Ah Holy Jesus (with reed organ)
Every year, when the clocks fall back and daylight retreats to the dark’s advances, reasonable people don puffy down jackets and collectively rue the approaching season of cold, sunless gloom. In Chicago where I live, there is perhaps no greater topic for small talk than complaining about the weather, and winter brings the liveliest complaints: polar vortexes, wind tunnels between skyscrapers, and dirty snow banks that take up valuable parking spaces. There is much to bemoan about the season.
Yet every year, I make it a point of personal pride and a display of character to not be dismayed by the winter gloom, to trick it and outwit it by throwing myself into the loving winter. To kill winter with kindness.
And so I decorate excessively for Christmas, visit the open-air Christmas markets, enter glögg competitions, host a raucous Christmas party, and visit the city’s outdoor spaces--even in the snow and bitter cold. Chalk it up to my hardy Swedish ancestors or my December birthday, but I possess a disposition engineered to withstand the elements. One year, on the coldest New Year’s weekend in Chicago’s recorded history, a friend and I packed a picnic lunch and ate it, gloves and all, in front of Chicago’s Bean sculpture during a dusting of snow. “Why let the winter slow me down?” I say when people, naturally, point out that picnicking in 10 degrees is irrational, if not masochistic. “Besides, once it gets below 10 degrees, you’re so numb, you can’t really feel how cold it is, so it’s a better time to be outside,” I explain. Rarely do I gain converts to my 10-degrees-is-better-than-35-degrees theory.
This method of stubbornly loving the winter worked, until now. This year, when the sun set before 5 pm on that first Sunday of Central Standard Time, I gritted my teeth and told myself the same story I always do, “this is fine! I love the winter. What would great-grandfather Gustav think if he heard me complain?” But at last, winter gloom had outrun me. In a pandemic year filled with grief, death, loneliness, and darkness, I found I no longer possessed the relentless, dogged optimism needed to overcome the creeping winter despair.
If there was ever a winter for me to find solace in Sufjan Steven’s Christmas collection, it is this one. His music embraces the winter gloom and darkness, not just with white-knuckled positivity (though there are boogey-ing elves and Christmas unicorns, of course), but in a way that unabashedly sits in the depths of human brokenness, even in—or perhaps especially in—the Christmas season. Where else can you find Christmas songs about a painful fight on Christmas morning, a child who doesn’t know how to voice what he really wants, or an apocalyptic warning about the dangers of materialism?
Perhaps most perplexingly for a standard Christmas album, Sufjan includes “Ah Holy Jesus,” a Lenten hymn about Jesus’ crucifixion and death, three times in three different arrangements on volume seven. “Ah holy Jesus,” the first verse goes, “how hast thou offended, that we to judge thee have in hate pretended? By foes derided, by thine own rejected, O most afflicted.” Here is a song about the depths of human brokenness.
In the second version, “Ah Holy Jesus (with reed organ),” the song begins abruptly and without introduction, almost as if the volunteer church choir jumped the gun and rushed in with their “Ah” at a cue meant only for the organist. But despite this accidental quality, the pacing is intentional. While the first “Ah Holy Jesus” on the volume has a melancholy slowness, the arrangement with reed organ has a racing, desperate effect; as if the song’s message is too painful and too raw to be disciplined, controlled, and measured.
The voices and harmonies sore with that freeness, swelling and sliding with expressions of sorrow and anguish. This is not a performance where the voices blend perfectly together, rather the listener can hear each part distinctly, heightening the discordant minor chords. The organ fades out for the second verse, and we can hear these voices more starkly as they sing: “For me, kind Jesus, was thine incarnation, thy mortal sorrow, and thy life’s oblation. Thy death of anguish and thy bitter passion for my salvation.” The singing swells to crescendos at “sorrow,” “oblation,” and “thy death of anguish,” with a rising harmony on the “death” that gives it a sharp extra punch. This is a song about human brokenness, not about the hope of Advent or the joy of Christmas, but the pain of Christ’s suffering and the brokenness of a humanity that could sentence anyone to this kind of violent death.
So why does Sufjan include “Ah Holy Jesus” in his Christmas canon? And why am I so drawn to it? If I’m being truthful, I’ve always been more comfortable with Christmas than with Easter. Each year, I enter the Advent season, the period before Christmas when Christians remember the generations spent waiting for Christ to come, with joyful anticipation, and I look forward to singing hymns at a Christmas Eve mass. When it comes to Lent, the period before Easter when we follow Christ’s temptation, betrayal, suffering, and death, I have been less eager to be in church. I have sat in Good Friday services when we remember the moment of Christ’s passion, and I have felt, well, nothing. People would sing songs like “Ah, Holy Jesus,” and others would be crying. I would feel terribly aware of my awkwardness, burning with the anxiety that I need to perform some type of grief or pain or emotion, when in reality, I just felt numb and unable to enter into that moment of darkness. I am focused too much on the expectations of what I am supposed to feel, and so I can’t feel anything but the shame of not feeling it.
When Sufjan Steven and his friends sing Ah Holy Jesus, it catches me off guard, without defenses. When the choir enters in too quickly and swells rapidly in tandem with the reed organ, I enter suddenly, before I can overthink, into the darkness of the moment, face-to-face with death in all its sorrow. There is no time to analyze it, or fight it, or trick it, or outwit it, or kill it with kindness. The darkness is there, and I am sitting with it, a part of it. For me, kind Jesus was thine incarnation, thy mortal sorrow, and thy life’s oblation.
And in this way, the Christmas story of birth and wonder is intertwined with the Lenten story of death and dying. The God of the Universe longed so deeply to be known to God’s creation that this Great Transcendence made itself vulnerable and entered in the temporal world, not as a king or a ruler but as a tiny baby, as Sufjan writes in one album booklet, “cooing and spitting up breastmilk.” God entered creation and cosmically altered the relationship between humanity and divinity, temporality and eternity, bound them up together in his own incarnation and birth, but also in his own death. Christians tend to focus on Christ dying specifically on the cross as if the vehicle of death is what is most important in the cosmic mystery of redemption, but it is in the act of dying itself, by whatever means, that God participates in that very, broken human experience, and thus transforms and redeems it.
In Sufjan’s “Ah Holy Jesus,” we recognize that death is part of the Christmas story. There is no Christmas without Lent, no birth without death, no life without pain, no light without darkness. There is no fighting it or tricking it or outwitting it, not even for God. The only way out is through.
In this particular season of darkness, in a winter filled with the human brokenness of inequity and suffering laid bare by a deathly pandemic, I have no choice but to sit with the darkness and sorrow--not to resist it, but to greet it, name it, and give myself the space to mourn and lament. But I no longer feel despair. When the Sufjan choir ends Ah Holy Jesus, they sing, “for my salvation.” They linger longer on the word “salvation,” and the organ enters slowly, the first bit of respite from the rush of anguish prior. There is a pause, a moment at the end to collect themselves, to breathe, and perhaps look forward to that salvation. I hope that we too might find that respite. There is no light without darkness, but there is no darkness without light.
Shannon Page has been a devoted Sufjan Stevens fan since the O.C. soundtrack and would get a Carrie and Lowell-inspired tattoo if she were brave enough. Aside from listening to Songs for Christmas, Shannon is a Masters of Divinity student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and especially enjoys writing and thinking about the intersection of the arts and faith.