Yesterday was bright, sunny. Nature smelled fresh from overnight rain.
Today morning snow flurries. Grey and somber.
Time for more Christmas songs and winter poems.
Velvet Shoes
by Elinor Wylie (1921)
|
Singing From on High
The traditional Christmas story feels somewhat out of touch in our current stage of economic progress. Very much apart from present everyday experiences.
Except for a few countries, there are no shepherds tending their sheep by night. No one to see angels announcing news of great joy. Nor an angelic host praising God with song.
Or might there be a modern day version of this event?
Not of shepherds tending flocks, but shoppers reviewing lists. A very busy, packed department store of last minute consumers seeking just the right gifts.
Not voices from afar but the growing impression of a musical sound. And then suddenly an angelic choir, seemingly everywhere and nowhere, surrounding the crowd with exultation.
Yes, it did happen. Really. And with modern iPhones, the whole event was captured for all to witness. Some were stunned with awe. Others sang along with the joyful noise. Some hugged their neighbors.
No one continued shopping. It was too powerful an experience to continue with everyday tasks. It interrupted immediate intentions and changed the sense of where everyone was at that time.
All shared this rejoicing in the midst of a very busy time.
You can feel the emotion in the event. And experience it, as the glory of Christmas captures everyone, at least for a moment. The smiles, the sense of exultation. The wonderment !
Merry Christmas on this and every day.
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp_RHnQ-jgU”
A Season Uniting Two Cooperative Virtues
Christmas in all its joyous celebrations seems to walk an awkward line between secular, commercial activities at their frenzied peak and the religious meaning of the Advent season.
There is a minor echo of this tension in credit union history. As the decade of the 1950’s evolved there was increasing friction between two priorities. One group wanted to promote the business potential of the cooperative system versus the expansion minded pioneers whose primary intent was forming more credit unions.
Today these differing views might be categorized by those who focus on purpose as the driving force, versus those who belief that growth through acquisitions of their peers and bank purchases are the way to secure the future.
How One Company Combines the Season’s Messages
Occasionally a firm will try to unite the business and religious aspects of this special season. The UK grocery chain, Sainsbury, has created a unique “commercial” each Christmas for over a decade. Each new effort commemorates an important value of the season while reference to the company’s business is at best tangential.
In 2014 their “offering” lasted over three minutes. As described by Stephen Masty:
“it recreated the informal Christmas Truce that spread among soldiers in the trenches near Ypres in 1914, one hundred years earlier. Instigated by a British officer writing to his German counterpart across No Man’s Land, it spread up and down the battle lines as, for a few hours, the guns stopped firing. Yesterday‘s and tomorrow’s combatants sang hymns together and celebrated the birth of the Prince of Peace.
The 2014 ad was the first to mark the Christianity of Christmas. German and British soldiers start to sing “Silent Night” almost spontaneously; while the only visible product is a WW1-era chocolate bar. I find it emotionally powerful.”
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWF2JBb1bvM”
The story of the ad’s creation is in an accompanying video of just over three minutes. It demonstrates why and how a very large for-profit firm honors lasting human values while supporting their business.
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s1YvnfcFVs”
The videos’ message is that in the worst of times there can be humanity. And this impulse is to be honored in better times.
Peace, for a moment, broke out in the midst of war. Individuals overcame the ever-present demands of military imperatives and the survival instincts created by trench warfare.
The Blessings of this Season
I am pleased to have shared my observations about credit unions with you this past year.
Cooperatives are a special way to combine our resources to help with everyday individual needs. This is a practical necessity that has existed since humankind first gathered in groups. Whatever the state of the economy.
This season reminds that sharing is an essential human value that is uniquely enabled by cooperative design. Whatever the difference in operational priorities, our unity arises from the belief that the needs of others will be met with common, not just individual, effort.
Merry Christmas. Peace. Goodwill.
Words of Hope in this Season
Words often feel special this time of year. The following poems were written during tragic personal circumstances of both authors. Each still affirms hope.
The first was converted to a popular Christmas carol, sung often today. The other, translated from Russian, celebrates life’s fullness even as it is near ending.
