A sin of omission

Time to ’fess up.

  In my 2019 book Keeping Christmas, I listed 129 popular songs of the season. About half were sacred, half were secular, and the rest were a bit of a mixture.

  The list was meant to be more representative than comprehensive. I’m sure I missed several songs, especially secular ones – not to mention some that have appeared in the six years since the book came out. (Can it really be that long ago?)

  Now I realize that my list ignored an important sacred hymn – an especially big error since this one is in the United Methodist Hymnal (#244) and many other hymnals as well. It’s been in circulation in English for 100 years, and French for many years before that.

It’s usually listed as “'Twas in the Moon of Wintertime.” The popular title is “The Huron Carol.” It has been recorded by many top artists, though I confess that I don’t recall hearing of it before Kate Bowler mentioned it in an Advent meditation this week.

It was written about 1643 by Saint Jean de Brébeuf, a French Jesuit priest to the Huron tribe in what is now Ontario. Brébeuf wrote the lyrics in the Huron language and set it to a French folk song. The original title was "Jesous Ahatonhia" ("Jesus, he is born").

  The Huron tribe is also known as Wendat or Wyandot, and has communities in Canada and the United States, including Kansas.

  Brébeuf and another missionary, Gabriel Lallemant, were tortured to death in1649 by Iroquois who destroyed the Jesuit mission and drove the Hurons out of their homeland.

  Here is the song as it appears in most hymnals, from the English translation by Jesse Edgar Middleton in 1926.

  1. 'Twas in the moon of wintertime when all the birds had fled,

That mighty Gitchi Manitou sent angel choirs instead;

Before their light the stars grew dim, and wandering hunter heard the hymn:

Refrain:

"Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born, in excelsis gloria."

  2. Within a lodge of broken bark the tender Babe was found,

A ragged robe of rabbit skin enwrapp'd his beauty round;

But as the hunter braves drew nigh, the angel song rang loud and high.

Refrain

  3. The earliest moon of wintertime is not so round and fair

As was the ring of glory on the helpless infant there.

The chiefs from far before him knelt with gifts of fox and beaver pelt.

Refrain

  4. O children of the forest free, O sons of Manitou,

The Holy Child of earth and heaven Is born today for you.

Come kneel before the radiant boy who brings you beauty, peace and joy.

Refrain

  May you have a blessed Advent and a merry (which is to say, a blessed) Christmas!

A new book is coming!

News flash: I’ve got a new book coming out soon!

  I’ll offer details later, when I have a better idea of when it will happen.

  I haven’t posted anything on this blog lately because I’ve been occupied getting the final manuscript to the publisher.

  Sad to say, it will not be out by Nov. 30, which is the end of the publisher’s half-price sale.

  (A reminder: two of my previous books are half-price! They are Keeping Christmas and Change of Heart. Check them out at wipfandstock.com.)

  Don’t think the new one will be out by Christmas either, so tell Santa he can cross it off his delivery lists this year.

  I turned in the manuscript and associated paperwork last Friday. I’m relieved to get over that initial hurdle, but more work is ahead, including paginating, copy editing, proofreading and early marketing. Happily, I don’t have to do all those steps, mostly just wait for the results.

  * * * * *

  Here’s more on the “hidden” Pantocrator at St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral in the city of Cork, Ireland.

  Linda and I toured the cathedral late in the summer as part of a Wesley Study Tour of the British Isles.

  The cathedral occupies a relatively small footprint but soars high into the sky above Cork. For all its height, it lacks the flying buttresses you often see to support the high walls in other cathedrals.

  The lack of buttresses may explain why high above the altar you can barely see a mosaic depiction of Christ Pantocrator, or Christ the King. The view is obscured by several colorful support beams.

  When I asked about them, a spokesman for the cathedral said the beams were probably used to carry the weight of the walls from the inside because there were no buttresses outside.

  Recently I got a message from Shane Broderick, a cathedral guide who also is a historian and folklorist. He said he thought the Pantocrator was not part of the original design by noted architect William Burges, but was added later.

  He provided a drawing by Burges of the upper reaches of the walls above the altar. There’s no Pantocrator visible.

