Everything Old Is New Again

I bought it with a great deal of reluctance, and even extreme doubt that it would end a love affair. While I loved the performer, and I certainly loved the material, I feared that somehow the combination of the two would leave me disappointed and even a bit jaded. She has always been a singer grounded in a true connection to the world in which she lived and the people who strove to live in it. The songs are some of the most well known songs, sung by people all over the world, in celebration of a singularity that forever changed men and women of faith's relationship with their creator.

Annie Lennox and Christmas Carols...it could have been a disaster, but instead it is an incarnation, an epiphany, a revelation of the power of music to reveal faith and celebration. So many of my own favorite seasonal songs, sung in our own Christmas Eve service - "The Holly and the Ivy," "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," "In the Bleak Midwinter," and "Silent Night" - illumined with a new voice, with her own polemical pop style, given a new importance, a new insistence that we hear the songs as if they were being sung for the first time.

If you know Annie Lennox's work, you know how it can both entertain and enjoin the listener to both appreciate and respond in very powerful and profound ways. A great artist is not one that is simply always pleasant and popular. Most performing artists who move beyond the entertainment industry want to make a mark, make a stir, and make a difference.

This is what God was doing in the history of our salvation. At one moment in time in the history of our human existence, when for many there was no hope for freedom, no hope for forgiveness, no hope for anything, God ripped through the firmament separating heaven and earth, bridging a gap that humankind in its arrogance and ignorance had created. God made a mark, made a stir, and made a difference in the hearts, minds and souls of all who recognized that from the moment of our Savior's birth, nothing in the universe would ever be the same.

When we celebrate the Feast of the Incarnation during our Christmas season, we will lovingly embrace old traditions, repeat old patterns, share in time honored ways, and yet we are always invited to keep in mind that no matter how many times we repeat the choruses and refrains of our Christmas rituals, it's not difficult to feel that same way we did the first time we gazed at a tree brought into the house as a sign of promise, the candles lit that were signs of light in our dark days, of the nativity which is the sign of the birth of Jesus and the birth of our salvation. And somehow it feels new, again and again. Like singing old carols in a new way, like shaking one another's hands and wishing peace in a new way, like celebrating the Holy Eucharist and making what happened two thousand years ago new, brand new in this present moment.

I love Annie Lennox - I'm a child of the 80's! But I've fallen in love all over again because of the way she has breathed life into songs I thought I knew. And I love her for what she has reminded me about the whole point of the Christmas season...everything old IS new again!

Happy Christmas!

Peace in Christ,
Fr. Shawn