Although I hope that the voice in your head sounds reasonable as you read the following (if anybody reads the following), feel free to hear it in a “You-kids-get-off-my-lawn!” tone if you’re into that kind of thing (and I know many of us are into that kind of thing these days).
The Republican Party no longer exists. . . .
My parents were Republicans and good people. My in-laws were Republicans and good people. I had—have—many friends who were—are—Republicans. These folks—from my parents to current friends—hold conservative values on government and economics. All well and good.
Or rather, all was well and good until actual Republicans and conservatives disappeared from this world by 1) leaving it like my parents and in-laws have done or 2) hiding—voiceless—in a daze of shock and disbelief at how their party and its ideology have been hijacked or 3) drinking the Kool-Aid and crossing over to the side of the hijackers.
Yes, the Republican Party—the GOP—still exists by name and in the news and on election ballots, but its traditional values have been trampled in the mud of their own sweat and blood by the mean and the ignorant and the arrogant, by downright idiots and the downright power hungry and the downright power hungry idiots. I know Jesus warned against calling anyone a fool (Matthew 5:22), but these days I find that admonition more difficult to abide by than most of the Ten Commandments.
Today’s so-called Republican Party is characterized by fear and its brood—anger, jealousy, anxiety. Shame and guilt often accompany fear, but today’s “Republicans” seem dead to these, probably, I think, because they no longer have a moral compass and thus lack any capacity for guilt and shame.
The things so-called Republicans fear are many: fear of the Other (typically identified by the shallow markers of skin color and makeup), fear of sharing (power, prestige, money, etc.), fear of losing (power, prestige, money, etc.), fear of the future, fear of the past (history as it actually happened, for example, or wrongs committed for power, prestige, money, etc.). Many Republicans of today (like their idiot golden—more orange really—idol/idle leader) do not recognize and will not admit these fears, but this is where the above mentioned ignorance and arrogance come in.
Conservative values are characterized not by what is right or wrong but by what is likely to keep them safe from the many, many fears they have (see above) and keep them comfortable in their judgments of what they deem right and keep them smug in their self-righteousness—all with an attitude that says, “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, y’all sit down and shut the fuck up a minute. We got this.”
Here’s an idea. Fear the Super Pigs, why dontcha:
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“This Is Not All” is a new song that has been with me for a while. In fact, I’ve had much of it written for several years, so I suppose it’s more accurate to say that it’s a newly completed song. It’s so newly completed that I haven’t even learned it yet. Still, that didn’t stop me from trying to play it at a recent gig on the Barnett Patio. I flubbed a bunch of it, especially toward the end, but it’s now out there in the world. I’ll continue to work on the music, but I feel like the lyrics are finished and say what I want them to say.
The first verse began with hiking a trail—going on a ramble, as my friend Scott Honeycutt calls it. The lines borrow some sentiments from Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson (and many others, I’m sure). We too often go out into nature, as Emerson and Thoreau caution us, looking for the big payoff in the scenery—a dramatic waterfall, the colors of autumn leaves, the mountaintop view of distance (even to the moon). Emerson writes in “Beauty,” the third chapter of Nature, “Go out of the house to see the moon, and ’tis mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.”
But the trail offers much at which to wonder that is seen only if we turn our eyes away from the big picture, away from the big expectations, and look down—not necessarily down, but just look.
Not all the wonder along the trail is to be found in woods and sky— look closer. It’s the tiny frog hidden in clover and that creature in the dust with a hundred legs or more. It’s in how I find my way home and that flower I never noticed by the door.
I like the last two lines in particular. Have you ever thought about how wonderful it is that you can—as long as you have a sound mind—find your way home? And you probably know many different ways to get home. Consider the Keb’ Mo’ song “More Thank One Way Home.” Take that as realistically or metaphorically as you wish.
