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You know how sometimes you'll sing a song you've sung a million times before, and all of a sudden you really hear it. You notice the lyrics, for the first time, in all their poignancy.
This happened to me, last night, while singing "It came upon a midnight clear," especially verse 3:
Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife
And hear the angels sing.
The lyrics were written by an Edmund H. Sears in 1849 ... before the Civil War, before WWI or II. And it's as if it could have been written yesterday.
These lyrics resonate with me so much. Sometimes it feels to me that if everyone would just shut up, stop their bickering and petty fighting, and listen, they could hear they angels sing, that song from long ago, "Gloria in Excelsis Deo," they sang it on the day Jesus was born (and sure, that day was almost certainly not December 25, but this is the day we celebrate it so there), and it still echoes today, if we'd only listen.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
This happened to me, last night, while singing "It came upon a midnight clear," especially verse 3:
Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife
And hear the angels sing.
The lyrics were written by an Edmund H. Sears in 1849 ... before the Civil War, before WWI or II. And it's as if it could have been written yesterday.
These lyrics resonate with me so much. Sometimes it feels to me that if everyone would just shut up, stop their bickering and petty fighting, and listen, they could hear they angels sing, that song from long ago, "Gloria in Excelsis Deo," they sang it on the day Jesus was born (and sure, that day was almost certainly not December 25, but this is the day we celebrate it so there), and it still echoes today, if we'd only listen.
Merry Christmas, everyone.