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Morning Reflection
December 23, 2025
Mystery and Manger
In a note dated December 2, 1965, the incomparable American conductor Robert Shaw had this to say about the performances of Handel’s Messiah that he had prepared for the Advent season.
“If our labor is valid – the result should be that Messiah sheds its sanctimonious, morbid, musical and religious pomposity, and becomes again what Handel certainly intended it to be, a light, bright, chamber-oratorio, celebrating with a secular deftness a remote but responsive religious mystery…
I should like to report… that once we had divested ourselves of old associations – the heaviness of sonority, tempo and accent – all that had been daubed, stuccoed, and garmented for public display now became simple, genuine, human and convincing.”
Robert Blocker: The Robert Shaw Reader
Reflection by Peter Vanderveen
Last week I bought a new pair of eyeglasses – my second in several weeks. For the first pair, I had had a new prescription for my lenses, and when I upgraded them I chose to include automatic tinting when they were exposed to ultra-violet light. What I hadn’t expected was that they’d turn dark almost every time I was outside. This was fine for what I wanted to see; it was helpful for me. But I realized that others could no longer see my eyes and, thus, they couldn’t fully read the expression that eyes give to one’s words. Often what we mean can’t merely be said; it must also be shown. Our eyes give our words essential depth. I noticed this, particularly, as I stood with families at graves, at the end of burial services. I felt, acutely, that I couldn’t speak adequately of death or resurrection – these great mysteries – with my eyes hidden from view. So I bought a pair of glasses without tinting.
This brought to mind for me Robert Shaw’s observation about Handel’s Messiah (above). It has long been encumbered, as Shaw noted, with the kind of seriousness that so often accompanies faux religiousness. Too much gravitas weighs it down. But what I’ve always most appreciated about Shaw’s statement is how he described Handel’s true accomplishment. Messiah is a meditation on the central mystery of Christianity, a mystery that is both “remote” and “responsive” – and Handel presented it with “secular deftness.” Put all these together, and suddenly a story and a revelation that has become tired and altogether commonplace and hidden behind too many centuries of accrued ritual trappings springs to life. So much of Messiah dances – even as it conveys the cosmic reality that is given expression in the life, death, and resurrection of one person. It’s as if Shaw removed the tinted lenses that obscured the lively truth of both the music and the God it was meant to reveal.
There is a universal appeal to the Christian Christmas story, even to many who would attest having no faith at all. And in spite of the avalanche of other traditions and stories that are celebrated around the clock for months leading up to Christmas Day – all the things that so consume our attention and energies – Luke’s account of Jesus’ birth remains central. It may be that there exists no other story that so succinctly and intimately narrates the mystery, “remote” and “responsive” that radiates throughout the whole of creation. And it may be that, in hearing it, each and every time, we imagine Mary and Joseph and shepherds gazing at an infant and seeing in this child’s eyes something of God eagerly taking in the world. Children’s eyes do this. And then, and there, God’s presence to us becomes “simple, genuine, human, and convincing” – loosed from all religious sanctimony.
Take a moment to listen to what Handel gave us – a dance not a march.
An audio clip from Shaw’s 1968 Messiah recording (spritely, not lugubrious) skip the ads:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKOYVs5a1EU
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