THE Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, together with its many successors and variations, is one of the great liturgical innovations of the modern era. Yet it is not so much an innovation as a recovery: a recovery of a lost way of reading the Bible, an ancient way of telling the salvation story, which is also and always our story.
The service in its present form goes back not just to the service on Christmas Eve of 1918 in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, put together by Eric Milner-White and first broadcast by the BBC in 1928, but to the very first Lessons and Carols, devised by E. W. Benson, the Bishop of Truro, and celebrated on Christmas Eve 1880 in the great wooden shed with which they made do before the present cathedral was built (Features, 18 December 2020). Benson’s son has described how his father “arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve — nine carols and nine tiny lessons, which were read by various officers of the Church, beginning with a chorister, and ending, through the different grades, with the Bishop”.
The genius of that first liturgy of lessons and carols was that the readings reached back to Genesis instead of beginning with the Gospels, so that they set out the over-arching narrative of scripture as a whole. Benson was alive to the way in which the Gospels re-read and reimagine the Old Testament so coherently and helpfully — a way of reading scripture which was natural to patristic and medieval readers, but was lost and overwritten — one might say, scribbled over — by all the speculations and atomising analysis of 19th-century form and historical criticism, dissolving the imaginative unity of scripture into a series of detached fragments and urtexts.
Though he was not the first to devise such a service, special credit must go to Milner-White for the brilliant bidding prayer that he placed at the beginning of the service at King’s, especially in the second paragraph, where he says: “Let us read and mark in Holy Scripture the tale of the loving purposes of God from the first days of our disobedience unto the glorious Redemption brought us by this Holy Child. . .”
With the phrase “read and mark”, he alludes to the familiar and comforting words of the old collect that we should “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” God’s word in the scriptures; but his addition to that of his own phrase “the tale of the loving purposes of God” is pure genius. Suddenly, we are taken out of the classroom and into the circle round the fireside telling tales, leaning in, finding ourselves in the story. The primal tale of the first Adam through whom everything went wrong suddenly comes into focus and makes sense of the tale of how the second Adam came to be born to set things right. At long last, we are reading with the grain of the scriptures, and not against it.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to write a poem to go with a variation of the Lessons and Carols service being celebrated in New York. It gave me a chance, in my own way, to follow with joy the narrative threads that lead from the Garden of Eden not only to the manger at Bethlehem but to Gethsemane, Golgotha, and, at last, to the Easter Garden. I’m glad to publish “A Tale of Two Gardens” here for the first time, and to share it this Christmas with readers of the Church Times.
A Tale of Two Gardens
God gave us all a garden once
And walked with us at eve
That we might know him face to face
With no need to believe.
But we denied and hid from him,
Concealing our own shame.
Yet he still came to look for us
And call us each by name.
He found us where we hid from him.
He clothed us in his grace.
But still we turned our backs on him
And would not see his face.
So now he comes to us again
Not as a Lord most high,
But weak and helpless as we are
That we might hear him cry.
And he who clothed us in our need
Lies naked in the straw
That we might wrap him in our rags
Whom once we fled in awe.
The strongest comes in weakness now,
A stranger to our door.
The king forsakes his palaces
And dwells amongst the poor.
And where we hurt he hurts with us
And when we weep he cries.
He knows the heart of all our hurts
The inside of our sighs.
He does not look down from above
But gazes up at us
That we might take him in our arms
Who always cradles us.
And if we welcome him again
With open hands and heart,
He’ll plant his garden deep in us,
The end from which we start.
And in that garden there’s a tomb
Whose stone is rolled away,
Where we and all we’ve ever loved
Were lowered in the clay.
But lo! the tomb is empty now
And, clothed in living light,
His ransomed people walk with One
Who came on Christmas night.
So come, Lord Jesus, find in me
The child you came to save.
Stoop tenderly with wounded hands
And lift me from my grave.
Be with us all, Emmanuel,
And keep us close and true.
Be with us till that Kingdom comes
Where we will be with you.