An American Poet Writes in the Face of Personal Tragedy
The circumstances of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s writing I heard the bells on Christmas Day, are clothed in tragedy and personal depression. His wife, Fanny, had been killed two years earlier in a fire started as she was sealing envelopes with hot wax when a flame caught her clothes.
He was too badly burned to attend her funeral, and wore a beard for the rest of his life to disguise the scars on his face from trying to put out the flames.
As a 29 year old widower, he had courted Fanny for seven years before they were married. In their 18 years together, they had six children. For Longfellow, they were the happiest time of his life.
Two years later, in 1863, his oldest son Charlie enlisted in the Union army against Longfellow’s wishes. The poet was a strong abolitionist, but also a pacifist. Charlie wrote his father from DC where he had joined the 1st Massachusetts Artillery:
I have tried hard to resist the temptation of going without your leave but I cannot any longer, I feel it to be my first duty to do what I can for my country and I would willingly lay down my life for it if it would be of any good God Bless you all.
He caught fever in June and took leave that summer to heal at home. He rejoined the fight. In November At New Hope, Va., he was shot, the bullet went through him from back to shoulder, just nicking his spine.
Longfellow brought his son back from DC to their home in Cambridge to convalesce, arriving on December 8th. Listening to church bells ringing at that time of year he was moved to write his poem (original words below) combing his anguish of war and hope for peace.
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
and wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
The carol version often omits the middle stances about the war in which “hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men”.
But despondency is overcome with the affirmation that “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep” and that ultimately there will be “…peace on earth, good will to men”.
The Burl Ives recording of the carol from 1966 is the shortened version omitting the Civil War context.
A Poem of Hope from Russia
Osip Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist who lived there during and after the revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. Born in 1891 he was educated in St. Petersburg, France and Germany. In 1937 Mandelstam was arrested and sentenced to five years in a corrective-labour camp in the Soviet Far East. He died that year at a transit camp near Vladivostok.
He is considered one of the most significant Russian poets of the 20th century. This poem was written in the camp shortly before he died.
And I Was Alive
Written by Osip Mandelstam
Translated by Christian Wiman
And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird–cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self–shattering power,
And it was all aimed at me.
What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?
Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not.
(May 4, 1937)
A Season for Work Appraisals
Bosses Struggle to Respond to Burned Out Workers (Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2021)
“Workplace stress is rampant and resignations have risen; employers are trying four-day workweeks, mandatory vacation days and other new ways of working.
In the first 10 months of this year, America’s workers handed in nearly 39 million resignations, the highest number since tracking began in 2000.
Some want better jobs. Others, a better work-life balance. Still others want a complete break from the corporate grind. Almost two years into the pandemic that left millions doing their jobs from home, many Americans are rethinking their relationship with work.”
A Season of Remembering and Joyous Sounds
One the joys of our annual cycle of religious and secular observances is how past memories are often rekindled. They arise in personal stories and from music primarily played at this time of year.
Last Friday my wife and had dinner with a 90-year-old couple, still living in their home. The husband is still active in the credit union community. He was 11 years old when WW II broke out.
As we finished the meal with Greek cookies bathed in powdered sugar, they recalled a time as children when war cake was served for dessert. The ingredients include little or no milk, sugar, butter, or eggs, because they were rationed, expensive or hard to obtain. When his father received a 5-pound bag of sugar as a gift for Christmas one year, he immediately turned it over to his church lest he be accused of violating ration limits.
Remembering times past makes them special, no matter what our worries were then.
Musical Joys with New Words
Music is especially potent in calling up special moments. I remember the first time I heard a live performance of the Handel’s Messiah. During the Christmas season I was at Boston Symphony Hall, senior year in college, on a date with a young lady whom I would later marry.
Years later I heard the familiar sounds, but with different words. The oratorio was being sung in Russian, a banned work during the Soviet era. This was one of the first recordings in that language. Listening to words, unknown to me, made it a wholly new experience.
En route to a holiday dinner years later while listening to the local classical music station, I heard a new CD that was also not in English. But it was so buoyant, melodic, and festive that I looked up the station’s playlist to find the title of the CD, Karolju.
