On the third day of Christmas...

...my true love gave to me
Three French hens
Two turtle doves
And a partridge in a pear tree

Advent comes much more naturally to me than the twelve days of Christmas. Like I said in my Ovid post, it seems to me that a sense of loss and grief is woven into man’s understanding of the world. Add a redeeming God into that sense of loss and bang! you get waiting.

But yesterday, the third day of Christmas, I was jerked out of my readings of Ovid by a song emitted from the new speakers Dad had given me two days earlier. It’s a lovely hymn which doesn’t get associated with Christmas (or much of anything, for that matter; people don’t really know what to do with this highly poetic hymn that mentions Creation in nearly every line and God in only one). A quarter of the way into the Christmas season, this was the hymn that connected my longing to my Savior’s birth:

Morning has broken
Like the first morning;
Blackbird has spoken
Like the first bird.
Praise for the singing,
Praise for the morning;
Praise for them springing
Fresh from the word.

Sweet the rain’s new fall
Sunlit from heaven,
Like the first dewfall
On the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness
Of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness
Where his feet pass.

Mine is the sunlight;
Mine is the morning
Born of the one light
Eden saw play.
Praise with elation,
Praise every morning,
God’s recreation
Of the new day.

Morning has broken; light has come into the world; once again and forever, God says “Let there be light.” By the third day of Creation, the earth was sprouting with vegetation; by the third day of Christmas, I am reminded that “Faithfulness springs up from the ground and righteousness looks down from the sky.” God whose feet walked in Eden now walks on earth once again, and “Righteousness will go before him and make his footsteps a way.”

God rest ye merry, on this fourth day of Christmas!