This piece was written by Sarah Kate Neall for our Songs of Advent blog series.

It’s hard to talk about working at a boarding school without veering into the genre of either fantasy or horror; my first year, I couldn’t decide if this was a sweet gig or a sinister trick designed to drain me of my 20s. I daily paced tree-lined walkways and took part in a rich history of educating eager minds. Everywhere I looked, there was some gem of New England architecture or flowering of young intellect that made my heart thrill. On the other hand, in my first year, I felt like a fraud in the classroom, a joke of a coach, and I knew I sucked at making snacks for the dorm. At every turn, I felt inadequate and overwhelmed. The stories I was telling myself squared off with one another daily: My God, I’m so lucky! My God, I’m so tired!

Courtesy of unsplash.com and Jeff Sheldon

This contradictory chatter ran on a continual loop in my head all that first semester, but I remember one moment in which it abruptly ceased. I calculated the use of going to the Lessons & Carols service at the school chapel, and I decided attendance would at least get me brownie points for Involvement in School Life. I slid into a wooden pew and glanced at the back of the church, a space now filled with rustling red fabric. One of my students grinned in her chorus gown and waved. The lights dimmed further; the chapel quieted. A single note on the piano sounded, and now a pale soloist in front began:

Once in royal David’s city

stood a lowly cattle shed

The single voice… I don’t really know how to say it, but the voice melted the air. Gleaming like a silver ribbon, it spun into the cavernous chapel space and touched us like a spell, stilling the whispers, pouring into the pews, making the hairs on my neck stand on end. With just a few notes— here we were, in a different world.

Where a mother laid her baby

in a manger for his bed.

Mary was that mother mild,

Jesus Christ her little child.

For whatever reason — fine arts requirement, love of music, selfish calculation, or force of habit, we all were in that chapel, listening to a story where total opposites were simultaneously true:

He came down to earth from heaven,

Who is God and Lord of all,

And His shelter was a stable,

And His cradle was a stall:

With the poor, and mean, and lowly,

Lived on earth our Saviour holy.

I would only later reflect on the lyrics. Here was both quaint Victorian hymn and compelling theological paradox: ‘Lived on earth our Saviour holy,’ it says, like God is coming to earth from heaven. Baby and Almighty, all at the same time, no less humble for his God-ness, no less God for his infant status. It’s a hymn about one of the most alien and strange doctrines of Christianity, that God became man for a time, that he remained fully God and fully man while he dwelled on earth. It is weird.

That man-embodying, the Incarnation, gives the Christ story unique heft. If God demands righteousness, and then God gives himself in the form of a human, both to live out that righteousness and pay the cost for our failure to do so, then He is quite a God. He is not the kind of God who fits neatly into six-line stanzas. But he is a God who nevertheless knows the conditions of human life. He knows exhaustion and wonder. He knows thrill and terror. He grasps incongruous sets of feelings: I am so lucky; I am so tired. He knows all sides to our story.

None of this was in my brain at the time. I was just listening. There was nothing but to listen.

For He is our childhood’s pattern;

Day by day, like us, He grew;

He was little, weak, and helpless,

Tears and smiles, like us He knew;

And He cares when we are sad,

And he shares when we are glad.

I sat there in the pew of the prep school chapel, listening to the soloist with ears suddenly alert and mind absolutely quiet. The loop in my brain ceased. My hands wanted to open. There was only this clear, keen note rising to the rafters, an interruption by something like holiness.

The chorus joined for the second stanza. The gowns began to walk, slowly, down the aisle to proceed with the rest of the song and the concert. I sat back, started to breathe again and to think. All semester I’d been asking “Do I belong? Am I good enough? Am I a fraud?” But as the song rose and fell in the dim light, the questions were no longer mine; they became, instead, simply this:

“Do you know I love you?”

Here He is, Emmanuel, God with us, all the time, perhaps a bit more audibly at Christmas. He’s longing for us to see Him and know Him. We can wrestle with and rest in the paradox of His coming, and maybe we can dwell more richly in our own: so fortunate and so afraid, so known by Him and so loved anyway.  Let us listen:

And our eyes at last shall see Him,

Through His own redeeming love;

For that Child so dear and gentle,

Is our Lord in heaven above:

And He leads His children on,

To the place where He is gone.

Sarah Kate Neall is from Signal Mountain, Tennessee. When not mourning the long-ago loss of her Southern accent, she tries instead to convince people that they should call her by her double name. She lives in Washington, DC.

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