I go for a walk or as I drive around town. I try to listen to both morning and evening portions every day. If I miss a day, I may try to catch up. If I miss a few, I simply resume with the current portion. By now, I would estimate I've listened and recited every psalm at least a dozen times, even taking missed days into account. I've tried to stretch from repeating after every phrase to waiting for the verse to complete, which helps to tie the phrases together in my memory and presents a more cohesive thought to my mind.

For perspective on how to read and understand the Psalms, I recommend C. S. Lewis's book Reflections on the Psalms. (Audiobook here.) Lewis writes as a reader, not an expert:

In this book, then, I write as one amateur to another, talking about difficulties I have met, or lights I have gained, when reading the Psalms, with the hope that this might at any rate interest, and sometimes even help, other inexpert readers. I am "comparing notes'', not presuming to instruct. It may appear to some that I have used the Psalms merely as pegs on which to hang a series of miscellaneous essays. I do not know that it would have done any harm if I had written the book that way, and I shall have no grievance against anyone who reads it that way. But that is not how it was in fact written. The thoughts it contains are those to which I found myself driven in reading the Psalms; sometimes by my enjoyment of them, sometimes by meeting with what at first I could not enjoy....

What must be said, however, is that the Psalms are poems, and poems intended to be sung: not doctrinal treatises, nor even sermons. Those who talk of reading the Bible "'as literature" sometimes mean, I think, reading it without attending to the main thing it is about; like reading Burke with no interest in politics, or reading the Aeneid with no interest in Rome. That seems to me to be nonsense. But there is a saner sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are. Most emphatically the Psalms must be read as poems; as lyrics, with all the licences and all the formalities, the hyperboles, the emotional rather than logical connections, which are proper to lyric poetry. They must be read as poems if they are to be understood ; no less than French must be read as French or English as English. Otherwise we shall miss what is in them and think we see what is not.

I have an app on my Android phone called BraveNewPipe, an open-source browser front end optimized for streaming videos and audio. It works with a variety of platforms, including YouTube, Bitchute, Rumble, and Soundcloud. It allows for the creation of playlists local to your phone, and it allows videos to play even when the phone screen is locked. It works very well for listening when my hands need to be free, as when I'm out for a walk, and I also use it for listening to podcasts while driving and while doing yardwork and chores around the house.

For the new year, I'm considering adding to my daily Psalter recitation a way to read the Gospels through every month. There are 89 chapters among the four books, which divides nicely into three chapters per day.

Edited from the version originally published on December 25, 2012

Merry Christmas to anyone who happens by BatesLine today.

This Advent (2023) I renewed an earlier attempt to turn the 4-arm, 5-globe reproduction Victorian streetlamp in front of our house into a kind of Advent candelabra. I installed three purple LED bulbs and one pink bulb (for Gaudete Sunday) in the lower arms, and a white bulb in the center, with the intention of lighting one per week. Travel got in the way, as did an electrical fault in one of the arms. So we have three of the four arms and the central, Christmas candle, lit. Maybe next year all of them will work.

My daughter and I drove back together from her college, and we arrived the evening of the 23rd. The next morning (Christmas Eve) she, my wife, and I sang with an ensemble at church, and my youngest son played cello. We sang a 400-year-old carol, "While by the sheep we watched at night," which you might know by the echoing refrain,"How great our joy! Joy, joy, joy!" The carol is Hymn of the Week at Word and Song by Tony Esolen, who tells us about the carol's composer, Friedrich Spee. Esolen asks:

What about the music to which we sing the carol? Can a minor key express joy? It certainly does here. It's that joy that brightens the sky on that solemn night when the eternal Lord was made manifest in time, and the tidings came not to kings and high priests, but to the shepherds watching in the night, perhaps huddling under their coats to keep warm, and keeping their staffs clasped and ready. What else, after all, can you say when the angel gives you this news? All words fail. Des bin ich froh -- it brings me joy.

We had lunch at Señor Pablo's in Sapulpa (we like their molcajete), and I had a short couple of hours to do some shopping before it was time to return to church at 5 pm for the Christmas Eve service of Lessons and Carols. On the way home, I put on this year's Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, and as we drove through the rain looking at Christmas lights in midtown Tulsa, we listened to the solo chorister sing the opening verse of "Once in Royal David's City," the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah, and the bidding prayer that opens the service.

As a Holland Hall high school student, I attended and sang in the annual service of Christmas lessons and carols at Trinity Episcopal Church, modeled after the annual Christmas Eve service from the chapel of King's College, Cambridge. My 8th grade year was the first year I was required to attend, and I expected to be bored. Instead, I was entranced. My last two years in high school, I was a member of the Concert Chorus and was privileged to join in the singing of Tomas Luis de Victoria's setting of O Magnum Mysterium, an ancient poem about the wonder that "animals should see the newborn Lord lying in a manger." As a senior, I was one of the 12 Madrigal Singers. The six ladies sang the plainsong setting of Hodie Christus Natus Est (Today Christ Is Born), repeating it as the students processed into their places. Then all 12 of us sang Peter J. Wilhousky's arrangement of Carol of the Bells, with the 3 basses landing on the final satisfying "Bom!" on that low G.

