'Christ is born' - a musical meditation

Apart from Messiaen's incomparable La Nativite du Seigneur, two of the most extraordinary Christmas chords I know of are found at the end of Sir JohnTavener's 'God is with us' (to be found at least on Choral Music of John Tavener, Naxos 8.555256, LC 05537 (2000); and on Sacred Music by John Tavener, Hyperion CDA 66464 (1991)). This is our Christmas morning music at home.

The text is: "God is with us. Hear ye people, even to the uttermost end of the earth. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light..." (Isa 9:2, 6), ending with 'Christ is born!'

I have not seen the score, but, taking it to be in C major, after the first triumphant 'Christ is born!' sung in a great C major chord, there follows a huge C# minor organ chord - a completely unrelated musical key, minor instead of major, and a semitone up, but linked to the previous chord by the E which is common to both C major and C# minor. The voices continue up a further semitone to D minor, modulating then through F major to another strong (E minor) chord, which is also immediately followed by another massive clashing organ chord of E major, with the mediant sharpened third of the scale of E (G# - also the dominant 5th of the earlier C# minor chord, and where the E is the tonic note of the E major and minor scales). The single note of E thus links all the chords: E major and E minor, C major and C# minor. Extraordinary intrusions, there is still a logical harmonic link between all the apparently incompatible keys.

So, in the Incarnation, the apparently impossible and incompatible chords of divinity and humanity are reconciled. The God who is made human, the Word who is made flesh-and-blood, makes possible what takes place because there are pre-given 'true relations' of Creator and creature. Now, in the beginning of the work of the New Creation, the single linking note of God's extraordinary humility sounds a new - certainly clashing and seemingly contradictory, but in reality related and compatible - symphony of hope and love. In Messiaen's Dieu Parmi nous, the foot-pedal's loud opening descending ladder, in no known or single key, portrays God's descent to rest in 'the low degree'of our humanity. The clashes and alternations, the daring flexible fluidity of chords inTavener's 'God with us' offers the same truth: logic cannot defy God; God descends.

In the wonderful words of Gregory of Nyssa, quoted by Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev (The Mystery of Faith, p. 64), 'Man is more precious than all the rest of the cosmos. Man, completed and perfected, is wondrous, even as God is wondrous. He is more than a microcosm - he is a micro-theos... Between God and man there is and must be commensurability in spite of all that is non-commensurable.' There is correlation as well as broken relationship.

In Jesus, God enters and embraces the frail and glorious vessel of our humanity in order to reveal his own glory. Through the Holy Spirit, God enables there to take place a similar and unique transformation of our individually and infinitely variable created humanity, so that each life, called, converted, polished, broken, hewn, held, shaped, riven and re-made may reveal both our source and our destiny. No other life will reveal what our own will. We are not made to be anyone else. Our celebration of the Feast of the Nativity is the focal point of initiation of that mysterious, hidden, quiet, secret, 'sweet exchange' between God and humanity, which takes place in a life offered without reserve and without understanding, and in the common location of a feeding-trough, where alone all our spirits are fed, as God makes himself as hungry as we are.