Let children sing songs of hope this time of year
Here I am, sitting at my son’s choir practice as they prepare for the Christmas concert. And I’m conflicted about the 100-percent Christian content of the music. This is a secular, community-based choir, in which not all the kids are Christian, not by a long shot. These are kids whose parents pay a significant tuition fee for musical instruction — not religious indoctrination. Our family is Christian — but this feels weird. Your opinion?
I had the opposite experience at a public school holiday concert last year. Ten days before Christmas and here was a stage full of kids, many wearing Santa hats, singing 90 minutes of musical drivel about snowflakes and icicles that form on the end of your nose. It was as inspiring as a bucket of spit. How did we get so messed up about this season? Why is Facebook plugged with pathetic people whining that the clerk at Walmart chimed “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”?
Look. We live in a multicultural society, in which people of many faiths, and no faith, must find a way to live together harmoniously, not just at this time of year but through the other 330 days as well.
Of course it’s wrong for a secular, community-based choir to sing exclusively Christian music. Such a program is not just culturally and religiously insensitive, it’s sheer musical laziness, falling back on “what we’ve always done” rather than exploring and learning the mosaic of wonderful music available in this season of interwoven traditions.
But it’s also wrong to reduce this season to nothing more than a meaningless common denominator of Jack Frost and sleigh-rides. Whether the dominant symbol of your celebrations is an unquenchable oil-lamp, candles signifying light in the midst of the world’s darkness, a family table laden in gut-splitting abundance, or the birth of a child in a far-away stable, the themes are very much the same: hope in the midst of despair, light that shines through the gloom, the fellowship of kindred spirits, peace in unexpected places.
2015 has not been an inspiring year in this tired planet’s history. The reality of climate change is finally sinking in, Paris bleeds not once but twice, refugee children wash ashore and airplanes fall from the sky, their descent the result not of accident but of attack. And so it goes. Neither sophomoric songs about snowflakes nor lazy religious/cultural exclusivism move us very far toward a better future.
But music that is beautiful, meaningful and prophetic has the power to shape, and reshape, the human soul, especially when drawn from the rich archives of the world’s diverse cultures and traditions, even more so when that music is rendered by the voices of children and young people.
At this time of year, and in every season that follows, let the children sing songs of hope, of courage and of peace, gathered up from all around this multicoloured planet.
And may the rest of us — the tired, the old, the blasé — be changed by the purity of their voices and the beauty of their songs.