At the beginning of Trinity's service, after the processional, Father Ralph Urmson-Taylor, who served as Holland Hall's Lower School chaplain, would read the bidding prayer. Confessing Evangelical has it as I remember it. It's worth a moment of your time to ponder.

Beloved in Christ, be it this Christmastide our care and delight to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger.

Therefore let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child.

But first, let us pray for the needs of the whole world; for peace on earth and goodwill among all his people; for unity and brotherhood within the Church he came to build, and especially in this our diocese.

And because this of all things would rejoice his heart, let us remember, in his name, the poor and helpless, the cold, the hungry, and the oppressed; the sick and them that mourn, the lonely and the unloved, the aged and the little children; all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love.

Lastly, let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are one forevermore.

These prayers and praises let us humbly offer up to the Throne of Heaven, in the words which Christ himself hath taught us: Our Father, which art in heaven...

The bidding prayer was written by Eric Milner-White, dean of the chapel of King's College, who introduced the Lessons and Carols service there on Christmas Eve 1918. Jeremy Summerly describes the prayer as "the greatest addition to the Church of England's liturgy since the Book of Common Prayer."

In some versions, the prayer for "all those who know not the Lord Jesus, or who love him not, or who by sin have grieved his heart of love" is dropped, perhaps because of political correctness and religious timidity, but they seem to have been restored in recent years. Who needs prayer more than those who reject the Way, the Truth, and the Life?

The phrase "upon another shore, and in a greater light" always gives me goosebumps as I think about friends and family who are no longer with us, but who are now free from pain and delighting in the presence of the Savior they loved so dearly in this life. As he wrote those words, Milner-White, who had served as an army chaplain in the Great War before his return to King's College, must have had in mind the 199 men of King's and the hundreds of thousands of his countrymen who never returned home from the trenches of Europe.

Which brings us to the final verses of the Epiphany hymn, "As with Gladness, Men of Old", which describes "another shore" as "the heavenly country bright":

Holy Jesus, every day
Keep us in the narrow way;
And, when earthly things are past,
Bring our ransomed souls at last
Where they need no star to guide,
Where no clouds Thy glory hide.

In the heavenly country bright,
Need they no created light;
Thou its Light, its Joy, its Crown,
Thou its Sun which goes not down;
There forever may we sing
Alleluias to our King!

The final verses of the processional hymn also speak to that blessed hope:

And our eyes at last shall see Him,
Through His own redeeming love,
For that Child so dear and gentle
Is our Lord in Heaven above;
And He leads His children on
To the place where He is gone.

Not in that poor lowly stable,
With the oxen standing by,
We shall see Him; but in Heaven,
Set at God's right Hand on high ;
When like stars His children crowned,
All in white shall wait around.

MORE:

"Once in Royal David's City," the processional hymn from King's College Lessons and Carols, is the Hymn of the Week at Word and Song by Debra and Anthony Esolen.

This year's broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Cambridge marked its 105th anniversary. You can listen to the service for the next four weeks on the BBC Sounds website. A pre-recorded video of the service, called Carols from King's, is available internationally for download at a price of £8.33 (about $10 US).

You can download the booklet for the service and a history of the service here. (Direct link to service booklet PDF. Direct link to history booklet PDF.)

The history of the Lessons and Carols service was presented in this 15-minute BBC program, Episode 8 of the series "A Cause for Caroling." (Unfortunately, it was not repeated this year, so you can't listen online at the moment, but it's available through Audible and as an audio CD.) Edward White Benson, first Bishop of Truro, originated the service of Nine Lessons and Carols in 1880. It was published in 1884 and began to be used more widely. From the 2018 service booklet:

The 1918 service was, in fact, adapted from an order drawn up by E. W. Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, for use in the large wooden shed which then served as his cathedral in Truro at 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve, 1880.

A. C. Benson recalled: 'My father arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve - nine carols and nine tiny lessons, which were read by various officers of the Church, beginning with a chorister, and ending, through the different grades, with the Bishop'. The idea had come from G. H. S. Walpole, later Bishop of Edinburgh.Very soon other churches adapted the service for their own use. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, Milner-White decided that A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols would be a more uplifting occasion at King's than Evensong on Christmas Eve. He used Benson's plan, but wrote the now-classic Bidding Prayer to set the tone at the beginning. Since then the spoken parts, which provide the backbone of the service, have only occasionally changed.

MORE: John Piper explains what Christmas is all about in 115 words:

Christmas means that a king has been born, conceived in the womb of a virgin. And this king will reign over an everlasting kingdom that will be made up of millions and millions of saved sinners. The reason that this everlasting, virgin-born king can reign over a kingdom of sinners is because he was born precisely to die. And he did die. He died in our place and bore our sin and provided our righteousness and took away the wrath of God and defeated the evil one so that anyone, anywhere, of any kind can turn from the treason of sin to the true king, and put their faith in him, and have everlasting joy.