As for the last line, Emily Dickinson writes in her poem 446 (Franklin; “This was a Poet”) that the poet
Distills amazing sense From Ordinary Meanings – And Attar* so immense
From the familiar species That perished by the Door – We wonder it was not Ourselves Arrested it – before –
(*Attar = fragrance)
Here, Dickison suggests—as Emerson does in his essay “The Poet”—that the poet (or the poetic eye) sees the richness, even the strangeness and wonder, in the familiar. Although those without the poet’s vision are subject to a kind of “ceaseless Poverty,” we still have the potential to understand and be enriched through that vision. That is, once the poet points out the wonder in the “familiar species / That perished by the Door”—”that flower I never noticed by the door”—we are enriched second-hand.
The second verse of “This Is Not All” sticks with wonder and the wonderful:
Not all the wonder along the way is waiting somewhere far ahead— look closer. A little boy runs in cape and mask, another stands shirtless in a barnyard banging a drum. A little girl learns to cartwheel, And another stands by the road and sticks out her thumb.
The idea here is that when we travel, whether on the road or trail or metaphorically through life, we often let the destination or goal loom so large in our minds that we ignore or lose sight of what is wonderful “along the way.” Consider the old adage that the journey is more important than the destination. The “little boy” is my son Raleigh, who had a vivid imagination and a love of costume.
The image of the other boy is from my travels at some point some years ago. I was driving in Indiana or Illinois or Iowa—somewhere with corn to the horizon. Just off the interstate was a large farmhouse, a big barn to the right of it (in the background, corn to the horizon from which a storm approached). In the barnyard, this kid—a teenager, at least—sat behind a full drum set and seemed in the middle of a massive rock ‘n’ roll show drum solo. A vivid, amazing scene!
The cartwheeling and hitchhiking girls are less real images than they are contrasts in innocence and experience, security and danger. But each of these has in it an element of wonder.
The song takes a dark turn to look at evil. The third verse recognizes that we leave ourselves open to the threatening workings of evil if we believe that it exists only in obvious places—”the terrorist and thief.”
Not all the evil in the world is in the terrorist and thief— look closer. It’s in the thousand faces of ignorance— political and corporate and religious. It’s in the hate and hunger and the trumped-up fights that pit them against us.
Ignorance is possibly the worst evil in our world today. Many of us seem to be getting to the point where we can’t see anything except through the lenses of ignorance, rage, and prejudice, our desire to win at all cost (while too ignorant to count the ultimate cost), our desire to “own” ______ [insert your fear/hate here], the devotion of our time and minds and hearts to conspiracy (which even if real probably has little to do with you and your little you might brighten). Charles Dickens wrote in his last scene with the Ghost of Christmas Present about “a boy and girl” that Scrooge spots hiding under the skirts of the Ghost’s robe, children [y]ellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish. . . .” When Scrooge asks if they are the children of the Ghost of Christmas Present, the spirit answers,
“‘They are Man’s. . . . And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it! . . . Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!'”
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
In our devaluing of education and of ourselves along with it, we have opened the door wide to all sorts of evil. The ignorant parents and grandparents and legislators slander teachers as misleading and “indoctrinating” their students. The ignorant revel in their ignorance as their badge of difference from the educated and the expert. (This is what Dickens refers to when he writes, “Admit it for your factious [that is, divisive] purposes, and make it worse!”). Thomas Jefferson—author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence—wrote elsewhere that “the spirit of the people [is not] infallible” and we “will become . . careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims.” I think the “single zealot” is now among us in Donald Trump, who is Dickens’s boy Ignorance personified. Beware! “Deny it” and experience the “Doom” he brings.
And yet perhaps there is still goodness. Fear and hate cannot survive honest expressions of love between people, between peoples, between us. Someone who becomes friends with—who comes to love—that which is feared, be it a skin color or a faith system or an identity (LGBTQ+) or whatever, usually finds it difficult, if not impossible, to fear and hate the person that has now become, to them, a human being—recognizing another as a human being, as a child of God (if you will). And that’s what it’s about, I think, opening up of ourselves to see the humanity in everybody. It is in this recognition and love that fear and hate begin to wither and die for lack of nourishment.
That said, I suspect we’re too far gone into ignorance—and an arrogance that prevents us from recognizing our ignorance—to survive.
Still, for the song, I lifted up my mind and heart and wrote a bridge and a fourth verse and tied it all together with a refrain “This Is Not All,” which first appears after the second verse and then repeats after the third and at the end.
