Fourth Tuesday of Advent
If you watched “Wilshire’s Got Talent” last weekend, you heard LeAnn and me play a duet of “Coventry Carol” on flute and concertina. We chose it in part because we could play it together, but also because it’s just a lovely melody. Somber, haunting, quiet – it’s been a favorite of mine for years, but I have to admit that I didn’t understand what it was about until recently.
“Coventry Carol” is a tune we hear every year during the holidays, but we rarely sing it because, well, it is a lullaby of death. Written in the 16th century as part of a song cycle of New Testament stories performed at pageants in Coventry, England, the carol is a lullaby sung by the mothers of the male infants under the age of two in Bethlehem that King Herod ordered to be killed in his attempt to eliminate the newborn “King of the Jews.” That story is told in the Gospel of Matthew, and while it’s a part of the Christmas narrative, the carol is not adorned with joyful hallelujahs. The melody is set in a minor key, but each verse ends with a single, sweet, rising major note. Musically, I hear that note as a touch of hope to be found in God’s plan for salvation.
Some old lithographs of the Coventry pageants show them being performed outside the Cathedral of St. Michael, which was completed in the 15th century. On a trip to England in 1994, I made a point of driving to Coventry to see the cathedral. What’s noteworthy is that much of the medieval heart of the city was destroyed in a massive bombing raid in 1940 at the start of World War II. Nothing was left of the cathedral but some exterior walls and the towering spire. Twenty years later, a new cathedral was completed adjacent to the ruins. Today, that juxtaposition presents a powerful symbol of the monstrous evil of man and the restorative grace of God. While the ruined cathedral broods a somber minor melody, the new cathedral offers a sweet note of hope.
The first time I played “Coventry Carol” as a musician was with a saxophone quartet at Wilshire’s Hanging of the Green service in 2008. I was a new widower and was sort of operating on autopilot. I was asked to play and so I played, and the carol became part of my healing. Also on the program that night was LeAnn accompanying the Sanctuary Choir on the processional, “Personent Hodie,” (“On this day, earth shall ring”), another 16th century composition. LeAnn and I talked for a moment before that service with neither of us having the slightest inkling of a future together. I look back today and see that brief conversation was much like that one sweet, hopeful note at the end of the carol.
The infants being rocked to sleep in the lullaby of “Coventry Carol” are the tragic, mostly forgotten innocents of the Christmas story. The Christ Child who was secreted away ahead of their massacre became that one sweet note of hope that has sounded through the ages — through good and bad — and that we are listening for still and this year perhaps more than ever.
“Coventry Carol” – Listen Here
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay”?
Herod the king, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.
That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay.”