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Hi <<First Name>> !
Merry Christmas, and all the blessings of the season to you from the Centre for Christian Studies! If you're having a peaceful Boxing Day, here are some stories and reflections from the CCS staff to relax with. (If you're in "Go, Go, Go!" mode, you can scroll down to the more "newsy" stuff near the bottom, and come back to the reflections whenever you want.) Enjoy! -- Scott
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From the Staff of CCS . . .
Like many of you, we missed seeing some of our favourite people face-to-face this Christmas. Luckily, we have other ways of connecting and maintaining community. This year, in lieu of our regular Cookies and Carols gathering, we asked the staff to recommend songs for a CCS Christmas playlist.
(Does anyone know the difference between a "carol", a "hymn", and a "song"? Is that a contentious question? Should I not ask?)
We've heard from a number of people who've been enjoying listening to our eclectic mix of favourites, so for this December edition of Common Threads we thought it might be nice to hear from the staff about why they picked what they did, and what those songs mean to them...
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Michelle's picks: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Silent Night, and Christmas Time Is Here
I love Takénobu’s arrangement of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen – the way the cellos anticipate the beat, pushing the song forward, the lightness of the pizzicato, the warmth of his voice. I revel in the reassurance of the refrain “Tidings of comfort and joy”, and the familiarity of an old favourite hymn. This track comes from a short album of five Christmas songs – and I had trouble picking which one to share!
Laila Biali’s eponymous album has been in heavy rotation on my playlists this year, so I was delighted when she released a recording of Silent Night. Again, I love the orchestration in her recordings, and the warmth and clarity of her voice. Her version of Silent Night is, to me, a more straightforward torch song than her other recordings. But Christmas never seems complete to me without this song; I have wonderful memories of candlelit sanctuaries on Christmas Eve, singing Silent Night together as the final carol of the evening service.
Christmas Time Is Here is from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. My first recording of the Vince Guaraldi Trio was a cassette tape of the Charlie Brown soundtrack (long since lost). This choice is more provoked by my love of jazz trios than any attachment to the Peanuts gang. I miss being able to see live music, and some of the more memorable concerts I’ve been to in recent years were jazz trio performances, including trios featuring Tigran Hamasayan, Fred Hersch and Oliver Jones.
In this uncertain year, I’ve found music to be a source of sustenance and strength. I find it to be a source of hope – that there is always something new and unexpected waiting to burst in, and change the way we hear the world around us, if we are open to the changes.
I hope music sustains you in the coming month. I hope it offers you warm memories. I hope music surprises you, leads you forward and threads connections into your life in the new year.
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Marcie's pick: Home by Another Way
In 1988, I bought a first edition James Taylor cassette tape Never Die Young. Among the catchy tunes and sentimental lyrics was a song that I didn’t expect to find: Home by Another Way. It was one of the first times I had heard a ‘secular radio star’ sing a song about a ‘church story.’ (Little did I know, that was pretty common). I first loved that this song invited me to imagine myself into the starched bible stories I knew, and to imagine Biblical characters into my modern day-to-day world. (“Maybe me and you can be wise guys, too”, “But Herod's always out there; he's got our cards on file”).
The story-telling is simple enough, at least if you are familiar with the Matthean text or a bathrobe & tea-towel pageant. The message, however, has deeper implications. It speaks of our personal culpability in bringing the gospel to fruition or standing in its way. Each of us play a part in the story, even those who seem peripheral, extra, or written out of some versions. It reminds us to think critically (“Keep a weather eye to the chart on high”), and that tyrants don’t often have our best interests in mind, even if their welcome is lavish. It highlights that there is always ‘another way’ when we feel trapped or cattle-herded by powerful forces – be they capitalism, dualistic thinking, fascism, heteronormativity, depression, or environmental determinism. This other way can be life-saving and life-giving, yet still have immeasurable costs. I am reminded of Walter Wink’s writings on Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way, and how there are always deeper meanings and critical questions to ask in Christian action. This song today calls me to trust; that in the midst of uncertainty and the dangers of this pandemic, “tomorrow is another day. We can make it another way. Safe home as they used to say.”
May we all experience a safe home this Christmas, continue to dream and take the path of 'another way'.
[Marcie's other picks: Cry of a Tiny Babe and In the Bleak Midwinter.]