The means of control are more than out of our hands— they’re far beyond our reach. But we can love, and love’s the root and height of all and love’s the root and height of each.
Not all the goodness in the world is to be found in church and child— look closer. It’s in the unshackled hearts that lift us high above the right or wrong or Right or Left— my friend’s warm hand in mine and true emotions honestly expressed.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
This Is Not All
Not all the wonder along the trail is to be found in woods and sky— look closer. It’s the tiny frog hidden in clover and that creature in the dust with a hundred legs or more. It’s in how I find my way home and that flower I never noticed by the door.
Not all the wonder along the way is waiting somewhere far ahead— look closer. A little boy runs in cape and mask, another stands shirtless in a barnyard banging a drum. A little girl learns to cartwheel, And another stands by the road and sticks out her thumb.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
Not all the evil in the world is in the terrorist and thief— look closer. It’s in the thousand faces of ignorance— political and corporate and religious. It’s in the hate and hunger and the trumped-up fights that put them against us.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
The means of control are more than out of our hands— they’re far beyond our reach. But we can love, and love’s the root and height of all and love’s the root and height of each.
Not all the goodness in the world is to be found in church and child— look closer. It’s in the unshackled hearts that lift us high above the right or wrong or Right or Left— my friend’s warm hand in mine and true emotions honestly expressed.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
Wishing a happy birthday to Leesa! Age is just a number (for the most part — excepting the odd pain here and there), and she doesn’t look or act her age in all the best ways!
This year, I gave her what I gave her last year — tickets so see and hear Keb’ Mo’! (We saw him with Lane and Raleigh in Boone last year. This year the two of us saw him in Morganton.)
Kevin wished Leesa a happy birthday from the stage of CoMMA (City of Morganton Municipal Auditorium) and played a song she’d requested via text: Hand It Over. As Leesa said, “It brought the house down!”
He also ended the show — maybe the next to last song — with Leesa’s other favorite, a song that you could easily imagine he wrote about her: She Just Wants to Dance!
And here’s a little something in celebration of her from her other favorite singer/songwriter: Soulmates!
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[Due to excessive commenting from Russian bots, I have stopped allowing comments on this blog. If you are not a Russian bot (or a bot of any other persuasion) and would like to comment, please email me at michaelamoscody@gmail.com.]
He is a man of deep ignorance, extravagant arrogance, blatant immorality, and no heartfelt convictions (not counting those thirty-four, of course). —
He is a man who cares nothing about you or me, about our lives in America, or about America itself. —
He is a celebrity (celebrated for being a rich ass) and nothing more, a third-rate stand-up comedian, maybe fourth-rate. —
He is the leader of a cult known as his “base” (consider the adjectival meanings of base). He has captured the devotion of that base with a slogan (MAGA, catchy but meaningless), a ridiculous little dance, and lies as big or small as needed. —
If you support the man after his conviction on thirty-four felony counts, after his attaches on women, on immigrants (fleeing to the United States– not to take your jobs but to find, they hope, better lives), on those with disabilities, after he has attacked anybody or said anything he thought might get him some masturbatory applause, then I can’t help thinking that, at some level, you are like him.
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I’ve lived in the United States of America for sixty-five years. I’ve been teaching American literature for the last twenty-seven of those.
My American lit surveys–particularly the sophomore-level general education version–begin with indigenous creation stories and trickster tales before moving to the letters of Cristoforo Colombo, i.e., Christopher Columbus. From there, it’s on to the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas and the American Puritans (including those we typically style as “Pilgrims”). My students and I then read from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, usually winding up the semester with poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
Having gone through some portion of these writings–in both undergraduate and graduate courses–every semester, I have come to believe that the one consistent American experience is that of decay, in all its not-so-varied noun and verb meanings:
to decline in health, strength, or vigor
to fall into ruin
to decline from a sound or prosperous condition
rot
gradual decline in strength, soundness, or prosperity or in degree of excellence or perfection
destruction, death; Merriam-Webster identifies this meaning as “obsolete,” but I think we have a good shot at bringing it back
The United States of America has decayed to the extent that it’s no longer even half of what it thinks itself to be. And if the USA is supposed to be–as it thinks it is–God’s gift to the world, it is now a cheap knock-off of the nation initially imagined, of the nation it might have been if it’d been able to live up to its own ideals and fend off the inevitable decay.