  So maybe another piece of the puzzle falls into place, so to speak.

  Shane sent me several photos of the Pantocrator. I’m including one here. You may notice that he is not nearly so fierce as so many other renderings of him.

  I’m also including another photo he sent me – a photo of one of the angels that line the high walls near the Pantocrator. This angel is holding a model of the cathedral.

  From that iconography it would appear that not only was the cathedral a part of the heavenly plan, perhaps the “hidden” Pantocrator was as well. Ask the angels.

A high mystery

The Christ Pantocrator at St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork, Ireland, (left), is partly obscured by colorful support beams. By contrast, te Pantocrator at Monreal Duomo in Palermo, Sicily, is in plain view. Yet there is one way to see the Cork mosaic clearly.

I like mysteries, but I like solving mysteries even more.

The latest mystery to catch my interest: Why would anyone place a beautiful piece of artwork in plain sight but almost impossible to see clearly?

  The question arises from a tour of a cathedral in Cork, Ireland, during our recent Wesley Study Tour of the British Isles.

  St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral is certainly magnificent. On a relatively small footprint, it soars high into the sky – so high I could barely crane my neck back far enough to see the upper reaches.

  It is there that I spotted it.

  High above the altar is a depiction of Christ Pantocrator, or Christ the King.

  Similar representations of Christ date back to the sixth century and are especially popular in Orthodox iconography. Christ is portrayed as the stern but compassionate ruler of the universe who raises his right hand in blessing and holds a Gospel book in his left hand.

  Linda and I have seen excellent versions of the Pantocrator in the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and on a wall in Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

  Alas, there is apparently no clear view of the mosaic at St. Fin Barre’s. A series of what one commentator calls “intersecting painted ribs” obscures the mosaic, no matter where you stand to get a better line of sight.

  Architect William Burges is said to have taken great care in every detail of the cathedral, completed in 1870. So is the obscured view of the Pantocrator an oversight, or maybe the unintentional result of necessary structural elements?

  Maybe I’m the only one who cares about this, but the Pantocrator image has long held great meaning for me, though it’s not easy to explain why.

  I have seen versions of the image that are quite intimidating, but I don’t see the stern visage as threatening. No, I see it as both magnificent and terrifying, the way you might see a lion in the wild.

  The notion that this great lion (think Aslan) might regard me as friend rather than prey is wildly exhilarating, and humbling, and comforting.

  He personifies the notion of “fear of the Lord.” Not quite fear as in terror or dread. More like fear as in great awe.

  I decided that the best way to solve the mystery was to go to the source, so I contacted St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral by email.

  A spokesman kindly offered an explanation.

  “Unlike other Gothic and Neo-Gothic Cathedrals such as Notre-Dame de Paris and the Washington National Cathedral, St. Fin Barre's Cathedral does not have outside flying buttresses, which serve to support the lateral and downward thrust from heavy stone vaulted ceilings.

  “William Burges undoubtedly took great care and responsibility over every detail of the cathedral's design and construction but chose not to use buttresses, perhaps to rein back on spiraling costs and expenses.”

  Rather, he said, Burgess might have chosen to use the interior wooden beams instead of exterior buttresses to support the high walls of the cathedral.

  He noted: “It is said here that to fully view and take in the Pantocrator mosaic scene, one should lie on the high altar floor underneath and view it in all its glory from there. Next time you visit us here in Cork you are more than welcome to try this!” 

  Lying on the floor of the high altar to view the Pantocrator mosaic? That posture might suggest some deep theological meaning, might it not?

  My great thanks to the cathedral staff for bothering with my query.

  As I ponder the meaning of the posture myself, I offer it to you as your own mystery to consider

A land divided

          Some thoughts on Ireland after brief visits to two cities in Ireland during a recent “Wesley Heritage Tour” that included a cruise around the British Isles:

          We did “walking tours” of Belfast and Cork. One thing we saw in Cork was a statue of Michael Collins standing next to his bicycle. The statue was not on a pinnacle or platform. It was a life-size bronze likeness in the middle of a busy public square, identified only by a smallish plaque. From a distance, you might not even know that it was a statue.