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David's picks: Long Way Around the Sea, and Christmas, Baby Please Come Home
My two choices are very different in tone and style.
Long Way Around the Sea by Low is a very slow, dragging, monotonous and repetitive song, which takes me into that part of the Christmas story that connects to the political danger, cross-border travel, and cross-cultural relationship networks that are sometimes overlooked in retellings of the first Christmas. The long…way…around…the…sea also reminds me that attaching one’s life to the life of Jesus will inevitably involve a life lived on the not-so-easy route.
Darlene Love’s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) hits me closer to where I’m at this year. On the one hand it is clearly a sad song of longing: “They’re singing Deck the Halls, but it’s not like Christmas at all, 'cause I remember when you were here and all the fun we had last year”! How many of us are shouting inside our heads just like Darlene Love: Please, Please, Please, Please, Please!
So many of us are processing how a time we normally count on for festivities and traditions with loved ones is just not going to happen this year. As I’ve listened to Christmas music I’m struck by how many ‘classics’ are desperately sad nostalgic pleas for an imagined Christmas of years past.
But Darlene Love’s soulful rock is also so cathartic. The power of the wall-of-sound music and her incredible voice exorcizes so much angst. More saxophone please, please, please!
[David's other pick: If You Were Born Today.]
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Cheryl's picks: The Huron Carole, and Please Come Home for Christmas
I picked The Huron Carole and Please Come Home for Christmas because they remind me of time spent with my sister, Karen, who is my only sibling. Over the years, we have found some events which we always attend together, just the two of us. The first is The Huron Carole, a seasonal event with songs and stories of Christmas in support of the local food bank. And, as we are both fans of the jazz singer Holly Cole, we go to see her every time she comes to town. Comfort and joy = time with my sis!
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Scott's picks: Why Do the Nations So Furiously Rage and The Rebel Jesus
Handel’s Messiah is often performed around Christmas (and Easter). This version of Why Do the Nations So Furiously Rage is from Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful Celebration, an early 90s riff on the 1741 oratorio (itself a riff on Biblical texts), incorporating elements from the history of African-American music – spirituals and gospel to jazz, funk, rap and hip-hop, and R&B. Handel’s showy trills and arpeggios get translated into various kinds of swoops, scats, twirls, raps, syncopations, scratches, and samples. Ever since hearing this album’s Hallelujah Chorus on CBC radio on a Christmas Day drive across the prairies, Soulful Celebration has been one of my holiday touchstones. And Al Jarreau’s Why Do the Nations, with its big band evocation of jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Count Basie, is one of my favourites. Classical purists might find this all too much – “If it’s baroque, don’t fix it!” – but to me it feels like re-contextualization and adaptation are kind of the point of the Incarnation. And boy, does it swing!
I’m not sure what I like more about Jackson Browne’s The Rebel Jesus – his earnest critique of religious hypocrisy and holiday consumerism, or his ability to nonetheless wish us joy, as a heathen on the side of the rebel Jesus. Regardless, in this year when many desperately need anything that frees us, I bid you pleasure and I bid you cheer.
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Lori's picks: Santa Baby and All For Jesus
Santa Baby, written by Joan Javits and Philip Springer for Eartha Kitt, was the best-selling Christmas song of 1953. Although Eartha Kitt started out in humble circumstances, at the time of recording she was a successful black singer and actress who didn’t need Santa’s benevolence.
I have always loved this song; Eartha Kitt’s unique singing style, the fun music, and the clearly tongue-in-cheek lyrics. It’s an interesting take on the 1934 song “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” - only this time children aren’t being told how to behave for Santa; this is a clearly a woman who knows her own mind, telling Santa what is what.
The song has been criticized for glorifying avarice, and its sexiness got it banned in the South when it first came out. The woman is looking to Santa as a sugar daddy. Clearly, it has none of the Christian values we might like in a Christmas song. In 2018 Miley Cyrus’s revised version of Santa Baby featured an empowered woman who doesn’t need Santa to buy her a fur or yacht or a platinum mine; she makes her own money. What she really wants is equal pay and an end to workplace harassment. But notice, Cyrus kept the tune for her revision. It’s just fun.
Santa Baby is a chance to examine what it is we really want to ask for at Christmas, and who we want to ask. (After all, Santa doesn’t really exist except as a personification of certain values.)