As Emily Dickinson wrote,
I reason, we could die– The best Vitality Cannot excel Decay, But, what of that?
A few years ago (never mind how many), Leesa and I drove to DC to spend a couple of days in the city and take in a Keb’ Mo’ concert while there. Leesa has developed a friendship with Kevin—we get to call him Kevin—over the years (and I’m part of it by proxy), so as is usual for us, we got to go backstage after the show to say hello. As we stood outside his dressing room, Kevin introduced us to his co-star for the evening, who was none other than Taj Mahal. But another less recognizable face was there that evening, and Kevin introduced us to him as well. (Leesa likes to say Kevin introduced us as if we were just as famous as anybody else, which is his generous nature.) That other face belonged to David Brooks, who is a conservative political and cultural commentator whose writing appears often in the New York Times.
Having met Mr. Brooks in that way, I tend to notice his writing when it crosses my field of vision. This past week I saw his name on the NYT Sunday Opinion page. His beautiful essay, which I hope you will read via the link, is titled “How to Stay Sane in Brutalizing Times.” The essay walks us through some “tragic” (in a good way) dispositions of sensibility and mentality, and Brooks summarizes his purpose like this:
I’m trying to describe a dual sensibility—becoming a person who learns humility and prudence from the Athenian tradition, but also audacity, emotional openness and care from the Jerusalem tradition.
His use of the adjective tragic doesn’t seem intended to relate exactly to its meaning in the catastrophes of ancient Greek dramatic tragedy, in which some great hero is ultimately destroyed—or at least brought low—by some fatal flaw such as pride. No, Brooks uses tragic in a less bombastic, less catastrophic sense. What he suggests here is that we look at the world and ourselves in realistic and humble ways, that we live prudently and not arrogantly, that we keep ourselves open to the good and the bad that will come our way and not close ourselves off as being above or beyond the reach of our need and that of others, of relationship, of our humanity in common with all.
One key idea Brooks offers is that our tendency to separate, our increasing tendency to rage, our tendency to dehumanize—desensitize us to the world in which we live. And in our desensitized state, we lose track of the wondrous beauty in nature and in each other. When we could be expanding, growing individually and communally, we are instead contracting into tight balls of rage, anger, and—the root of these—fear.
Such a state of being wadded up tight leaves us unable reach out to others, to feel with and for them, to feel sorry for ourselves for the right reasons such as the joy and fellowship and discovery we’re missing. This also is present in Brooks’s essay, probably nowhere more so than this paragraph:
. . . most people — maybe more than you think — are peace- and love-seeking creatures who are sometimes caught in bad situations. The most practical thing you can do, even in hard times, is to lead with curiosity, lead with respect, work hard to understand the people you might be taught to detest.
This passage, especially its phrase “lead with curiosity,” made me decide to focus this 3rd Saturday Song Story on “Sense of Wonder,” a song I wrote with Mark Chesshir sometime back in the late 1980s. I don’t remember the exact division of labor, but my guess is that Mark wrote most of the music while I wrote most of the words.
Here’s the first verse, sung over an appropriately B-minor chord progression:
A rose, unnoticed, blooms and dies to bloom again— So many such gifts return to Sender unopened. Calendar days fly off the wall in whirling wind, And still the journal lays, blank pages from beginning to end.
Somewhere along my journey to becoming an English professor, I learned that the journal “lies” instead of “lays,” but setting that aside, I like the image of a natural world—embodied in the rose—full of amazing events that fail to amaze us because—busy and distracted—we pay so little attention. I also like the images of the flying calendar days I remember seeing in old TV shows and movies and the journal pages flipping through in the same whirlwind.
Next comes the second section of the first verse:
The treadmill world is small— No place for standing tall— Where the heart is a sleeping giant To be feared and kept tied up.
I’m particularly fond of the image of the heart as like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Do we fear our hearts and the acts of feeling, caring, and courage they are all capable of leading us into?
