A couple weeks ago, I was volunteering at a New York City food pantry, putting together bags of food for the holidays. I was partnered with an older woman who was clearly a regular.
As we walked in circles around a room filled with tables of different food items, she told me about the time she got mugged on Christmas Day.
She was on her way to the early morning Mass. There was no one on the street. Suddenly a van pulled over and two men got out. They said they wanted directions, but right away she saw how they looked at her purse.
As soon as one man grabs it she starts screaming for help. The guy whips her around because she won’t let it go. Then he’s dragging her, and still she’s screaming and holding on.
Finally, the two of them get so freaked out they ran back to their van and drove away. She just lay there, watching them go. “Not a single person came to help me,” she tells me.
Though her stockings were ripped, her knees bloody from where they dragged her, she still went to Mass. When I asked how she could possibly do that after what she had been through, she looked at me kind of puzzled. “What else am I going to do?” she asked.
We do not generally think about Christmas carols as about a battle. And yet what does it mean for the Christ child to be our savior, if not a blessed release from some kind of struggle?
And she remembers the opening song: It was “O Come All Ye Faithful.” “I sang it at the top of my lungs,” she told me. “I sang it so loud, I’m sure people wondered, ‘What’s the deal with her?’” I asked her why she did that. “I just had to. I was just so grateful to be there,” the woman said.
When she was done, the two of us just stood there, quiet. I started to run the lyrics in my mind. The ending of the first line immediately leapt out: “O Come All Ye Faithful, joyful and triumphant.”
“Maybe that was you,” I told her. “Triumphant?”
She gave me this little grin. “Yeah. That’s right. I was.”
We do not generally think about Christmas carols as about a battle. And yet what does it mean for the Christ child to be our savior, if not a blessed release from some kind of struggle?
This week on “Hark!: The stories behind our favorite Christmas carols,” experts share with host Maggi Van Dorn how that sense of overcoming something seemingly impossible is very much at the heart of “O Come All Ye Faithful” (also known as “Adeste Fideles”). Dr. Kim Harris, an assistant professor of African American thought and practice at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, points out how the song is an invitation into a community—one that includes not only all of us but those who have gone before us and the angels we rely on to save us.
“For people who were enslaved,” she tells Maggi, “whose children had been sold away from them, whose family member may have run away and you don’t know where they are or how they are, the only thing you could hope is that the angels who are watching over all of us would somehow know where they were and how they were.”
Scottish Jesuit Andrew Cameron-Mowat, S.J., who works as a parish priest in North London, and harpist Parker Ramsay, who was at one time an organ fellow at King’s College Cambridge, also dissect the song’s “miraculous chord,” which makes people feel as they’re singing the song much like my friend did—like they have made it home.
There’s all this and much more, this week on “Hark!”
