Hymns and Carols: Gabriel's Message
As it our custom here at the School, we will be considering the carols and hymns associated with Advent and Christmas. To start us off this year, Mthr Ayla Lepine has these reflections on Gabriel’s Message. Mthr Ayla is an art historian and serves as curate of Hampstead Parish Church. Her book with Kate Jordan, Modern Architecture and Religious Communities 1850-1970 was published by Routledge (2018).
The medieval Basque hymn ‘Gabriel’s Message’ tells the story of the Annunciation in the context of Christmas. The worship of heaven and earth conjoin as the chorus repeats the connection between the Blessed Virgin Mary’s unique status as the Mother of God and the desire to honour and praise both her and God.
The Trinitarian presence of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is implied beneath the radiant surface of the hymn, in the core of the Annunciation and the impulse to worship. Time—both Chronos and Kairos—weave into playful conjoining throughout the hymn, which tells the story of the Annunciation in a linear way while promising the generations to come and looking to the forerunners of Christ’s arrival, particularly Isaiah. The hymn pierces the darkness with Gabriel’s flaming eyes and snowdrift wings, offering the Feast of the Annunciation as a Christmas promise, redolent with Advent imagery.
The carol is based on a c. 13th-century Latin hymn, Angelus ad Virginem, which probably has a Franciscan origin. Its popularity meant it travelled throughout Europe, and was known in Britain soon after it was written. Indeed, it’s quoted in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, as part of the Miller’s Tale when he mentions Nicholas the scholar singing it:
And over all there lay a psaltery
Whereon he made an evening's melody,
Playing so sweetly that the chamber rang;
And Angelus ad virginem he sang;
And after that he warbled the King's Note:
Often in good voice was his merry throat.
A 14th-century version in Middle English, far more compact than the Latin hymn’s original five verses, reads:
Gabriel fram Heven-King / Sent to the Maide sweete,
Broute hir blisful tiding / And fair he gan hir greete:
'Heil be thu, ful of grace aright! / For Godes Son, this Heven Light,
For mannes love / Will man bicome / And take / Fles of thee,
Maide bright, / Manken free for to make / Of sen and devles might.'
In the original hymn, and in the Middle English translation, the final theological note is one of sin, repentance, and the desire for forgiveness blending with the desire for salvation, which will come in the form of the birth of Christ. The patient Advent waiting for the infant Christ is framed by the Annunciation as a promise of forgiveness as well as the gateway to the triumph over death and darkness.
Ecce Ancilla Domini! Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
The version of the carol we sing in Britain now, however, is not derived from Chaucerian or Middle English sources, but from that Basque original, which was paraphrased and translated by Sabine Baring-Gould, who encountered it through Basque travels during Christmas with his family when he was a boy.
The carol is therefore part of that vital collecting, preserving, and reimagining of medieval and folk hymnody in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like so many of these examples, its medieval origins have been brought to life in the vernacular in a fairly recent form, part of a Christian tradition which, in the case of this carol, is a truly modern invention. The tune, the ideas, and the narrative sequence are ancient, but the arrangement and translation is far closer to our time than to St Francis’ or Chaucer’s.
Gabriel’s message, with its mention of the birth in Bethlehem, is most certainly a Christmas carol rather than an Advent carol. That said, the Advent promise and the waiting in darkness for the promised arrival of Jesus has a place in this carol’s qualities and the way in which the Christmas story is told.
On Advent Sunday the deacon may say this dismissal:
Go out in love and good will.
Do not fear the darkness.
Shine as lights in the world to the glory of God.
Throughout Advent we resolve not to fear the darkness, which is no small challenge in these short days. Straining to hear the flutter of angels’ wings in the sky above the shepherds, waiting for the culmination of ‘God in time, God in man’ as ‘God’s timeless plan’, Christians are invited to meditate on multiple series of narratives that interlace to form a theological, historical, and biblical matrix within which the Holy Child arrives to set us free, even as he is swaddled in a makeshift cradle. There is a challenge to resist a sentimental nostalgia in these Advent weeks too, as they intermingle with Christmas carols, ribbons of lights strung along high streets, and preparations for the Feast in late December that seem to become the Feast of a long November.
This phenomenon is not just the secular commercial overtaking of Advent by a pre-emptive Christmas rush, but a way to stave off the darkness as well, surely, as a way of avoiding the darkness. It is a cultural distraction, so afraid are we of dwelling in our darkness within and without. And what is to fear in the darkness, truly, when the darkness does not comprehend the inextinguishable light? Perhaps a preacher’s simple answer would be unswervingly optimistic, but we are beset always by the persistent twinges and deeper damage of fear, harm, and danger. Why else would we need our prayers for ‘the peace which the world cannot give?’ And yet, as St John of the Cross suggests, the darkness is no darkness in God, for the individual, or for the Body of Christ, because ‘When the evening of this life comes we shall be judged on Love.’