The chorus will grow as the song continues. This first chorus is short: “Racing the rain and chased by the thunder, / Hold on to a sense of wonder.” We threw in the “oh-way-oh” to mimic the moaning voices of those working through enslavement and imprisonment.
Here’s the two halves of the second verse:
The spark of childhood put away with childish things Leaves the good life tasteless and in need of some leavening. Look to the magic of youth— The no-holds-barred search for truth. The heart is a sleeping giant. Take a chance and wake it up.
Do we take 1 Corinthians 13:11-12 a little too literally? A capacity for joy — a sense of wonder — enriches our lives no matter how old we become. Both positive and negative examples of this are all around us in the people we share family and community with.* One of the ways in which an energetic, youthful sense of wonder can be realized — perhaps the main way — is to “take a chance” and wake up our hearts, unbind them, and let them rise.
The second chorus is longer:
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
I like these lines. Even more so than back yonder in the 1980s, our senses are constantly under attack, pummeled by media of all kinds and the excessive drama that all of it seems to wield in ever more dangerous ways. Our senses are drowning in information and misinformation “supposed to fire [our] imagination” when it in fact robs us of imagination, one of the main gifts that should be original in each of us.
And yet the rose continues its amazing cycle of life, which is the idea behind the song’s short bridge:
It is not for things to wonder at that we lack In this catch-as-catch-can struggle with the hourglass.**
We must raise our gaze from our navels (or anybody else’s navel) and take in the world — move through the world — with a sense of wonder.
A rose, unnoticed, blooms and dies to bloom again— So many such gifts return to Sender unopened. Calendar days fly off the wall in whirling wind, And still the journal lays, blank pages from beginning to end. The treadmill world is small— No place for standing tall— Where the heart is a sleeping giant To be feared and kept tied up.
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
The spark of childhood put away with childish things Leaves the good life tasteless and in need of some leavening. Look to the magic of youth— The no-holds-barred search for truth. The heart is a sleeping giant. Take a chance and wake it up.
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
It is not for things to wonder at that we lack In this catch-as-catch-can struggle with the hourglass.
[The Mark Chesshir lead guitar break!]
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
*I read something recently that said the old grammatical rule of not ending a sentence with a preposition is on its way out, going the way of the injunction against the split infinitive. I’m giving it a try, but I’m not comfortable with either change.
**Here the phrase “catch-as-catch-can” joins with the second verse’s phrase “no-holds-barred” to reveal my long-held obsession with wrestling as the most apt metaphor for our relationships with the world, with each other, with our faith, with God.
Who’s Gabriel Tanner, you ask? He’s the central figure of my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook.
The paperback cover from 2017
Yes, he’s fictional, but I know him pretty well. He’s a lot like me in some ways–all right, many ways. But in other ways I won’t go into here, he’s not. In addition to Gabriel’s Songbook, he’s featured in “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel” from 2021’s A Twilight Reel: Stories. And you’ll probably not be surprised to learn that he’s a background character (but never “on stage”) in my new manuscript novel “Streets of Nashville,” as well as one of the featured narrators in my work-in-progress “Avalon Moon.” So, he’s been a busy guy.
I have a file that I keep on my fictional town of Runion and its people. The file includes dates all the way back to 1818. The note on Gabriel Tanner, whose first name seems to mean, in Hebrew, “devoted to God” or “hero of God,” was born to Kirk and Maggie James Tanner on March 8, 1959. He has a brother named Butler, a cousin named Carter “Cutter” Clements, and a wife named Eliza Garrison Tanner, to whom he has been married twice.
How did I pick March 8, 1959, as his birthdate? The 1959 comes from my interest in having him be roughly the same age I am, and I was born on November 25, 1958. More particularly, I picked March 8 because it was on that day in 1983 (I think) that I recorded “Thunder and Lightning” in Nashville. I was in Bullet Recording on Music Square West (17th Avenue South) with my producer Earl Richards and an amazing group of studio musicians. For several days, we’d been tracking songs for my second (unreleased) album, to be titled Waiting for the Night.
