[Vision2020] My Christmas Column/Radio Commentary

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Season's Greetings Visionaries!

Below is my Christmas column radio commentary/column.  The full version with Michael Feinstein's discovery that his Christmas concerts of popular favorites were "too Jewish" can be read at www.home.roadrunner.com/~nickgier/DoYouHear.htm You will find my other Christmas columns on the same page.

Before writing this I listened to many versions of  "Do You Hear What I Hear?'the piece on YouTube –Whitney Houston’s, Cee Cee Winans’, Carrie Underwood’s, the Carpenters’ – but I have to admit, and many out there will roll their eyes, that Johnny Mathis’ rendition is still the best. Be rest assured, however, that “Hello, Young Lovers” is no longer my favorite song. I just hope that the station manager was able to overlay Johnny Mathias singing the piece, because it was something that electronics nudnick like me couldn't do.
     
I was dismayed to hear that Houston left out the Night Wind at the beginning of the song. The Night Wind gives the ecological aspect of the song that I want to emphasize.

Happy Winter Solstice to you all,

Nick Gier

"DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?" SAID THE LITTLE LAMB

This year our Unitarian choir is singing "Do You Hear What I Hear?" and we were all delighted to learn that the lyricist Noel Regney was a Unitarian convert from Catholicism. After fighting for the French Resistance in World War II, Regney came to the U.S. in 1952 and married pianist/composer Gloria Shayne. In addition to their great Christmas piece, they also wrote "Rain, Rain, Go Away," "Sweet Little Darlin’" and many other top tunes.
     
Regney and Shayne wrote their famous carol during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and they must have decided – perhaps due to the threat of nuclear annihilation – that the Mighty King in their song should have a different view of the world than King Herod. 
   
The carol begins with the Night Wind telling the Little Lamb to look skyward and see "a star, dancing in the night, with a tail as big as a kite." It seems as if Regney is going for a comet rather than a conjunction of the planets for the Star of Bethlehem.

If the Night Wind is a witness for the earth, then today she could ask the Little Lamb to look at what he sees in India. The Ganges River, worshipped as a goddess by the Hindus, has a coliform bacterial count 3,000 times higher than the UN standard for safe water.  

The Night Wind could also tell the Little Lamb to look at the Himalayan glaciers, melting at such a rate that tens of millions of people will soon be threatened by huge floods. The Night Wind is right now witnessing the total disappearance of the Chacaltaya glacier in Bolivia, once the highest in the world. The Night Wind and her daytime sisters are invigorated by the warmest years in recorded history. By their very nature they cannot help but cause more unpredictable and destructive storms.

The Little Lamb asks the Shepherd Boy: "Do you hear what I hear?" Today the Shepard Boy could hear some of same sounds he heard 2,000 years ago – the sounds of children, now hundreds of millions more, crying because they are sick and hungry. Even though the world's farmers produce enough food for everyone, over one billion people are malnourished. Every day 16,000 children die of hunger in the world. 
  
The Shepard Boy would be dismayed at the same huge gap between the rich and the poor. Today he would hear the pleas of 1.3 billion people who are trying to feed, clothe and house their children on less than $2 per day.

The Shepard Boy would be alarmed that today there are just as many discordant voices and armed battles as there were 2,000 years ago. Thousands of young children are carrying arms into battle, and a record number of girls and women are being raped.

The Shepard Boy asks the Mighty King in his "palace warm": "Do you know what I know? … A Child shivers in the cold, let us bring him silver and gold." What the children of the world need far more than jewels is clean water; as many as 4,400 die each day from diarrhea and other water borne illnesses. Today the Shepard Boy would know, sadly, that last year 8.8 million children died from various illnesses before they reached the age of 5.

The Mighty King, not the Herod of Jesus' time, says: "Listen to what I say: Pray for peace, people everywhere! The child, sleeping in the night, will bring us goodness and light." For Unitarians the birth of a divine child is a metaphor for the promise and great possibility of all infants born into this world. We see the miraculous births of Confucius, Buddha and Jesus as symbols of the hope that every newborn child brings to a broken world.

May we all hope that there will soon be a king who speaks of peace and who does not have to make war at the same time.  

Nick Gier taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.