Stable Lamp is Lighted,” born on a Connecticut college campus; and the South Carolina composition “Come, Tou Long-Expected Jesus.” Add to these the joyous African-


American spiritual “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” and we have a small picture of how our immediate neigh- bors responded to the Christ event.


But neither the season nor the


joy is limited to the Western world. From Malawi, a nation of southeast- ern Africa, comes the traditional folk tune “Tat Boy-Child of Mary,” and from the Cameroons in western Africa we have a carol titled “He Came Down.” Chinese culture also has provided


us with songs of faith, including Geonyong Lee’s “Come Now, O Prince of Peace,” and hymn writer Qi-fang Liang, who added to our musical treasury with his “Midnight Stars Make Bright the Skies.” And one of the most popular hymns for Japanese Christians is “In a Lowly Manger Born.”


Ecumenical fabric If the music of this holy season pro- vides us with global diversity, it also exhibits an ecumenical fabric. While Martin Luther wrote “From Heaven Above,” a Welsh Baptist, William Walker, gave us “Come, Tou Long-Expected Jesus.” We can add an American Unitarian, Edmund H. Sears, who gave us “It Came upon the Midnight Clear”; a British Congregationalist, Isaac Watts, with his “Joy to the World”; and “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” written by an American Episcopal bishop, Phillips Brooks. Some carols were written by


giants of hymnology such as Swe- den’s Johan Olof Wallin, Denmark’s Nicolai Grundtvig, and Germany’s Felix Mendelssohn with his tune for “Hark! Te Herald Angels Sing.”


But others weren’t professional


musicians, such as William Chat- terton Dix, an insurance salesman; the fourth-century lawyer Marcus Aurelius Clemens Prudentius; and the American English professor, Richard Purdy Wilbur. But perhaps the ultimate human


interest stories surrounding the carols is the fact that on at least two occasions marriages between texts and tunes were regarded as ill- advised and doomed to failure. When Dix wrote the words to


“What Child is Tis” the text was without a tune. Gradually the words were united with a popular ballad that had been written three centuries earlier titled “Greensleeves.” It was regarded as a tune so totally unfit for a sacred theme that even William Shakespeare had once used an anal- ogy of two things being as unrelated as “the hundredth Psalm to the tune of Greensleeves.” But they were wrong and the marriage continues to this day. Te other unusual bonding of text


and tune occurred when “Hark! Te Herald Angels Sing” was written as a poem of four-line stanzas in 1739 by Charles Wesley, whose brother John was the founder of the Methodist Church. A year later Mendelssohn, the son


of a Jewish father and a Christian mother, composed a piece of music to celebrate the 400th anniversary of printing. He expressed a desire to find a text but felt it would never be appropriate for a sacred text. Never- theless, the combination gradually happened and it has stood the test of time. And so a journey through the


music of Christmas reveals a uni- versal emotion that cuts across all boundaries. Tis Christmas season, as we open our hymnals to again join in singing those old familiar carols, let us be reminded not only of the Savior’s birth but that songs cel- ebrating that birth have come from every corner of the globe spanning many centuries. Christmas carols are truly songs


of the world. People in every situa- tion and time have heard the song of the angels and have answered back with songs of their own. 


Author bio: Dickson is an ELCA pastor, retired chemistry professor, and author of 15 books on science and theology. He lives in Hickory, N.C.


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