OPINION: Culturally specific Christmas memories can take a long time to appreciate fully, writes VICTORIA WHITE
Once in Royal David’s city
Stood a lowly cattle shed...
THE CLEAR voice of the boy soprano will soar through St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin this afternoon and on RTÉ Radio 1, sending shivers down the spine of any self-respecting Irish Anglican. The voice of the child raised up against the dark and cold conveys the essence of the Christmas story: the heart-stopping mystery of the birth of a child and the promise of a world in which the weak would be strong because “that Child so dear and gentle/Is our Lord in heaven above”.
As a child, I was sent into the freezing sunroom that had to house the Christmas tree because it was lit with real candles, to sing Once in Royalevery Christmas Eve. Back then, I thought every family did exactly the same thing and it took me a long time to work out how culturally specific are my Christmas memories.
The first verse of Once in Royal, sung by a boy soprano, was first so arranged in King's College, Cambridge, in 1919 and has ever since begun their Christmas Eve Nine Lessons and Carols. It has been copied all over the world, as well as in Dublin. But I can't help thinking now that the level of emotion in our house about that hymn derived from the fact that it was written (in 1848) by Cecil Frances Alexander, the famous wife of the Bishop of Derry and Raphoe.
My mother's family is from east Donegal and my grandparents were schoolteachers in a Church of Ireland school, though a little bit too late to have had Bishop Alexander as their boss. Two of Cecil Alexander's other greatest hits also formed the soundtrack to our family events. All Things Bright and Beautifulwas played endlessly on the piano by my gardener mother and There is a Green Hillwas sung at both my parents' funerals.
Even writing all of this makes me feel like a bit of a freak. I am aware of the hymns’ self-conscious Victoriana, their easy emotion about the little children while real children still starved to death in Ireland. It’s not surprising I’ve spent most of my life playing down my huge legacy of Church of Ireland hymns and traditions. They set me apart from the mainstream and those who integrate best prosper most.
It's only in recent years I have become aware that I have engaged in a conscious act of suppression. But the emotions are overwhelming. At a carol service the other night Once in Royalhad me in tears. "I'm blubbing," I admitted to the woman beside me. She was as bad, she said: "I just remember hearing this and feeling so safe."
My parents both sang and my mother played the piano. They would sing in part harmony on long car journeys. My mother used to say she felt incredibly lucky to have found a partner from the same cultural tradition – apart from the fact my granny would have preferred, horror of horrors, a child “outside wedlock” than a Catholic son-in-law. I went to a multidenominational school that bore out my Auntie May’s famous pronouncement: “All multidenominational schools are Protestant.”
Hearing last Sunday the reading from Isaiah chapter 9, “His name shall be called – Wonderful Counsellor! The Mighty God! The Everlasting Father! The Prince of Peace!” I was transported back to the carol services at that school .
“Do you remember?” I texted my friend from those days who has this year faced life-threatening illness. “Yes,” she texted. “Wonderful memories.”
Then it hit me. My children will not have the same memories. I remembered what my mother had said when she was in her dotage and I announced I was sending the children to a Catholic Gaelscoil: “Everything will be in Irish. They won’t have the music. They won’t have the hymns.” I thought her bigoted side was coming out. She’d seemed happy with my choice of a Catholic partner.
But now she was facing death and the death of her legacy. And now I understand and respect that emotion. She knew the Church of Ireland hymnal by heart. She was the inheritor of a vast store of wonderful music with complex harmonies and some of the finest poetry in the language. The Anglican tradition is embodied by the English language in a way that, for me, Irish Catholicism is not. It does not seem to me to be so much the words themselves that inspire Catholics, but a wider appeal to the senses through imagery.
And it has been partly my own choice that my children will not have that Church of Ireland inheritance. Asked to come to church and “make myself known” to the vicar if I wanted my kids to go to one of the local C of I schools, I left immediately, furious at what seemed like a demand for ostentatious church attendance. Which, of course, is easily done.
No, I think my kids should have got their cultural inheritance by my own efforts at home and at church, rather than at school. And all they’ve had were dribs and drabs probably because it is my instinct to let them integrate as far as possible.
These are no different to the emotions of parents bringing up a child in any majority culture different to their own. Rather, they are no different to the emotions of any parents who fail to hand on their minority culture because they doubt its usefulness.
And as I age, I really cannot any more doubt the usefulness to them of words like these, from Once in Royal:
For he is our childhood’s pattern
Day by day like us he grew
He was little, weak and helpless
Tears and smiles like us he knew
And he feeleth for our sadness
And he shareth in our gladness.
The Festival Service of Nine Lessons and Carols from St Patrick’s Cathedral will be broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 today at 4pm