Advent and Singing the Spirits out of the Trees
PD
Dear Friends,
Today is the first Sunday of Advent. And what a different Advent it is this year. For many of us, church services are still suspended or at least don't look like they once did. Perhaps what I will miss most of all this Advent and Christmas are the songs. I love Christmas Carols in particular. Being an anglophile, they speak to my soul in a particular way. They are theologically rich, musically beautiful, and I happen to know the bass part to most of them.
Perhaps one of my favorites, however, is the song, "Here We Come a-Wassailing." You may be more familiar with it by its less "pagan" title, "Here We Come a-Caroling." It's an interesting song. On first blush, and especially with its "caroling" title, it is a song about the act of Christmas Caroling, going around to your neighbors' houses singing Christmas Carols. It is one of those performative songs where what you're singing about is what you're doing and asking for in the moment. There's even something of the trick-or-treat to it. After all, in the fourth verse beer is explicitly requested, and would be necessary on those cold English evenings. But there is something deeper going on here as well.
You see, to wassail, is to sing the evil spirits out of the trees. The word wassail comes from the Anglo-Saxonwes þú hálwhich means, be you hale or be you healthy. It is the equivalent of Latin'ssalvewhich serves as a greeting, but also a desire for your good health. In the Middle Ages, English people would going singing amongst their apple trees, to bless them, so that in the Winter, as they rest, they will revive in the Spring and bring a good harvest in the late Summer and early Autumn. After this, a drink, also called wassail, would be made. This drink is a kind of mulled apple cider (of the alcoholic variety) and was drunk from a wassail bowl.
While this tradition may seem simply pagan, an act of sympathetic magic attempting to ensure a good harvest, I think there is something more to it than that. After all, in the song, while the call is for beer and food for the carolers, the promised return is God's blessings. It was an act of the poor, singing for their wealthier neighbors and engaging in a kind of gift exchange. The neighbors give beer and food, the singers give song and God's blessings. This, of course, goes back to the belief from very early on in the Church, that the poor were, by virtue of their poverty, holier than the rest of us. So already, we see in the act of singing desire to spread God's goodness both material and spiritual.
But then we move to the act of wassailing at Christmas time. How appropriate is it, after all, that for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, we are asking for blessings upon the seemingly dead world while preparing for the birth of the Author of Life. The Prince of this World still holds sway, and thus we encounter poverty, famine, illness, war. But, we now have an aid in the person of Christ, who united every element of this world into himself by becoming human. He took on all of created nature, for all of creation is bound up in us, from the lowest minerals (and the atoms and quarks lower than them) to the intellect of the highest Angels, and everything in between. All this was bound up in us, the summation of Creation. But he is the summit of all humanity, and thus united his divinity to everything, even the apple trees.
So as Advent begins, and we wait for the second-coming of Christ, let us exult in his first coming, which has begun to heal the rift we created between ourselves and the rest of creation. Let us declare to the trees and flowers and rocks and animals and other spirits, wes þú hál, be you hale! And let us remember to bless one another with both material and spiritual gifts, for both, ultimately, come from God who is the ultimate Giver of Gifts as well as the ultimate Gift himself.
Sincerely,
David Russell Mosley
This originally went out as my first newsletter: Letters from the Edge of Elfland. Go here to sign up for this week’s letter coming out on Sunday.
