Sabbath Devotional :: We Bow Our Knees, and Hope Our Hearts Follow

YouTube: St. Paul Cathedral Choir: Balulalow

O my deare hert, young Jesu sweit,

Prepare thy creddil in my spreit,

And I sall rock thee to my hert,

And never mair from thee depart.

But I sall praise thee evermoir

With sanges sweit unto thy gloir;

The knees of my hert sall I bow,

And sing that richt Balulalo.

This text, which I know from Benjamin Britten’s setting in the Ceremony of Carols has always amused me a little. A cradle in the spirit? The knees of my heart??

This afternoon, I went to my nephew’s baptism. The font had filled more slowly than expected, so the water was shallow. Before the service began, my brother coached his son to really bend his knees, so that he could be fully immersed. My brother also had to bend way down to complete the ordinance.

Everything else about the ritual was the way it always is — the talk on baptism, the littlest kids pressing their noses to the glass in front of the font, the awkward shaking of hands after the confirmation blessing. I have watched it all at least 100 times, probably, with small variations in the talks or the sappiness of the videos we watch while the participants get dry clothes on, or the extravagance of the refreshments afterwards. Sometimes I still find it moving, but often it’s a little rote. This is just what we do.

Christmas feels like that to me sometimes. It is just what we do. There have been years in my life when Christmastime has come as a triumphant celebration of a happy year-–friends seem plentiful and true, school or work has been just challenging enough to feel exhilaration at its completion, God’s close, warm presence is easy to believe in. And there have been years when Christmastime was bleak and painful —when I was numb to the music and lights and joy all around, purely desperate for a glimpse of the Savior on his birthday, eager to welcome the year’s dark close. But there have been lots of years — most years, perhaps — when Christmas has seemed like mostly a list of chores, with “feel childlike wonder, reverent awe, overflowing love for Jesus” somewhere near the top, mocking me all season as I failed to check it off with a satisfying click of accomplishment.

Today as I watched my brother and his son bending their knees, I heard that Old English lullaby in my head and it made sense. We do Christmas — we tell the stories, bake the cookies, (burn the cookies), light the candles, hang the wreaths, dress the children in bathrobes and whatever blue cloth we can find, sing the carols — because that is what Christians do. We bow our knees, and hope our hearts follow. What our bodies do, our hearts can learn.

The knees of my hert sall I bow, sall I bow. . .