March 8 (a Tuesday in 1983) was the last day of laying down basic tracks for the album, and we had maybe two or three hours of studio and musician time remaining. So Earl asked if I had anything more that I wanted to record. “Well,” I said. “I have this new one that we could try.” (I said something like that. This was forty years ago today, you know, and I was twenty-four years old.) I played the song through once for the musicians, and they were ready to record. I doubt that it took more than a couple of takes to capture the track.
Oh, man, it was gonna be a hit! So said all who played on it and heard it. But it was not to be, as the album never saw the light of day.
Several years later, the “Cody Band” version of “Thunder and Lightning” made it on an Asheville, NC, radio station’s River Rock album and became a local–even regional–hit, making the list of top five requests of the day (alongside Prince, Madonna, and others) for several weeks in a row and subsequently picking up over one thousand plays between January and August.
The song was–and still is–terrifically important to me, so you can understand how its original recording date of March 8 would be assigned the birthdate of Gabriel Tanner.
If you’re reading this and you’ve ever worked with Leesa or sat in her chair, you know she will not do hair without music. Recently, we had to purchase a new MP3 player for her salon. I loaded it with some songs I had on hand, MP3s of favorites we’d purchased over the past few years. Along with those, I dumped whole jump drive of my songs on the new player, which she seems very happy about.
You know if you’ve seen me since – I don’t know – 2012, I have very little in the way of hair left on my head, and we’ve even begun buzzing that down to the scalp, just short of shaving it. Anyway, maintaining this requires that I sit down in her styling chair every 10-14 days. The last time I was there, a song came on that I had more or less forgotten. It’s called “Angel.”
I wrote the song in 1987 with Mark Chesshir, one of the lead guitarists in the band we typically called The Cody Band. Many of the songs recorded at Mark’s home studio over the years, especially those songs that don’t appear on either Cody Retrospective or Homecoming, Mark and I performed ourselves, playing all the parts or bringing in musical friends when needed or desired. I think “The Light in Your Eyes” and “I Must Have Dreamed” are good examples of this practice.
“Angel” includes the full band, I think. Mark Chesshir and Gene Ford on guitars, either Danny O’Lannerghty or Mark Burchfield on bass (can’t remember which), and Steve Grossman on drums. My guess is that Mark also played keys. I’m not sure why the song doesn’t appear on either of the albums mentioned above. If I’m remembering right, it was a powerful piece when we played it live.
I would feel the way I feel tonight forever if I could. My eyes are clear, my heart is strong, and love feels like it should. Still, the dawn cannot be held back, and this night will have an end. But as long as you stay, I know I’ll feel this way again.
O Angel, I know the sound of your wings. O Angel, I’m always listening for that whisper in the night.
When you hear me say, “I love you,” don’t feel trapped and run away. Sometimes when I look at you, I can find nothing else to say. I remember the nights that I have spent chasing ghosts and dreams. But you’re real to the touch, You don’t know how much that means.
O Angel, I know the sound of your wings. O Angel, I’m always listening for that whisper in the night.
I’ve seen so many broken hearts getting washed away at night. Come and carry me above that tide.
O Angel, I know the sound of your wings. O Angel, I’m always listening for that whisper in the night.
. . . for my contribution to politicizing Christmas.
People exist in this world who believe that certain other people have been waging a war on Christmas. People exist in this world who believed — and maybe still believe — that the 2016 election of Donald Trump was a win for Christmas in this (nonexistent, in my opinion) war.
Consider these 2022 Christmas “tweets” (still a stupid thing to think of as a meaningful pronouncement). Really think about them, setting aside our tendency to valorize our own or demonize the other.
Now honestly, which seems most in keeping with the Christmas spirit? Which the most respectful of the season and its origins? Can the Christmas spirit, given its source in Christ, be shared through sarcasm and bitterness?
I recently completed my annual reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, first published on 19 December 1843, one hundred seventy-nine years ago. In “Stave Three: The Second of the Three Spirits,” telling the story of Scrooge’s time with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge connects Christmas with Sundays (“‘seventh day'”), when the shops are closed and thereby the poor are deprived of a meal. Speaking for himself and the whole family of Christmases past, the Ghost of Christmas Present says,
“There are some upon this earth of yours, . . . who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived.”