STILL MORE:

At her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, Eleanor Parker has written a great many articles about the Anglo-Saxon commemoration of the Christian year. This Twitter thread and this blog entry will lead you to a series of articles on the "O Antiphons," the Latin poems of praise to Christ that are read at vespers over the week prior to Christmas day, each one naming a title of Christ reflecting a different aspect of His glory -- Wisdom, Lord, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Dayspring (Morning Star), King of Nations, and Emmanuel (God with us).

Her essay from 1st Sunday in Advent 2020 reflects on Advent, Christmas, and time, on 2020's lack of holidays, the impossibility of "pressing pause" on life, the origins of Christmas and claims of cultural appropriation, the emotional impact of the season. A worthwhile ramble on a gray day. It's all worth reading, but this passage stood out to me, and it cites that wonderful phrase from the bidding prayer that undoes me every year:

The British festival year used to involve numerous seasons and holidays when people could gather together, in extended families and in local communities; now for many people in that 90% it's almost all concentrated on Christmas, and that's a lot of pressure. Of course advertisers exploit that pressure for their own ends, so many of us have a vision in our heads of the 'perfect family Christmas' which may bear little or no relation to how we have actually experienced the season. (I'm sure the journalists are attacking the imaginary advertisers' Christmas more than anything they've seen in real life.)

It's typical of the modern Christmas, most of all in its focus on family and childhood, that it leads people to places of strong emotion, both good and bad. Whether your memories of childhood Christmas are happy or unhappy ones, when Christmas comes round there's no escaping them. Whatever your family is or isn't, or whatever you want it to be, this is the time when you are insistently pushed to think about it and to compare yourself to others. Any sense of loss or deficiency in the family is made worse by the contrast with images of other apparently perfect families, or by remembering past happiness, or imagining what could or should be. Grief is harder. Absences are more keenly felt. It's a season when one phrase or one note of a song can open floodgates of emotion, calling forth profound fears, griefs, and longings which in ordinary time we might manage to contain. Christmas used to be a season of ghost stories, and it's certainly a time when it's hard not to be haunted by memories - even happy memories, of 'those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light'.

You can call that sentimental, or irrational, but it's very powerful all the same. And it's no coincidence - of course it isn't - that this is all intensified because it takes place at midwinter, when the days are very short and the nights very long; when the weather is cold and hostile; when light is lowest, and the shadows longest. There's a reason we call this season 'the dead of winter', with all the sterility and hopelessness that implies. That makes the Christmas brightness all the brighter, or the darkness all the darker - the lights and the warmth and the company all the more welcome, or their absence all the more painful.

It's a bleak and lonely and isolating time of year, at the best of times; and these aren't the best of times. How much more endless the empty evenings seem now in November than they did in April, now they begin at four o'clock in the afternoon! The 'it's just one day' people can go on saying that as much as they like, but this particular day, after nine months of isolation or separation from family, is going to be hard for a lot of people.

Just remember: If you didn't fulfill every Christmas tradition you wanted to honor, give every gift you wanted to give, sing every carol on or before December 25, there are still eleven days of Christmas remaining!

RELATED: Tom Holland writing in Unherd in December 2020 on The Myth of Pagan Christmas. Holland takes us back to the Christmas feast at the court of King Athelstan in Amesbury in 932, and looks back from there to the idea of measuring time from the birth of Christ:

Bede, more clearly than any Christian scholar before him, had recognised that there was only the one fixed point amid the great sweep of the aeons, only the single pivot. Drawing on calendrical tables compiled some two centuries earlier, he had fixed on the Incarnation, the entry of the divine into the womb of the Virgin Mary, as the moment on which all of history turned. Years, by Bede's reckoning, were properly measured according to whether they were before Christ or anno Domini: in the year of the Lord. The effect was to render the calendar itself as Christian. The great drama of Christ's incarnation and birth stood at the very centre of both the turning of the year and the passage of the millennia. The fact that pagans too had staged midwinter festivities presented no threat to this conceptualisation, but quite the opposite. Dimly, inadequately, gropingly, they had anticipated the supreme miracle: the coming into darkness of the true Light, by which every man who comes into the world is lit.

He concludes with this:

This year of all years [2020] -- with a clarity denied us in happier times -- it is possible to recognise in Christmas its fundamentally Christian character. The light shining in the darkness proclaimed by the festival is a very theological light, one that promises redemption from the miseries of a fallen world. In a time of pandemic, when the festive season is haunted by the shadows of sickness and bereavement, of loneliness and disappointment, of poverty and dread, the power of this theology, one that has fuelled the celebration of Christmas for century after century, becomes easier, perhaps, to recognise than in a time of prosperity. The similarities shared by the feast day of Christ's birth with other celebrations that, over the course of history, have been held in the dead of winter should not delude us into denying a truth so evident as to verge on the tautologous: Christmas is a thoroughly Christian festival.