"Who is He?"

 

“Who is He?” is another of my favorite hymns we sang in the churches on Tiree when I was a child. This reprint is from December 31, 2012.

Benjamin Russell Hanby is an American composer who also wrote “Up on the Housetop” and “Jolly Old St. Nicholas.” Still, I think of “Who is He” in connection with Scotland because that is where I first heard it.

“Who is He?”

The last of my favorite Scottish Christmas carols isn’t a Christmas carol at all. It starts out like one, but it is also a Good Friday and Easter hymn. In fact, we sang it year round.

Benjamin Russell Hanby wrote both the words and the music (tune, Lowliness) to “Who is He?” In the verses below, I’ve printed the chorus each time for easier reading.

Who is He, in yonder stall,

At whose feet the shepherds fall?

‘Tis the Lord! O wondrous story!

‘Tis the Lord, the King of Glory!

At His feet we humbly fall;

Crown Him, crown Him Lord of all.

 

Who is He, in yonder cot,*

Bending to His toilsome lot?

‘Tis the Lord! O wondrous story!

‘Tis the Lord, the King of Glory!

At His feet we humbly fall;

Crown Him, crown Him Lord of all.

 

Who is He, in deep distress,

Fasting in the wilderness?

‘Tis the Lord! O wondrous story!

‘Tis the Lord, the King of Glory!

At His feet we humbly fall;

Crown Him, crown Him Lord of all.

 

Who is He that stands and weeps

At the grave where Lazarus sleeps?

‘Tis the Lord! O wondrous story!

‘Tis the Lord, the King of Glory!

At His feet we humbly fall;

Crown Him, crown Him Lord of all.

 

Lo! at midnight, who is He

Prays in dark Gethsemane?

‘Tis the Lord! O wondrous story!

‘Tis the Lord, the King of Glory!

At His feet we humbly fall;

Crown Him, crown Him Lord of all.

 

Who is He, in Calvary’s throes,

Asks for blessings on His foes?

‘Tis the Lord! O wondrous story!

‘Tis the Lord, the King of Glory!

At His feet we humbly fall;

Crown Him, crown Him Lord of all.

 

Who is He that from the grave

Comes to heal and help and save?

‘Tis the Lord! O wondrous story!

‘Tis the Lord, the King of Glory!

At His feet we humbly fall;

Crown Him, crown Him Lord of all.

 

Who is He that on yon throne

Rules the world of light alone?

‘Tis the Lord! O wondrous story!

‘Tis the Lord, the King of Glory!

At His feet we humbly fall;

Crown Him, crown Him Lord of all.**

The three children you see standing in front of the largest church on Tiree were sad when they had to leave the Isle, but they were also excited about returning to Edinburgh at the beginning of a new year.

In the same way, I’m sad to be leaving this series on Scottish Christmas carols, but I’m excited about writing new posts for 2013. Come along and see how I do.

Have a Christ-filled year.

__________

* “Cot” can mean either a narrow bed, such as one where a child might sleep, or a small house, such as one where a carpenter might live and work.

** As printed in The Church Hymnary, Revised Edition (Oxford University Press, 1927). This source identifies the tune as “Lowliness.” In other sources, the same tune is called “Who Is He.”

"Child in the Manger"

 

This week’s post is reprinted from December 24, 2012. Obviously, the photo was not taken during my childhood but is from a trip back to Tiree with my brothers in 2017. Daddy did preach at this church, however.

“Child in the Manger”

Another carol I learned in Scotland is “Child in the Manger,” written in Gaelic by Mary Macdonald and translated into English by Lachlan Macbean. It is sung to a Gaelic melody now called Bunessan.

This carol needs no introduction and no explanation. Here it is.

 

Child in the manger,

Infant of Mary;

Outcast and stranger,

Lord of all!

Child who inherits

All our trangressions,

All our demerits

On Him fall.

 

Once the most holy

Child of salvation

Gently and lowly

Lived below;

Now, as our glorious

Mightly Redeemer,

See Him victorious

O’er each foe.

 

Prophets foretold Him,

Infant of wonder;

Angels behold Him

On His throne;

Worthy our Savior

Of all their praises;

Happy forever

Are His own.*

 Have a blessed Christmas.

__________

* As printed in The Church Hymnary, Revised Edition (Oxford University Press, 1927).

