For my first post in a while, this might sound frivolous, but I really think this has made a difference in my Christmas worship. I want to point out some common mis-readings of the Christmas Hymns that are caused mostly by the fact that the hymnal starts each line with a capital letter.

You see, our hymnal, and I believe this is standard practice for hymnals, is made to make hymn singing easy. That is, it assumes people don’t want to worry about things like where to take a breath, and it assumes they want to take a breath as often as possible. Short lines and obvious breaking points are just easier when trying to get a room full of realtively untrained singers to stay relatively together while they sing a song. Thus each very short phrase is started with a capital letter to make it seem like a new sentence–that way everyone takes a breath before hand.

It does present a few problems, occasionally with understanding songs, however, and I think that this is more prevalent at Christmas. I know of at least two songs that can get tricky at this time of year, and I had a third, but can’t find the troublesome spot now, perhaps because I have trained myself to read it otherwise.

One of the culprit songs is O Little Town of Bethlehem, second verse:

For Christ is born of Mary,
And gathered all above,
While mortals sleep, the angels keep,
Their watch of wondering love.

“Gathered all above” here does not have to do with the ascension, but with the angels. They are gathered above while we mortals sleep, keeping a watch of wondering love.

The second is “Silent Night. ” Line three, which starts “Round yon virgin,” is the first difficulty here, and while we may figure out when we pass childhood that this “round” has nothing to do with Mary’s pregnancy , we still may not have any idea what it does mean until we back up and see that the sentence is actually “All is calm, all is bright, round yon virgin mother and child.” Say it as a sentence. The other problem here is that “radiant beams from thy holy face” has nothing to do with some sort of supernatural power shooting out of the baby’s countenance. Rather, it is “loves pure light, radiant” which “beams from [his] holy face” radiant describes the light of love, not some beams, and beams is a verb, not a noun.

There are other parts of other hymns and songs that are not as problematic, but where we subtly miss meaning by misreading the grammar of the song because we are too busy singing and waxing nostalgic to notice. I hope that someone out there will take my challenge to re-read the songs of Christmas and enrich their worshiping through song by understanding what we sing each year. They mgiht sound like small things, but some of the attention to detail has helped these hymns to touch my heart with the grand nature of the condescension of God, when our savior, as the song says, mildly laid his glory by, born that man no more may die (my paraphrase.).

Merry Christmas.