News December 2020

December 2020 Sponsored by Bettie & Geoff Gray From 29th November, Advent Sunday, until Christmas Day, we will be sending out by email a prayer for the day. If you are not yet on the St Mary’s Newsletter email list and would like to receive the daily prayer then please send your email address to [email protected]. Church in the Garden continues every Sunday at 10am when you can join Ben and family via Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/sharingJesuswithall/ St Mary’s Church will be open from 4pm until 8pm on Christmas Eve with a very special installation of light, sound and decorations that will celebrate Christmas On Sunday 20th December at 4pm there will be a and the joy of carols. You will find carol themed Livestream Christingle from the Vicarage garden via decorated trees, crib scenes, projected images, the Facebook page when you can join in with making atmospheric lighting and a soundtrack of carols, so do a Christingle. come along and experience a very different Christmas Eve at St Mary’s. Please dress for the weather as we will have to restrict the number of people inside at any one On Sunday 20th December at 6pm join in the Big time so you may be queuing and also wear a mask and Carol Sing. Let’s get back on the doorstep and sing maintain social distancing. Please enter by the double carols together and keep hope alive this Christmas. gate on the south side opposite the Green. Thank you. Tune into Radio Cumbria at 6pm and the carols will There are 6 mini trees that need decorating, begin after the news. Visit www.bigcarolsing.co.uk to each one on the theme of a carol so if you would like download and print the carol sheet. to decorate one call Geoff Gray on 01228 547419 - first come, first served!. You are invited to bring a gift with you for the Foodbank and place it in the crib in front of the altar. Canned meat, pasta, pasta sauce, crisps, biscuits and any other dried foods are particularly welcome. I doubt if anyone two years ago could have imagined what 2020 would look like. This Christmas will be different to any that any of us can remember. But this Christmas and Advent may be more similar to the first Christmas than we initially realise. Mary and Joseph did not have their parents and families present when they welcomed Jesus into the world. The Angels did not have a church to sing in and the shepherds worshipped Jesus in the stable of an inn. We are unlikely to have large gatherings or to be able to meet in churches and parties. Yet, we can prepare to welcome Jesus without a choir, without a church and without large gatherings of friends and family. We celebrate the birth of Jesus into the world and we celebrate inviting Jesus into our lives. When we invite Jesus into our lives we invite him into our home and our families; into our work and our play. When we invite Jesus into our lives he redeems us from sin, forgiving all that we have done. He brings light into darkness. He offers us Eternal life. That means bringing hope in fear and life in death. That is something to celebrate - something to be merry about. My hope and prayer for you is that you will be able to find this light in the darkness and that you will be able to celebrate this Christmas. I pray that you can praise even if it is only on a hillside, that you can worship even if only in a humble home and that you can welcome Jesus even if we cannot gather to do so. God bless [email protected] Thank you to everyone who voted for their favourite carol. A great variety were chosen with 36 different was written by Phillips carols. Here, in reverse order, are St Mary’s Top Ten: Brooks in 1868. He was an Episcopal priest in Philadelphia and had been inspired by a visit to the village of Bethlehem. He wrote the poem for his In Roquemaure, a small town close to Avignon in the church, and his organist, Lewis Redner added the south of France, at the end of 1843, the church organ music, ‘St Louis’. We are more familiar with the tune had recently been renovated. To celebrate the event, called ‘Forest Green’ which was adapted by Ralph the parish priest persuaded poet Placide Cappeau, a Vaughan Williams from the English folk song ‘The native of the town, to write a Christmas poem. Soon Ploughboy's Dream’ which he had collected from a afterwards, Adolphe Adam composed the music. labourer in Forest Green, Surrey in 1903. Here it is Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight translated sung by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge: the song into English in 1855 as . https://youtu.be/VJqgspx57C0 