Why the bicycle? Collins was known for cycling everywhere. Why the recognition? He was an Irish revolutionary who was one of the architects of the 1921 treaty that created the Republic of Ireland – alas, separate from Northern Ireland. A civil war followed, and Collins was assassinated in a roadside ambush.

          The tour of Belfast was more in depth, and most depressing. Our guide said he was Catholic but his father was Protestant, and when his father died some years ago he did not feel safe going to the funeral on the Protestant side of town.

          He said his family has come up with a plan for future funerals. They’ll be held at a crematorium because those are generally run by atheists, so families from both sides of the divide can attend because it’s neutral turf.

          He showed us the “peace wall” that divides Belfast. At some places it is 25 to 30 feet tall, built in three stages over the years, ever higher.

          One long street was lined with murals (on the other side of the wide street, alas, and hard to see because of the traffic). The murals, maybe 8 to 10 feet tall, took various stands on the Troubles and other issues.

          One interesting thing is the parallels the murals drew with the plight of Palestinians, with whom many Belfast Irish feel great sympathy – as they have for many years sympathized with any oppressed minority.

          Most compelling was the famous wall-size mural (shown here) celebrating Bobby Sands and other hunger strike martyrs.

          Our guide said the “peace wall” that separates Belfast is not made of brick or wire; rather it’s a mental wall that he thinks will not come down in his lifetime or the lifetimes of his children, or maybe even in the lifetimes of his grandchildren. He was not sure what might bring the people of Northern Ireland together, perhaps just the passage of time and the deaths of those who remember the Troubles too well.

          The Troubles are not really over yet, he said, only moved out of sight but not yet out of mind.

          Wanting to learn more, I read Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. It doesn’t even try to tell the whole story but focuses on the murder of Jean McConville and the role played by the Price sisters, Brendan Huges and Gerry Adams. It’s well written and I think well reported but, as compelling as it is, it’s not an easy read.

As our Belfast guide said, it’s hard to see how any good can come from this, even when the memories fade, however long that takes. Ireland is a beautiful land, and the people we met there were beautiful, too. But how much longer will their souls be wracked by such division and hatred?

Dog whistle not needed

      Sometimes the mask slips – or, as a writer for The Atlantic puts it, “It’s not a dog whistle if everyone can hear it.”

      A dog whistle, of course, is a coded communication. It sounds benign to outsiders, but to insiders its message is clear. These days, the message is always racist.

      In recent days, the mask has come off for today’s Republicans, and the revelation is not pretty. The dog whistle is now something outsiders can hear as well as insiders.

      Most recently, the Kansas chapter of Young Republicans was disbanded because some of its members made disgusting comments in a chat room.

      Old Republicans acted outraged and tried to distance themselves from it all. But too many of the Young Republicans were too tightly plugged into the Old Republican power structure for the denials to ring true.

      If you need more verification, consider the remarks made Sept. 2 by Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt at the fifth annual National Conservatism Conference in Washington.

       “What is an American?” he asked. He said it's not a matter of citizenship. No, no. It’s a matter of race. A true American, Schmitt said, is white.

      The white Europeans who settled America and conquered the West “believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants,” he said.

       “They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us. America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny. If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all.”

      Immigration is wrong, he said, because it allows non-whites to share the birthright of the descendants of America’s original white Christian settlers.

       “We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith,” said Schmitt, who is of German ancestry.

       “Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God.”

      The left, he said, is “turning the American tradition into a deracinated ideological creed,” an idea stripped of its proper racial foundation. It is stealing the country from the “real American nation” – that is, the pilgrims, the pioneers and the settlers who “repelled wave after wave of Indian war band attacks” to build this country.

      Nonwhites are threats to the real America, he claimed. They are the people tearing down Confederate statues and removing Confederate names from buildings, streets, and forts, turning “yesterday’s heroes into today’s villains.”

      They are the people behind what he called the “George Floyd riots.”

       “When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America, with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.”

      Did I say that Schmitt is Republican? Did I have to?

      Yes, it’s too bad. The party our parents knew is long gone. What has replaced it is vile – and, yes, not really American.