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The Original Christmas Music
by Father Dominic Legge, OP 

I performed a Christmas music experiment last year. Included in my Western Civilization course was a class on medieval music – which, of course, means Gregorian chant. Inspired by an article by a Dominican confrere on the subject, I played for my students several different unidentified pieces of music – a number of Gregorian chants and one Christmas carol – and asked them to write down a description of each. 

The concentration of the students listening to the chant took me by surprise. (Filling a large lecture hall with energy on a Friday afternoon is not easy; one notices when their interest is piqued.) After a few moments, a focused calm – could one even say peace? – descended on the hall as they absorbed the flowing chant. 

The first was the ancient entrance chant for the Christmas Midnight Mass, Dominus dixit. The students’ descriptions were striking. Some said it evoked in them a longing tinged with melancholy. (One even thought that it was originally meant for a funeral.) “Peaceful” was the most-used adjective. No one guessed that it was Christmas music – even less, that for over a millennium it has marked the beginning of the Church’s solemn celebration of Christmas. After listening to a few more chants – some, like the Easter responsory Haec dies, radiating a serene joy – we arrived at Bing Crosby singing “Joy to the World.” In contrast to the chant, the students thought its celebratory vigor was almost abrasive. 

Christmas carols are delightful, to be sure, and listening to a Bing Crosby Christmas CD is one of my favorite ways to pass a Christmas evening. But the Church’s chant tradition is deep and rich; there is a reason these artistic and theological masterpieces are the “official” music of the Mass (even if rarely heard in American parishes). Attentive listeners to the Christmas entrance chant – like my students – often pose an excellent question: why would such a joyful occasion have such subdued, even melancholy, music at the beginning?  What could this mean?

To be sure, Christmas is great cause for rejoicing; it is one of the greatest feasts of the Church year. But it is a rejoicing that goes much deeper than singing “Happy Birthday” to Jesus can express. We do celebrate His birth, but this not merely a birthday; it is the great Feast of the Incarnation. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” God, who dwells in unapproachable light, who has a splendor without any shadow of imperfection or change, willed to descend to earth and to become man, so that “you may escape the corruption that is in the world . . . and become partakers of the divine nature.” (2 Peter 1:4.) 

But we also know that this greatest of Christmas gifts, our redemption, was won for us at a price; the eternal Son emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave, in order to suffer and die for us. His birth leads to the cross because “He came unto his own, and His own received Him not.”  The world rejected Him from the beginning – Herod, seeking to destroy Him, murdered the innocent children of Bethlehem – and in the end, His own disciple betrayed Him so that his own people could kill Him. Even today, His victory over sin and death is absolute but not yet complete – as we witness every day in a world marked by poverty, violence, and war. It is not even complete in us who believe but still reject Him daily by our sins, whether large or small.  Yet it is this birth – the birth of a weak and vulnerable child who is the almighty and eternal God – that saves the world from sitting forever in the shadow of death.

What is more, by his birth as a human child, the eternal Son reveals the deepest mysteries of God to those who hearken to His voice: God is not solitary or alone, but is a Trinity of persons sharing the fullness and perfection of divine life. The text of this Christmas entrance chant, taken from Psalm 2, draws us into precisely this rich double meaning of the Son’s birth: “The Lord said to me: You are my Son; Today I have begotten you.” The Son is begotten by the Father in the eternal Today of God, and He is born as a man in the time-bound today of our Christmas feast.

And so the Church begins her celebration of Christ’s birth not with a loud fanfare, but with an invitation to contemplate the deepest mysteries at the heart of Christianity: the eternal generation of the Son in the bosom of the Father, and his coming among us as a man – as a helpless baby! – to bring us back to the Father. The more our minds and hearts are lifted up to rest in these mysteries, the more we will enter into the true Spirit of Christmas.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)