It is performed here by Celtic Trio and Choir: https://youtu.be/ITIaYoWCPkE The words of are by English writer is an 1849 poem Isaac Watts and are based on Psalm 98 - ‘Shout for written by Edmund Sears a pastor of the Unitarian joy to the Lord, all the earth, burst into jubilant song Church in Wayland, Massachusetts. A year later with music’. It was first published in 1719 in Watts' Richard Storrs Willis set it to music and his tune, collection . The tune usually used ‘Carol’, remains the most popular in the States. We today is from an 1848 edition by the American are more familiar with ‘Noel’, a later adaptation by church music composer Lowell Mason and attributed Arthur Sullivan from an English melody sung here by as being ‘from Handel’. The all-boy English vocal the choir of Winchester Cathedral: group, Libera, perform it here: https://youtu.be/rSn0_Zj6gjQ https://youtu.be/5IH8A86FLs0 It is curious that the origin of the words to one of the first appeared in 1739 most popular carols, , is so in the collection . It features obscure. An early appearance was in 1882, in the lyrical contributions from Charles Wesley and Chicago based journal, George Whitefield, two of the founding ministers of under the heading ‘Luther's Cradle Song’, attributing Methodism. Wesley had requested slow and solemn it to the German religious reformer. This is now music and it wasn’t until 1855 that it was set to the considered to be spurious and it is probably entirely familiar tune adapted from a cantata by Felix American in origin. The tune we are most familiar Mendelssohn. This performance is by the Radio with is ‘Cradle Song’ by the American composer France Children’s Choir: William J Kirkpatrick but in the States the setting by https://youtu.be/s1BPxZombgw James R Murray is more common, as sung here by Sufjan Stevens: https://youtu.be/vTzdJWZ2FRE is based on a poem by the English poet Christina Rossetti and was published, under the title A Christmas Carol, in January 1872. The poem first appeared set to music by Gustav Holst in in 1906. Christina was sister to the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who visited St Mary’s in 1869 and wrote enthusiastically about the church. Listen to King’s College Choir sing the Harold Darke setting of 1911: https://youtu.be/Gppy3xsk6c0 or Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht was first Isaiah 9:6-7 performed on Christmas Eve 1818 at St Nicholas parish church in Oberndorf, a village on the Salzach river in Austria. The young priest, Father Joseph . Mohr, had written the lyrics two years earlier and Imagine the longed for hope for all who lived under asked Franz Xaver Gruber, schoolmaster and organist the oppression of the Roman occupation. The birth of in a nearby village to compose a melody and guitar Jesus was amazing HOPE. Every evidence pointed to accompaniment for the Christmas Eve mass, after him being the long awaited for Messiah - Saviour, river flooding had damaged the church organ. who would bring in the Kingdom of God. Listen to the Vienna Boys’ Choir perform Stille Nacht: As he grew and called disciples to follow him, https://youtu.be/vKvKMgR8H7k as they witnessed his miracles and heard his powerful words, HOPE grew - expectations were raised. They would soon be free. The origin of , or Adeste Even though Jesus kept teaching them that his Fideles in the original Latin, is rather uncertain and Kingdom was not like the kingdoms of the world, in confused. It is often credited to John Francis Wade, a their minds this was hard to grasp. Even though he copyist of musical manuscripts, who was responsible said he would suffer and die, they could not hear this, for the earliest printed version in 1751. The earliest as they imagined a new Kingdom coming in with known manuscript version, though, bears the name power and force - this was their experience in history. of King John IV of Portugal, ‘The Musician King’ THEN - when Jesus was crucified imagine (1645-1692) and the text is also often attributed to how they felt. All hope and expectation dashed. anonymous Cistercian monks. Listen to it being sung Worse still must have been the thought that they had at Westminster Abbey: got it all wrong. Now their lives were under threat https://youtu.be/l1wHyMR_SCA and they were afraid. Three days later the most remarkable life changing event took place - Jesus broke the power of death and rose from the grave. Imagine seeing Jesus again - standing right in front of you. HOPE came flooding back in much greater waves than before.

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