by Fred Moleck
An Anamnestic Advent
There was a lovely segment on NBC’s Today program last week. The Christmas programs A Charlie Brown Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas were celebrated as the harbingers of the Christmas season.
The commentator enthusiastically acclaimed these classic Christmas treats as seasonal visitors, the ones that carry weight in forming the American public’s Christmas consciousness.
Now, he didn’t come out with those words, but his enthusiasm approached unbridled joy.
He exhibited great understanding of the need of repetition and symbolic language that is relevant to and expressive of the community that generates it.
Liturgists, doesn’t that approach a pretty good definition of liturgy? The essential element of music was also highlighted.
The music score for Charlie Brown is a jazz score, the first ever used in a kids’ TV program. It worked.
Burl Ives, the American minstrel of the twentieth century, spun the tale of discrimination against an outsider whose red nose was a liability until it functioned to redeem a difficult situation.
The song—“Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer, had a very shiny nose. And if you ever saw it, you would even say it glows”—which is inescapable for the past six weeks, was the powerful venue. It worked.
(Good grief. I used no other source to quote the opening lines. That’s scary. Incidentally, it is 77 77 77 77D 75 77 77 77D.)
I can’t remember any of the music for How the Grinch Stole Christmas . . . so, it didn’t work.
I found myself agreeing with the commentator a hundred per cent, but then, I, with another thousand liturgical music teachers, have been preaching and teaching the necessity of seasonal repertory.
To hear this principle on a TV program sort of validated for me the past several decades of insisting on a stable repertory for ritual enactment.
Whoa. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
Liturgical principles were around a long time before Schultz and Ives and Suess. (I won’t go as far as calling the TV cartoons an iconographic bridge to the Holy One.)
Advent restarts the cycle of our church year with familiar readings, especially Isaiah; “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” which stretches back to our Ur-songs; and the unnecessary Advent wreath, but don’t you dare try to eliminate it from the Advent environment.
These elements gain their power from the season in which they are used and create the powerful inertia that celebrates the coming of the historical Jesus and the eschatological Jesus.
Seen under that light, Charlie, Rudolph, and Mr. Grinch pale.
Did you ever think that A Charlie Brown Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas would have been infused with anamnestic power?
Good grief and yikes!!You can reach Fred Moleck via email at fmoleck@earthlink.net