It is a suite of original Christmas carols for choir and orchestra by the America composer Christopher Rouse. The work was commissioned and first performed on November 7, 1991 by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
The composer modeled the work and its rhythmic variations after Carl Off’s Carmina Burana. Here is how the composer explained his unusual choice of language.
As I wished to compose the music first, the problem of texts presented itself. Finding appropriate existing texts to fit already composed music would have been virtually impossible, and as I did not trust my own ability to devise a poetically satisfying text, I decided to compose my own texts in a variety of languages (Latin, Swedish, French, Spanish, Russian, Czech, German, and Italian) which, although making reference to words and phrases appropriate to the Christmas season, would not be intelligibly translatable as complete entities. It was rather my intent to match the sound of the language to the musical style of the carol to which it was applied. I resultantly selected words often more for the quality of their sound and the extent to which such sound typified the language of their origin than for their cognitive “meaning” per se.
Though the music of Karolju is original, the first and tenth movements of the work paraphrase the coda of “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana. The third movement also quotes a four-measure phrase from The Nutcracker by the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, which itself dates back to an 18th-century minuet.
This is the link to all of the individual carols on the album. Many languages are used but to capture the spirit of the season you might open with the Swedish carol #2, for 1:45 minutes.
Enjoy these original sounds of the season’s spirit. Listen as the words, even when not understood, create texture for each musical movement.
Please add your favorite choral sounds at the end of the blog.
A Nativity Play-Poem
Amid sheepish shepherds,
embarrassed kings, awkward angels
with their bent-coat-hanger wings –
my most unforgettable character
is the tender-hearted lad
assigned to play the innkeeper,
who undid the whole production
when he assured the wandering couple,
“You folks are so, so lucky.
We just had a cancellation.”
by J. Barrie Sheperd
When Our Parents Woke Up 80 Years Ago
My mom grew up in Taylorville, Illinois.
This is an EXTRA edition of the Breeze Courier, Christian County’s only daily from 80 years ago.
The headline event changed the world for our parents. Knowing what was coming, my mom and dad eloped to Missouri to get married as there was no waiting period required for a license.
My Dad’s military ID shows his active service from May 5, 1941 to his release from inactive duty on January 17, 1946.
On page 6 of the paper are ads for current local movies. The main show is Keeping “Em Flying starring Bud Abbott and Lou Costello.
The Special Sunday dinner of roast tom turkey at tne Blue Classic restaurant is 50 cents, served from 12 to 8 pm.
Thanksgiving Settings in 2021
Nature’s fashion change brightens our autumn.
History remembered for those who welcomed the first newcomers to our shores. This blog was written on the land of the Piscataway peoples.
People living in temporary shelters. The unhoused on the grass circle in front of Union Station in DC.
A gift of thanks for a life well lived and hope in the future. (Nun danket alle Gott)
What the Pilgrims Gave Coops
The Pilgrims did much more than inaugurate a national holiday. They set up the first civil authority in the New World. The full agreement is a single paragraph. It was called The Mayflower Combination (November 11, 1620):
IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, & c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience. IN WITNESS whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape-Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, Anno Domini; 1620
Historian Bradley J. Birzer describes this effort as follows: “what incredibly and pugnacious audacity these Pilgrims had. Ruling themselves with a simple agreement, a single paragraph, and a deep and abiding faith.
“I wracked my brain trying to remember an example of another, earlier assertion of self-government. Had the Greeks done it or the Jews? No, they had already relied upon a law giver. The Romans asserted something in 509BC, but I’m not sure it had quite the same texture as what the Pilgrims did in 1620.
“I really couldn’t come up with a significant example. For all intents and purposes, the Plymouth Combination is the first real assertion of the right to self-governance in the modern western world and one of the most important in any time or place.”
The Right of Self Governance
The unique elements of cooperative design are all in this founding document.
Words familiar to any cooperator include: mutually, covenant and combine, for better ordering, and acts, for the general Good of the Colony.
The document was an agreement to work together to further everyone’s well-being.
We remember the Pilgrims for many historical reasons. But the legacy that may be most consequential to America’s history is this commitment to self-government.
Credit unions are the embodiment of this ideal in their design for community financial services.
As we give thanks tomorrow, add the credit union model to the Pilgrim’s legacy for America.