On Religion: The Need For Advent Music Playlists
(ANALYSIS) “O Lord, How Shall I Meet You” is a perfect Lutheran hymn for the weeks before Christmas, but shoppers will never hear it between Muzak versions of "Jingle Bells" and "White Christmas" in their local malls.
The key is that “O Lord, How Shall I Meet You” is from the penitential season of Advent, said Pastor Will Weedon. That's the four weeks preceding Christmas in liturgical calendars for Catholics, Lutherans and others in Western Christianity.
The Christmas connection is clear, stressed Weedon, with lines such as: “O Lord, how shall I meet You / How welcome You aright? / Your people long to greet You / My hope, my heart's delight! / O, kindle, Lord most holy / Your lamp within my breast / To do in spirit lowly / All that may please You best.”
The hymn contains this confession: “I lay in fetters, groaning / You came to set me free / I stood, my shame bemoaning / You came to honor me.”
“We need to hear this as we prepare for Christmas,” said Weedon, former director of worship and chaplain for the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. “Advent hymns have about them a sense of dissatisfaction with our lives in this world. ... We have a mess on our hands, some of it of our own making, and we're praying for Christ to come and save us,” he said, reached by telephone.
That message “doesn't work at Walmart, where Christmas starts at Halloween. Our culture doesn’t understand the idea of fasting before feasting. We are urged to party and feast all the time.”
Collections of Christmas music often include a few popular Advent hymns sung in Protestant services and even in Christmas parties, such as “Joy to the World,” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and, especially, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Many Catholic Advent hymns focus on the role of Mary, the mother of Jesus, such as “Rorate Caeli (Drop down, Ye Heavens).”
In recent years, Brett McCraken of The Gospel Coalition network has created online playlists — such as “Advent Longing/Christmas Joy” — to stress connections between Advent themes and Christmas. One goal is to note the obvious tension between the sobering messages heard during the quiet weeks of Advent and the waves of joyful songs, sacred and secular, that now start before Thanksgiving and the blitz called “The Holidays.”
For many, the idea of an “Advent music playlist” is bizarre.
“There is real theological meaning in the longing and expectation of Advent — the ‘not yet’ of the hoped-for gift — that hymns like ‘Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus’ capture so well," said McCracken, reached by email. "It's good to sit with the expectation and hunger. ... But consumerism conditions us to go from one party season to another — constant satisfaction but little space for contemplative longing.”
In modern America, churches don't have to ask the faithful to be “constantly somber and subdued from Dec. 1 to 24, only listening to the joyful music starting on Christmas,” he added. “But I do think mixing in some 'mournful exile' amidst the merriment makes the light of Christmas shine all the brighter in the darkness.”
That’s what keyboardist and songwriter Jeff Johnson attempted during years of pre-Christmas tours, often with the late Irish flautist Brian Dunning, blending hymns, folk tunes and Celtic music, now collected online in the “Winter Songs” playlist.
Many of these shows took place during Advent and, while they included Christmas favorites, Johnson added many “contemplative” and “worshipful” numbers — Advent classics and older Christmas hymns. Audiences had a chance to hear “Lo How a Rose E'er Blooming,” “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,” “We Follow a Star,” “Down in Yon Forest” and many folk songs and hymns from eras long before Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the crush of modern calendars.
“Maybe we had something to do with helping people start to think ... about what Christmas is truly about,” said Johnson via Zoom. Advent is profound because of its emphasis on the darkness that comes before the light and “this idea of waiting and being still.”
These ideas are quite countercultural, he added. “The message for Advent is this — just stop, don't try to do anything; this is all about God doing everything.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.