The music that makes Christmas

Dec 26, 2020 by

by Douglas Murray, UnHerd:

Cancelled services won’t silence the singing.

In April I wrote about the prospect of Easter 2020 being an Easter unlike any other. As I said then, with the churches shut and services either cancelled or live-streamed from empty buildings, people were going to have to find their own places for contemplation. Now, unfathomable though it might have seemed back in April, most of the UK is once again in total or near lockdown.

Not only have many of the churches remained closed, but unlike Giles Fraser’s, many — it is now clear — will not be reopening. Church administrators have used the opportunity that the Covid crisis has presented to do some of the things they had wanted to do anyway. My own family’s church, where worship had been continual for some 900 years, was closed by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster during this crisis: the choir dissolved, the congregation disbanded and all future services cancelled.

As it happens, St Margaret’s Westminster was the church in which I sang as a chorister, and as everyone else who has been through that experience will know, singing in a choir is not only one of the best ways to learn music but one of the finest ways for the liturgy and fabric of the Church to get into your bones.

Although Easter may be the most important festival for Christians, today’s feast is the most significant for cultural Christians. For many, the Christmas service was the only time in the year that they would go through the doors of their local church. Midnight Mass, or the service of Nine Lessons and Carols, would suddenly be filled with people who the church hadn’t seen for a year. And in a way that makes the absence of services and carol singing this year even sadder still. People who were only holding on to the church by a thread risk having that last thread frayed as well.
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