Conceived miraculously and utterly controversially, birthed from his holy mother’s womb, Jesus is born poor, and born radiant. Jesus is the God of humility and simplicity because he is the Prince of Peace, the King of Heaven. From the Feast of Christ the King onwards, we are reminded repeatedly that the Majesty we worship is reigning over all creation because of the The lectionary, marked by candles Sunday by Sunday, focuses on the prophets, patriarchs, John the Baptist, and the Blessed Virgin Mary before culminating with the Light of the World in the promise of Emmanuel. Alongside, Advent’s classic themes are death, judgement, heaven and hell. This quartet of human, divine, scriptural, and theological concepts and experiences are underpinned by God’s commitment to break through the barrier that separated life and death itself. The theologian, mystic and spiritual director Evelyn Underhill writes of this commitment through the lens of the Annunciation and Mary’s holy participation in the work of salvation in her response to Gabriel. The emphases on ‘His’ and ‘ours’, illuminating the need for reliance on God and not ourselves, are Underhill’s:
Love breaks down the barrier that shuts most of us from Heaven. That thought is too much for us really, yet it is the central truth of the spiritual life. And that loving, self-yielding to the Eternal Love – that willingness that God shall possess, indwell, fertilize, bring for the fruit of His Spirit in us, instead of the fruits of our spirit – is the secret of all Christian power and Christian peace.
An additional series of Advent meditations and themes, precious in the heritage of Christian poetry, are the seven O Antiphons derived from the prophecies of Isaiah. These are sung at the Magnificat during Vespers in the final week before Christmas. The last Antiphon, on 23 December, speaks of Emmanuel, God with us:
O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.
That same day, the Benedictus Antiphon is:
Behold, all things are fulfilled, which were spoken by the Angel to the Virgin Mary.
In Latin, the antiphons’ first letters produce the acrostic ‘Ero cras’ (‘Tomorrow, I will come’). If the hymn to the Blessed Virgin Mary, O Virgo Virginum, is added, the acrostic becomes ‘Vero cras’ (‘Truly, tomorrow’). These Antiphons are most likely from the sixth century, and possibly earlier. They are historical treasures of the Church, that bring the worshipping life of the Body of Christ into the typological story of our salvation afresh. They are present tense, appealing responsively to the distinctive character of Isaiah’s sacred names for the One who will come. There are few more poignant uses of the Hebrew Bible in this season’s liturgy.
Gabriel’s Message concludes with the same note as the O Antiphons together with the Benedictus Antiphon for 23 December, making the connection deeply and strongly between the fulfilment of the Annunciation and the fulfilment of eternal life through the birth of Christ in Bethlehem. First, there is Gabriel in flight. Then, the statement of Mary’s infinite worth to all Christians as the blessed mother who carries Salvation within her body, feeding the foetal Messiah with her own self so that he may become the true holy food for the world’s redemption.
The intimation of eternity is in the second verse’s inclusion of ‘all generations’, in the same verse that Isaiah is referenced and the incarnation is promised. At the halfway point, when the lilting line of praise to Mary as ‘most highly favoured’ is inscribed within the singers’ mouths and hearts, Mary listens, reverences, speaks, and glorifies God in the first words of the Magnificat. Finally, the result. Because of Mary’s response, full of wonder, to the message Gabriel brings, the Subject of ever O Antiphon joins humanity in order to conjoin humanity to God. Why? Why all this activity against the backdrop of this delicate repeating phrase reminding us of Mary’s status as the Mother of God? For Love. The energy and the dynamic changefulness of love within the Sacred Hearts of Mary and Jesus, bound up in the eternal changeless love of the Trinity, is captured in Underhill’s poem, ‘Dynamic Love’:
For Love is time, succession, ardour, change;
It is the holy thrust of living things,
That seek a consummation and enlace
Some fragment of the All in each fecund embrace
Whence life again flows forth upon its endless chase.
The angel Gabriel from heaven came
His wings as drifted snow his eyes as flame
‘All hail’ said he ‘thou lowly maiden Mary,
Most highly favoured lady,’ Gloria!
‘For know a blessed mother thou shalt be,
All generations laud and honour thee,
Thy Son shall be Emmanuel, by seers foretold
Most highly favoured lady,’ Gloria!
Then gentle Mary meekly bowed her head
‘To me be as it pleaseth God,’ she said,
‘My soul shall laud and magnify his holy name.’
Most highly favoured lady. Gloria!
Of her, Emmanuel, the Christ was born
In Bethlehem, all on a Christmas morn
And Christian folk throughout the world will ever say:
‘Most highly favoured lady,’ Gloria!