"In the Bleak Midwinter"

 

During the rest of December, I will be reprinting posts from 2012. They talk about three Christmas carols that I learned when living in Scotland as a child. This first one is from December 17, 2012.

“In the Bleak Midwinter”

The year my family lived in Scotland, we spent our Christmas holiday on the Isle of Tiree, where my father earned a small stipend by preaching at the churches scattered around the island. Tiree was sparsely populated and the congregations were small, but the people were warm and friendly.

The picture shows the house we rented for our brief stay.

Before we even left for Tiree, I discovered several new Christmas carols. Three of them became favorites, and I’m going to spend the next few weeks talking about them.

Two carols are very strong theologically, so I’ll save them for the next two Mondays. I’ll start with the weakest of the three.

“In the Bleak Midwinter” has plenty of faults. First, the winter that Christina Rossetti wrote about resembles the ones she knew in England, not the kind they have in Bethlehem. Second, nobody knows what month Jesus was born in, but chances are it wasn’t during the winter. Still, something in the song spoke to me.

Maybe it was because it is so singable, or it could have been the melody (Cranham, by Gustav Holst). Then again, it could have been that, as a ten-year-old who had grown up in church, I was surprised to find a popular Christmas carol I didn’t know.

Or maybe it was because the Sunday School I often attended used the last verse as its offertory. And that is the best verse of the carol from a theological standpoint.

Here are all the words. Enjoy the first three stanzas, but focus on the fourth.

 

In the bleak midwinter,

Frosty winds made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone;

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

Snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter,

Long ago.

 

Our God, heaven cannot hold Him,

Nor earth sustain;

Heaven and earth shall flee away

When He comes to reign:

In the bleak midwinter

A stable place sufficed

The Lord God Almighty,

Jesus Christ.

 

Angels and archangels

May have gathered there,

Cherubim and seraphim

Thronged the air—

But His mother only,

In her maiden bliss,

Worshiped the Beloved

With a kiss.

 

What can I give Him,

Poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd,

I would bring a lamb;

If I were a wise man,

I would do my part;

Yet what I can I give Him—

Give my heart.*

And your heart is enough.

__________

* As printed in The Church Hymnary, Revised Edition (Oxford University Press, 1927).

Finding Time for Writing

Roland is getting his right knee replaced this week, and the surgery and follow-up will have me spending a lot of time in waiting rooms during December. My very thoughtful husband is giving me an early Christmas present by hiring a cleaning lady to come in twice while he is recuperating, but I’ll still have to take over some of the day-to-day chores that Roland usually does. This means that I’ll have less time for writing than usual.

So how can I make the most of the time I do have? I’ll look for every spare moment and use it.

Fortunately, I have enough warning about those waiting room visits to make sure I have something to do while waiting. For example, although I’m not going to take my laptop to the hospital, I do plan to take the following:

• Kindle,
• My critique partner's current chapter and a red pen for comments and edits,
• Lined paper and black pen to work on the next chapter or two of my current work in progress, and
• Character list, extended outline (detailed notes for each chapter), and any research I need for the next few chapters of my work in progress.

·      I’ll still have to type up the critique and any new chapters when I get home, but most of the work will already have been done.

I’m also going to free up some writing time by using reprints for my blogs over the next three weeks.

Writing is in my genes, and I can’t not write. (Yes, the double negative is intentional.)

So I WILL find time for it.

 

A Christmas Card Tradition

 

Roland and I created, addressed, and sent our Christmas cards this past weekend. Actually, I did most of the creating, but Roland had significant input. In fact, our Christmas card tradition sprung from one of his ideas.

On a trip to Greece and Turkey in 2006, we spent some time at the Ephesus Museum in a small town outside of Ephesus. While there, Roland took a photo of a busted up statue of Ceasar Augustus. We were sending out commercial Christmas cards at the time and continued to do so through 2009. By 2010, however, I had started making notecards from some of my photos, and we decided to create our own Christmas cards instead of buying them. Then Roland had the idea of using his photo of Ceasar Augustus with “Ceasar’s Greetings” on the front and Luke 2:1-7 on the inside. That’s the scripture that tells us it was a decree from Ceasar Augustus that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. Here is the front of that card:

From 2011–2014, most of our Christmas cards used nativity scenes found at various places in the Midwest, although 2015 was a Bernardino Luini painting from the Louvre that I took during a brief stop in Paris that year, and 2017 was a stained-glass window from a church in Normandy, which I took during that same trip.