What the Ghost of Christmas Present suggests here is that there are those who claim Christ/Christianity/Christmas whose lives and deeds in this world are carried on as if Christ/Christianity/Christmas are names only, dead things that “‘never lived.'”
And now I’ll stray off into a couple of related asides. . . .
Almost one hundred years after Dickens, Joseph Campbell wrote a passage in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces that, from the moment I read it, put me in mind of Donald Trump and his “kith and kin”:
The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.
Christians are Easter people, not Christmas people (and certainly not 4th-of-July people). For Christians, Christmas has no meaning without Easter.
Now, here’s a very recent bit of aggressive ignorance from one of Trump’s kith and kin. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert dismissed the Cross and the sacrifice upon which true Christianity is based, suggesting that Jesus wouldn’t have had to die if he’d had enough AR-15s “to keep his government from killing him.” Yes, she really said that.
I used to love hearing my cousin Darwin Reeves sing a 20th-century hymn titled “Ten Thousand Angels,” written in 1958 by Ray Overholt. The chorus goes, in part, like this:
He could have called ten thousand angels To destroy the world and set Him free. He could have called ten thousand angels, But He died alone, for you and me.
An important verse of the song goes like this:
To the howling mob He yielded; He did not for mercy cry. The cross of shame He took alone. And when He cried, “It’s finished,” He gave Himself to die; Salvation’s wondrous plan was done.
This is based on Matthew 26:53, in which Jesus says as he is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemene, “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”
But according to Boebert, Jesus should have been like Neo and asked for “guns, lots of guns”:
I hope that true Christians — not Xians — will call out Boebert (and her kith and kin) for such crass abuse of their faith and such overt kissing of the gun lobby’s “butt.”
I had some other stuff, but I think I’ll save it for my next 4th Tuesday Political post.
In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all — and all means all, y’all — and a healthy and happy New Year!
The front picture is of me as I looked when I wrote “Christmastime.” The performance is by me now, thirty-four years later.
As I recall . . .
It was in the spring of 1988, and I was writing songs for Ave Canora, a small publishing venture that was part of the music empire of Nashville/Broadway singing star Gary Morris. Word ran through the offices of Gary Morris Music that he would be recording a Christmas album in the near future. I’d never written a Christmas song before, but I really wanted to have a song on that album.
So, in April 1988, in the midst of that year’s Easter season, I sat down to write “Christmastime.” My main musical influences were only two: almost 30 years of hymns and carols in my little mountain church and community in Walnut, North Carolina, and Johnny Mathis’s album Merry Christmas, the Christmas album of all Christmas albums as far as I’m concerned, released in October 1958, less than two months before I was born. I was writing a lot of songs in the key of E at the time, and so, E it was for “Christmastime.”
Here’s an early recording of “Christmastime” from the home studio of my friend Mark Chesshir. It’s possible that this is the demo that I turned in to Ave Canora and the version that Gary heard.
Verse #1 is all about light, which is one of my true loves in the Christmas season. Leesa and I don’t decorate the exterior of our house, but I love the lights of Christmas. Light designs and displays–from simple to complex–are the only thing I enjoy about the extended Christmas season the Xian world developed due to the demands of capitalism.
See the world In a different light At Christmastime. See it shine In the children’s eyes At Christmastime. Let the season sparkle in me Like the moon on virgin snow Fallen some long-ago Christmastime.
We have light appearing in “shine” and “sparkle,” and we have “light” in its different connotation of understanding–to see the world in a different light. Many of us give the world a little more grace at Christmastime. Or maybe we express a little bit of righteous anger at the commercialism that isn’t as much in our faces as at other times of the year. With “virgin,” the lyric includes just a taste, an essence, a foreshadowing, of the Christian story of the birth of Jesus. And the “snow” is classic in terms of memory and desire, for me, as I’m always “dreaming of a white Christmas.”
Verse #2 is about memory. The older I get, the more precious and haunting memory becomes, perhaps especially in the context of Christmas. So much of the celebration and so many of the people I’ve celebrated with are yearly lost and fade into memory.
Window pane– Watching a parade Through frosty lines. Memories– Bittersweet and homemade– Cross my mind. Family and friends at the door– With the laughter and the kisses pour Love and good wishes for Christmastime.
