BBC Radio 4 2015-12-19

Good Morning. Name that tune. The one you can hear if you stop, right now, the one playing on your mental sound system.

(beat)

All week, for me, since a Carol Service last Sunday, it’s been the tune of 'O Come All Ye Faithful'.

‘Ear-worms’ they’re called, or ‘haunting melodies’ - that line of music that sticks in your mind.

You discover you’re humming it, even though no-one is playing it. You’re walking down the street and there it is: the theme from Star Wars… the chorus of Yesterday …
Beethoven’s 5th… Silent Night.

For me, the haunting melody of ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ brought back the words of the carol - I’d looked around the church wondering how many people were quizzing those words as they sang.
God of God, light of light
Lo, He abhors not the virgin's womb;
Very God, begotten not created...

At one time there were seizmic arguments about words like ‘begotten’ - it was about the bragging rights of God and Jesus.

In Turkey, at a fourth century church conference - where everyone was trying to come up with a common creed - Saint Nicholas himself lost his episcopal rag with a heretic called Arius.

Arius wanted an opt-out clause on the divinity of Jesus.

Legend has it that Nicholas walked across the room and slapped Arius in the face. ‘Begotten’ was what they settled on in the Nicene Creed – and that’s what the carol reminds us about.

Those millions of us who will raise our voices in church this week - timidly or gustily - will be less bothered about theological accuracy.

The tune will carry us, even when the words drop us.

Carols embed the memory of the Christmas story in community life. And there’s something exhilarating about being in a crowd where you all join in the same song.

I don’t read music but in a local community choir for a couple of years I discovered that if I stood by Sam, 75, who could read music or next to Evan, our youngest son, I could follow them as they followed the music.

Research suggests that choral singing calms anxiety and lifts the spirit - that it boosts social bonding and promotes a sense of connection.

But there’s also something deeper - how singing is about a kind of yearning - a longing to express in sound what’s so difficult to capture in words.

And there’s another beauty you find in a throng of singers, the way that your own individual sound is lost in a greater sound. Turn up to any church late on Christmas Eve this week and lose yourself in these familiar songs.

If carols sometimes sentimentalise history they also look forward hopefully, capturing our longing for

‘Peace on earth and mercy mild
God and sinners reconciled…’

Why wouldn’t we sing about that in days like these? Why wouldn’t we be haunted by melodies of peace?