Dec. 10

Double digits already?! This happens every Advent, and every Advent we’re confused. Honest to God, the only month that outpaces December is February.

Right, we promised you a rant on Conditor Alme Siderum. Otherwise known as a perfectly inoffensive hymn.

So, what’s it done to offend us? Nothing.

There’s a thing in the order of service called a Sequence Hymn that basically exists to knit the first lesson to the psalm. Lots of churches have them. My old church had one every Sunday and it was always different.

Enter St Thomas’s, Huron St. Where, every Advent, come hell or high water, we have to sing Creator of the Starry Height as a sequencing hymn. Every. Single. Sunday. And then it sods off for Christmas and a great whack of Epipheny. Until Lent comes round and the sequence hymn comes back, and even though Lent is a completely different liturgical bloody season we have to sing this thing again. For six weeks.

As hymns go, there are more offensive ones. It even has a decent tune, except that’s not what we sing. For reasons best known to this church, we sing the plainsong tune, and it goes on for bloody ever. It’s also super unwieldy for anyone who A)can’t read nuems or B) struggles to sing without hefty backup from a choir.

And even if none of that were true, four consecutive Sundays of this thing is A Lot. Five years on, we officially hate this hymn. We are sick to death of singing it, and we don’t understand why the weird penitential season obsession with it our church has.

We actually fell down an ecclesiastical rabbit hole chasing this up once. We thought maybe this was an Anglican Church of Canada quirk and read all the fine print of all the manuals for music directors of said church. It’s not a thing. There are zero rules insisting you drive your congregants insane by using this hymn – and only this hymn! – every time the purple vestments come out.

There is no rhyme or reason, and we’re doubly not coping this Advent, because we may or may not have rebelled during the era of the Covid Live-Stream and picked our own sequence hymns, with zero plainchant sung at a key only a coloratura could pull off. No, seriously. We ended up on High F more than we didn’t and it was fabulous. Jerusalem the Golden never sounded so good. Ditto Lo In The Wilderness A Voice.

But now we’re back to in-person worship and nothing but Creator of the Starry Height, and two Sundays in we just want to murder it. Slowly. With a spoon.

Probably just as well we’re drinking a refreshing peppermint tea tonight, eh? This isn’t for you if you don’t like mint; The clue’s in the name. It tastes very strongly of what it says on the tin. We love mint, so it’s always a winner.

Again, some of the strength comes from tipping the whole packet into the pot. It’s just too hard trying to portion stuff out of those recyclable plastic bags they’ve switched to. You end up with tea leaves on the counter, and that’s a sad waste of tea.

After all that, here’s a poem about stars that doesn’t get old. Maybe because no one’s set it to plainsong…Maybe because that guy Keats was good at his job.

Bright Star
John Keats
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
 Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.