Idumea (Sacred Harp)
I.
Somewhere in the absurd collection of goodies that came with my Silver and Gold vinyl box set, amongst the tinsel, the coloring book, the singalong scores, the campy psychedelic clip art collages, and the actual records, there is an essay, penned by Pastor Vito Aiuto of “Vito’s Ordination Song” fame, titled “A Brief Exposition on Advent & The End Times.” If you’ve never read it, I encourage you to dig around and find it next time you get your set out. It discusses how the rise of Christianity during antiquity changed the common understanding of time from cyclical to linear due to its emphasis on progress towards salvation and eventual apocalypse. However, no matter what your cosmology, it’s hard to get away from the fundamental cyclical nature of days and years, so Pastor Aiuto makes a case that the Christian calendar, with its combination of linear progress (Jesus is born on Christmas, dies on Good Friday, comes back to life on Easter, ascends to heaven forty days later, and is coronated as king of the universe in November) and cyclical repetition (all of this happens again and again every year), is a reconciliation of these opposing understandings.
This gives Advent, the season leading up to Christmas, a certain tension, because it represents not just the beginning of the next journey from birth to coronation, but the end of the previous one. That is, the month before Christmas is actually about the apocalypse just as much as it is about patiently waiting for a joyful miraculous birth to occur. Pastor Aiuto then gives plenty of evidence for this seemingly wild claim, from quotes of early church figures to thinly-veiled apocalyptic undertones in well-known Advent hymns. He didn’t even need to mention Handel’s Messiah for me to remember how much violence there is interspersed with the shepherds and angel choirs in the so-called “Christmas section” of this oratorio. Here are the words to one of the movements:
Thus saith the Lord, the Lord of hosts:
“Yet once a little while, and I will shake
The heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry lands.
And I will shake all nations,
And the desire of all nations shall come.”
Sure, it ends on a high note, presumably interpreted as a prediction of Jesus’s birth by Christians (the text is taken from the Old Testament), but before this desire can be fulfilled, it sounds like there needs to be a massive worldwide earthquake. It’s not the friendly livestock-keeping-baby-Jesus-company imagery that pervades more modern Christmas music, certainly.
II.
Why should we care about this dark historical undercurrent beneath the season that most of us, myself included, now associate more with cozy sweaters, mulled wine, snow, and spending time with our families than with doomsday? First, I would argue that any mass cultural set of rituals, even as seemingly profane and disconnected from any formal belief system as lining up in a parking lot before dawn for blowout deals on Black Friday, constitutes a religious practice, no matter what motivates any particular individual to participate. Customs such as driving to the Christmas Tree farm and awkward office parties where someone invariably has a few too many may be aesthetically pretty far from Midnight Mass, but they are still things we feel compelled to do every year like clockwork, that give our years structure and meaning. Since moving to coastal California from the East Coast a few years ago, these kinds of things sometimes feel like all I’ve got to mark the passage of time absent leaves falling from trees and snow days.
And if we’re engaging in a religious practice, it’s my strongly held opinion that a religious practice needs to spend some time dwelling on the ugly stuff as well as the pleasant stuff. Life isn’t a long stream of happiness and good fortune, so neither should our rituals be. Making an effort to be grateful is an important part of figuring out how to be fulfilled in life, sure, but I think we also need to work on wrapping our heads around unpleasant but unavoidable subjects like death and loss.
I doubt there's anyone on the planet who hasn't been having a tough year. The pandemic is bad enough, but add to that the rapidly increasing number of natural disasters caused by climate change and the global resurgence of fascism, and things seem downright hopeless, if not straight-up apocalyptic. My family and I are blessed to be healthy and economically secure so far, but I'm still sad I don't get to do some of the things that usually bring me joy, like singing in choirs and going to Sufjan concerts (can you imagine how cathartic the shows will be when concerts are finally safe again and he goes on tour?). Evacuating our home in August due to the worst wildfire season in recorded history, though it thankfully turned out not to have been necessary, and then breathing smoke for the next month put me in an even worse mood. If nothing else, this has all made me realize the psychological benefit of occasionally spending some time contemplating the end of the world.
III.
Volume VII is probably my least favorite of the ten that make up Sufjan’s decade of Christmas albums. It goes on forever, and even if I like most of the tracks on it, they don’t fit together or flow all that well. Most of the other volumes, despite their occasional oscillations between frivolity and profundity, have a coherence to them, but this one strikes me as the result of a bunch of old pals getting together on a cold night around a bowl of eggnog, throwing a couple of logs on the fire, and fucking around while a live mic observes it all from the corner. I sense this because I’ve been in plenty of rooms like this, although mine never had a tenth the talent in them. Studying the liner notes makes me think I might actually not be that far off; much of this volume was recorded during a “frantic caroling session with the Smith family… at the New Jerusalem Rec Room.” I can picture it now: “Hey, how about a 17th-century Lutheran passion chorale?” “Yeah, but after that, let’s do one where we rhyme ‘ding-a-ling-a-ring-a-ling’ with ‘baby Jesus is the king.’” “OK, now let’s do that chorale again, but with an old foot-pedal reed organ this time!” This approach of course makes up for in charm what it loses in polish and coherence.
Towards the end of this oddball collection are two shape note hymns from a hymnal called the Sacred Harp. Shape notes are a musical notation invented in the US in the late eighteenth century to ease the sight-reading of four-part hymns, and the Sacred Harp is one of the most widely used shape note hymnals today. I won’t say too much more about this musical tradition in general as there are many sources all over the internet that can explain it much better than I can, except that it’s a uniquely American form of music — perhaps even the original American form of music — that is still actively practiced today, and that the poetry set by these songs can be pretty jarring to modern ears due to its frequent focus on death. (I’m part of the community that sings this music, and we work hard to be inclusive and friendly, and come from a wide diversity of religious beliefs and lack thereof, so come sing with us in a town or city near you after the pandemic is over!) Here are the words to “Idumea,” the track that I’m supposed to be writing about:
And am I born to die?
To lay this body down!
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown?A land of deepest shade,
Unpierced by human thought;
The dreary regions of the dead,
Where all things are forgot!Soon as from earth I go,
What will become of me?
Eternal happiness or woe
Must then my portion be!
The poem was written by the British Methodist cleric Charles Wesley in 1763 and the music by Ananiais Davisson of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in 1816. Wesley wrote the text of many hymns still in wide use today, probably most famously “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” also covered in Sufjan’s Christmas collection. “And am I born to die?” is a little bit less cheerful, but perhaps we ought not be surprised that the same person could write both a cheery baby Jesus hymn and a gloomy one contemplating the inevitability of death. Sufjan wrote “Super Sexy Woman” as well as “The Only Thing,” after all. It’s probably healthy to sometimes remember that life is fleeting and everything that you’re stressing over is going to be gone someday just like you; that creation and annihilation are always going to be tightly bound to one another no matter how much the modern western Christianity-informed understanding of time tries to separate them; that we’re all born to die but are still allowed to celebrate in the meantime; that December is actually about the apocalypse. Merry Christmas.
Edward Stallknecht Rice is a biologist living in California. He makes Christmas albums every once in a while too.