This verse is made up of images from memory. These memories, however, are only implied. They’re left vague and general so that the listener (reader) can plug in their specific memories and memory images. I doubt if I thought that at the time I was writing this lyric, but it’s the way I understand it now.
Verse #3 returns to the Christmas story a bit more directly than the intimation of “virgin” in the first verse. We have a star and a child, a call for peace and stillness, a sounds of celebrating bells and singing people and angels.
Distant star, I am not alone With you in sight. In my heart, There’s a little child Alive tonight. So, let the world lie peaceful and still While the bells ring and people sing And angel wings are whispering, “It’s Christmastime.”
I hope that I got chills, that I maybe even cried, when I completed this last verse. It’s all there, I think, all that Christmas has been to me–all that I struggle to have it still be to me. The star that guided the wise men guides me to the child that is still alive in me. The moon on virgin snow exists as part of a world lying peaceful and still. The parade, the laughter, kisses, and good wishes are echoed in the ringing bells and the singing people. And at the end, the lyric returns one last time to the original Christmas story of angels–the “heavenly host”–appearing to the shepherds.
See the world In a different light At Christmastime. See it shine In the children’s eyes At Christmastime. Let the season sparkle in me Like the moon on virgin snow Fallen some long-ago Christmastime.
Window pane– Watching a parade Through frosty lines. Memories– Bittersweet and homemade– Cross my mind. Family and friends at the door– With the laughter and the kisses pour Love and good wishes for Christmastime.
Distant star, I am not alone With you in sight. In my heart, There’s a little child Alive tonight. So, let the world lie peaceful and still While the bells ring and people sing And angel wings are whispering, “It’s Christmastime.”
Many thanks to everybody who, over the years, has said that it’s not really Christmas until they’ve heard “Christmastime”!
“Merry Christmas to all!”
Here’s some more stuff:
I’ll go ahead and say it (with some regret and bitterness, and with apologies for the latter): I have a crass commercial desire that many singers had recorded “Christmas Time” so that I could have a nice little royalty bonus every year . . . and so could Leesa when I’m gone . . . and so could Lane and Raleigh when Leesa’s gone. . . .
When I first moved to Johnson City, people used to say, “Hey, I heard ‘Christmas Time’ in K-Mart today!” I even heard it there a time or two myself. But, you know, K-Mart’s not around anymore. (There’s the bitterness again, and again, I apologize.)
Jimmy Patterson was a fellow I met years ago when Leesa, Raleigh, and I attended Cherokee United Methodist Church. He loved “Christmastime.” I heard it told that the first time I played it at Cherokee, Jimmy was standing with our pastor David Woody, and in his excitement over what he was hearing, Jimmy took Pastor Woody’s hand and squeezed it. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that “Christmastime” meant so much to Jimmy that his wife Bonnie asked me to play it at his funeral / celebration of life . . . in the summertime, as I recall.
One last thing: Gary Morris released two different versions of his album Every Christmas.
I don’t remember exactly why this was the case, but here’s my story about it. He already had the original Every Christmas album recorded and turned in to Warner Brothers Records by the time I submitted “Christmastime.” That’s the cover on the left, released in 1988. The last song–track 10 on that one–was Gary’s version of “Carol of the Bells.” Then at some point soon afterwards, no later than Christmas 1990, they repackaged and rereleased the album–new cover (on the right) and “Christmastime” replaced “Carol of the Bells.” In practical terms, just as far as publishing goes, Gary’s company would receive what was called mechanical royalties for “Christmastime” that he wouldn’t receive for “Carol of the Bells.” I doubt that was the driving force behind the change, but it was a side effect. Now, on Gary’s website, the album on the left is for sale instead of the later “blue” version. Interestingly, the side effect here is that whoever gets the money for sales of that “poinsettia” version does not have to pay mechanical royalties to me because “Christmastime” isn’t on that version. Given this, I think it’s worth noticing that Spotify, iTunes, and other platforms sell only the “poinsettia” version, so . . . no Christmas royalties for me!
O the bells ring and people sing and angel wings are whispering, “It’s Christmastime”!
