As a child growing up in a mainline Christian tradition in what was once called the Western Reserve of Massachusetts, I was surrounded by traditional Christmas music - from church, from school choirs and orchestra and piano lessons and thrown-together ensembles for holiday events. Sometimes listening, a lot of times singing or playing an instrument myself. It's apparently weird to know all the verses of Oh Come All Ye Faithful by heart without having heard it since last year, or to be able to go into an eigth-note filled descant without looking at the music (assuming the high notes don't stick in my throat).
But there's one carol that I never heard in church or choir, that I learned from a play-at-home organ book. I never understood why, because it seemed to fit with the rest and was about as English- European-y as they come: I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, written by one of New England's favorite sons, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
When I finally read the full poem, I understood a little more.
The song starts out painting a lovely little Currier and Ives theme:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
and it emphazizes that kind of warm cuddly thing we're used to hearing in Christmas songs:
Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
But then it goes dark. Like, depth of despair dark:
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
My childhood button-organ book didn't include those lines.
Longfellow wrote this in 1863. The deepest depth of the U.S. Civil War. His son had been wounded in battle that year, and Longfellow had travelled to Washington D.C. That was closer to the battlefields than any older non-military New England patrician was likely to get. We don't know exactly what he saw there, but between his injured son and the other horribly injured soldiers, and the stories we can guess many of them told, Longfellow was clearly affected.
The existential bleakness of those two short verses chills, even today.
The last two stanzas assert a return to faith and hope,
And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."
A lot of modern commentators treat this as a happy ending -- " Hope returns, God will fix everything, happy happy joy joy." Which fits it a little more easily with our usual Christmas warm and fuzzies.
But it strikes me now that the final stanza seems incomplete, simplistic, throwaway in this expanded context. The grief and dark is painted in hyper realism. The cannons are black and solid and are bellowing in a pretty specific real-world place. This Right prevailing stuff is hardly that level of concrete, There's no plan, no location, nothing to back up the assertion. And a hell of a lot of evidence to the contrary. So we’re supposed to have our optimism restored by a vague unsupported assertion - from a bunch of bells?
Maybe Longfellow was trying to reassure himself, if weakly. Maybe that stanza says what he thinks he was supposed to say in the culture of his time - the socially palatable answer to his personal despair, even if he didn't feel that in his gut. Maybe he saw the neat happy ending as a good tactic for selling poems in the depth of a brutal war. Despair or no, you gotta make a buck. Or maybe he did actually have the return to faith that contemporary Christian commenters like to claim.
It seems like, in most years, the holiday season forces us into this combination of despair over bad and hope for good - to the point where it all seems like a trope, like how could anyone possibly say anything that doesn't sound stupid, vacuous or trite. And this year has had no global and local shortage of outrages and horrors and injustices and Wrongs. Wrongs that most of us of any or no religious tradition feel we have some obligation to rail against, to work against, to try, in some manner, to fight.
But the cannons are black and powerful, and they only move and shape-shift from one year to the next. They don't ever seem to go away. In depair we hang our head, there is no peace on earth we say. And some promise from a bunch of bells - or an invisible Space Daddy, as some might say - seems a pretty puny consolation.
Maybe Longfellow didn't have a more concrete answer as he looked up from his personal despondency. Or maybe he had a faith that was stronger than mine. Or a cynicism.
Maybe what he left unsaid was something akin to what leaders in my faith tradition often say at the end of a service.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes with which Christ looks out his compassion to the world. Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.
So be swift to love, and make haste to be kind.
I don't think it matters what we believe or don't believe, or what framework we each use to counteract the dark cannons of our day and time. One way or another, that work falls to us. And because we are weak and messy and often generally suck at a lot of things, we don't make as much progress as we think we should. And at the end of a year, we perceive those failures - local and global - in a particularly bitter light.
Longfellow would understand. But he might also shake our shoulders and turn our heads to see the progress across the globe since his time, a mere 160 years ago. As I write a lot of times, an outsider can often see what we who live within a system overlook.
So perhaps we gather our courage from the bells, or wherever makes sense for you. And make haste to be kind.
Much love and thanks to you for reading and learning with me this year.
Go get 'em,