BBC4's Advent Offerings -- Thanks Be Unto God

Thank God for BBC4’s advent offerings. If you have never visited their website, I suggest you check it out. From an audio-rich advent calendar, to daily services recorded in various cathedrals throughout Britain, you can easily fill your ears with carols, choirs, readings from the lectionary, and advent homilies. Over time, the BBC has become a staple of my advent experience, if simply for the music. I can’t get enough performance during the season, and certainly can’t afford in cost or time what is available. The BBC serves it up for free.

Music, and especially choral music, really makes the advent season for me. My Mom, both a teacher of voice and an experienced and accomplished alto herself, was always dragging me to performances in my youth, and, well, it must have rubbed off. Now I’d drag myself to one every day if possible. There is nothing quite like experiencing music as a living thing. In our day of artificial lungs and mechanical hearts, we know how to keep a performance going on decades afterward, and we have mistakenly equated these corpses with living bodies. At the same time, performance groups in every area of the liberal arts have out-priced tickets to all but the wealthy, and, as each year more die from lack of funds and public interest, they reap the results. So-called culture isn’t dying because people aren’t interested any longer, rather, people are dying because ‘culture’ has turned its back on them. Music – good music -- needs its reformation.

A large part of it, too, is education. Even as I sit down in a theatre or music hall and begin to enjoy a performance, I am always painfully aware that I don’t know how to listen. I have no real framework for making meaning from what is happening. The aesthetic enjoyment is there, but experienced as a child at play, not as an adult who enters into the real depth of the thing. The only performances for which our culture educates us are political and athletic ones. My soul feels poorer for it. Just last year I drug L. and Kara to a local Episcopal church for an advent’s evening of English carols. They came more for me than for them. I wanted Kara to hear live music, to see the performers, to hear the sharp intake of their breaths, the rustle of flipping pages and the shifting and coughing of the audience. But, I had not way of really explaining to her how to take it all in. All I could do was drag she and L. there and hope for the best. There is something wrong there. If I was to go with a friend to a wrestling match, by the time we arrived at the stadium he would have filled my ears with the back-story and suitable anecdotes attached to each of the competing wrestlers. He certainly wouldn’t just induct me to our seats, sit down mutely beside me and say nothing with every body-blow of the match.

Advent suggests an answer to this malady. During Advent, the songs, readings, sermons and even the movements of time participate together lending their voices to each other. The coming of God to his people and as his people informs everything, creating what the academy calls a meta-narrative. Inducted, then, by every voice, we are led through this great story until we ourselves form a part.

So, I weep for you music and theatre. I weep for you members of the Handel & Haydn Society who, each year, sing the complete oratorio of Handel’s Messiah. I compose a lament for you well-wishers singing Christmas songs in shopping malls. You are like sheep without a shepherd. You listen but hear not. You sing, and dance, and speak your lines without knowledge. You wander in exile without a narrative-home, clutching your arias, symphonies, concertos, and chamber pieces to your breast. You have forgotten your informing logos, become unseated from the dynamic and creating Word, and need, as much as any of us, advent to give you life again.