A final thought about Christmas before we focus on the challenges of 2024:
Ken Kehner, the extremely talented pianist who accompanies our great Director of Music Ministry and incredible organist, Greten Hudepohl, at the First Christian Church here in Jefferson City,played a Christmas hymn during our communion service yesterday. I recognized it on about the second note as one of my favorites.
It’s one of the Alfred Burt carols and it’s too bad that they are not better known or more frequently performed.
Alfred Burt was the son of a Michigan Episcopal cleric who graduated from the University of Michigan in 1942 as an outstanding student in music theory, and played trumpet, primarily jazz trumpet, in orchestras and bands. But once a year, for 15 years between 1942 and 1954, he carried on his father’s tradition of writing a Christmas carol that was sent out to friends instead of Christmas cards. He was only 34 when he died.
Actually, Burt wrote the music and Wihla Houston, the organist at the senior Burt’s Church wrote the lyrics.
In 1951, they produced “Some Children See Him:”
Some children see Him lily white
The baby Jesus born this night
Some children see Him lily white
With tresses soft and fair.
Some children see Him bronzed and brown
The Lord of heaven to earth come down
Some children see Him bronzed and brown
With dark and heavy hair.
Some children see Him almond-eyed
This Savior whom we kneel beside
Some children see Him almond-eyed
With skin of yellow hue.Some children see Him dark as they
Sweet Mary’s Son to whom we pray
Some children see him dark as they
And they love Him, too.
The children each in different place
Will see the baby Jesus’s face
Like theirs, but bright with heavenly grace
And filled with holy light
O lay aside each earthly thing
And with thy heart as offering
Come worship now the infant King
To his love that’s born tonight.
This should be a hymn/carol of our time, a time when some who are convinced only their interpretation of Jesus is acceptable or that skin color is a measure of humanity, opportunity, and place, or that believe origins presently or long ago define the quantity of equality to be granted.
But there will be some calling themselves Christians who will reject the idea that other faces see the face of Jesus differently.
Alfred Burt had lung cancer. He died on February 7, 1954, just two days after he finished scoring the last of his songs, “The Star Carol.”
Ten years later, the singing group “The Voices of Jimmy Joyce, recorded Burt’s carols. It has been in my heart for all these years since. Although Christmas already is fading from our lives and memories on this New Year’s Day, it might be worth listening to Alfred Burt’s carols that I hope stay with you, too, from Christmas to Christmas.
A grander performance was done by the Boston Boys Choir and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus accompanied by the Boston Pops Orchestra under the baton of John Willliams, the great movie theme composer.
(58) John Williams: The Carols of Alfred Burt – YouTube
Alfred Burt, who died 70 years ago this year, gave us a great and abiding gift with the carols he and Wihla Houston composed.
Would that we could see each other the way “Some Children See Him.”