Ernie Smith’s 1974 song, All for Jesus, though not technically a Christmas song, is traditionally sung at Christmas in Jamaica. It’s the story of the holy baby, born with nothing but the love of parents and community. In contrast to Santa Baby, this song is about a different kind of gift at Christmas—God’s gift of love which is available for even the most lowly:
Nuh matter if you thief, or if you dread*
Of if yuh have a crown 'pon yuh head
Nuh matter if you have no heart at all
Jesus bring love for one and all
*refers to Rastas
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Janet's pick: The Trumpet Child
My choice for the CCS playlist is The Trumpet Child by Over the Rhine. (The band is named after their immigrant neighbourhood in Cincinnati, Ohio. Check out their website for the interesting story.)
By the time I arrived as the fifth kid in my family, my middle sister was enraptured with Herb Alpert and Louis Armstrong. I was raised on trumpet exquisiteness. The bright, intense, and brilliant sounds of the horns filled the air and can still fill my soul. When I was old enough to choose an instrument to play in the Junior High band, the trumpet was the only possible choice. Besides, the trumpets always get the best parts.
I was also in Junior High when the significance of trumpets in the Bible started to catch my attention. A trumpet blare is a call to something bigger and larger than any individual person. It is immediate and urgent. Trumpets in biblical texts call us to celebrate together, they announce the presence of the Spirit, they bring down walls. God is a divine Musician with their own trumpet (1 Thessalonians 4:16).
Yet the responses to trumpet calls in scripture are even more impressive than the blare itself. People tremble and are filled with awe. They hear the voice of God. When a trumpet blast is heard, the people know to listen. In various scriptures we are told the people rest, stand still in silence, shout a great shout, and fight no more. At the sound of the last trumpet in 1 Corinthians 15:52, the unimaginable is imagined: we will be changed.
May the trumpet child, indeed, continue to surprise the human race. And may we respond with change.
P.S. My other song choices include Christmas Must Be Tonight by The Band. I love the line “Mary carried the light”. It reminds me to also carry the light for today, whatever that may be. And Children, Go Where I Send Thee by The Fairfield Four is a favourite. In addition to the beautiful way this group sings together, I appreciate the reminder ‘Who am I if I do not go where I am sent?’
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On the Web...
(click a title to read the whole article)
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Congratulations to Betty Marlin (grad 1961, Companion of the Centre 2006) who was honoured with the Order of St. Stephen's College for 2020.
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The CCS offices will be closed until January 3. (We check the mail, though.) Have a safe and peaceful New Year.
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CCS Community
- Prayers for the family and friends of Mary Elliot (grad 2011) who died earlier this month.
- Prayers for the family and friends of Marjorie Smith (grad 1966) who died in November.
- Prayers for the family and friends of Vera Bell (grad 1964) who died last month.
- Prayers for the family and friends of Nancy Holman (grad 1956) who died at the end of October.
- Prayers for the family and friends of Ruth Jefferson (grad 1958) who died earlier this year.
- Prayers for the family and friends of Ron Williams (former Central Council member and friend of the Centre) who died earlier this year.
- Prayers for Heather Sandilands on the recent death of her mother, Lois.
- Prayer for Brenda Miller on the death last month of her husband, Scott.
- Congratulations to Betty Marlin who was honoured with the Order of St. Stephen's College. (Mentioned above in "On the Web".)
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CCS Friday - January 8
CCS Fridays continue in the new year. These online zoom presentations and discussions run from 12:00 to 1:00 Central Time. They are free, but you must register.
The topic for the January 8th CCS Friday is a secret at this point (even to us), but I'm sure it will be engaging!
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There's still time to help...and it's needed urgently!
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Through no fault of our own, CCS is facing a shortfall of $51,000! So I am concerned.
But I am also encouraged. Your gift today will help erase that shortfall.
If you’ve already sent your gift, thank you so much!
You have long supported the Centre for Christian Studies: with your donations, your prayers, and your friendship.
Will you send a gift before December 31 to erase the shortfall and help end the year strong?
You and I don’t want this gap in funding to prevent a student from getting a practical, outward-looking theological education that imagines church differently.
Your gift today will help erase that shortfall. Send your donation before December 31, so we can end the year strong.
Blessings,
Michelle Owens (Principal)
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Upcoming Learning Circles...
Great continuing education opportunities! All these circles will be online, so you can take them wherever you are.
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Common Threads