After that, we decided we would try to use religious photos from the trips we had taken during the year. We were mostly successful. We even had a photo from our 2020 trip, which we squeezed in just before the pandemic shut everything down. We were traveling again by the end of 2021, but that trip to Africa produced no appropriate photos, so we had to dig into my photo archives for a photo taken in Florence, Italy in 2018. Last year we were back on track, and this year we had three photos to choose from—one from Melbourne and two from Ireland. We ended up using the one at the top of this post.

Let’s hope that next year yields some equally good choices.

__________

The photo at the head of this blog is a painting on exhibit at Kilkenny Castle in Kilkenny, Republic of Ireland, and I photographed it while we were there in May. The card next to the painting identified it as “Madonna and Child—Artist: after Carlo Dolci (1616-86).”

Thank God

 

No, I’m not swearing. With Thanksgiving coming up, I decided to take a traditional approach to this week’s blog post and thank God for His many blessings: a loving husband, three wonderful children (including my son-in-law), great friends, good health (for my age), my writing, plenty of activities to keep me busy, a church where I can grow in my knowledge of and relationship with Christ, and, of course, Christ’s death on the cross to save me from my sins.

But most of this post will be taken from Martin Luther’s Small Catechism. Here is his explanation to the Fourth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer.

Give us this day our daily bread.

What does this mean? God certainly gives daily bread to everyone without our prayers, even to all evil people, but we pray in this petition that God would lead us to realize this and to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving.

What is meant by daily bread? Daily bread includes everything that has to do with the support and needs of the body, such as food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, land, animals, money, goods, a devout husband or wife, devout children, devout workers, devout and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, self-control, good reputation, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.

So thank God this week and always.

__________

The photo shows Martin Luther’s study at Wartburg Castle where he translated the New Testament into German. I took it during a Reformation tour in 2016.

It's a Lie

 

As I wrote last week’s blog post, I was reminded of a post I wrote eleven years ago objecting to telling children that they can be anything they want to be. That November 12, 2012 post is reprinted here.

It’s a Lie

Violin concertos embraced me as I drove back from Indianapolis on Saturday, and my heart soared and ached simultaneously. I longed to be able to play like that.

I love the violin. It is more versatile than any other musical instrument. In Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” the violins trill like birds, roar like thunder, murmur like a gentle breeze, romp like peasants celebrating the harvest, and spit like icy rain.

Few of you know that I used to play violin. I took lessons for three years and played last chair in the college orchestra for one year before I faced the truth: I would never be more than a sixth-rate violinist. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. Granted, I didn’t practice as much as I should have, but it was my body that betrayed me.

Physically, there are two characteristics all good violinists possess. One is an “ear” for pitch. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are deaf violinists who can “hear” the pitch in the vibrations that course through their fingertips. But one way or another, a violinist must be able to determine whether he or she is on pitch while tuning and playing the instrument.

If a piano is properly tuned, playing the perfect pitch is as simple as hitting a particular key. Violins aren’t like that. Each string contains a continuum of pitches, and producing the right one requires you to hear it inside your head as you place your fingers.

I was good at that.

The other necessary characteristic is dexterity. Dexterity in the bow arm (which is the right arm for a right-handed person), and dexterity in the fingers that play the notes, which are on the opposite hand than the one you use for writing and other fine-motor skills.

Dexterity I didn’t have and could never develop no matter how motivated I was. If I had set my heart on being a great violinist, my dreams—and my heart—would have shattered.

So I wince whenever I hear someone say, “You can be whatever you want if you try hard enough.”

It’s a lie.

Not everyone can be the smartest kid in the class or the prettiest girl or the best athlete. Many people want to be President of the United States or Miss America or an Olympic gold medalist, but only a few succeed.

I’ll never be a good violinist. But that’s okay, because my talents lie in other directions.

We all have talents. They may not be the ones that make us rich or famous, but everyone is valuable. We need carpenters as much as (okay, more than) we need lawyers.

The secret to success is not in believing that we can be whatever we want to be. That road leads to heartbreak.

The secret to success is discovering our talents and making the most of them.

And that’s no lie.