O Come, O Come, Emmanuel
Keeping with the past two years, in the month of December I have been sharing the stories of how some of our beloved Christmas carols and songs came to be. The information comes from a little book I own: “Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas,” by Ace Collins. In this third year of sharing these stories, I am starting off with the song that will probably be sung the first Sunday of December, aka the first Sunday of Advent, in nearly all churches everywhere. The song, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is one of the most appropriate songs for Advent. It also happens to be one of the oldest Christmas carols still sung today. This popular hymn dates back to the ninth century and represents an important and ancient series of services celebrated by the Catholic church.
The universal nature of faith presented in this song can best be seen by the fact that it has crossed over from a hymn sung in Latin and used in only formal Catholic masses to a carol translated into scores of languages and embraced by every Christian denomination in the world.
The unknown writer of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is believed to have been a monk or priest who penned the words before 800 a.d. He would also have been a scholar with a rich knowledge of both the Old and New Testaments. Almost immediately the hymn was picked up by many European churches and monasteries and became an intensely important part of the church. Yet for fifty-one weeks of each year it was ignored and saved for a single week of Advent vespers leading up to the celebration of Christ’s birth. That is still much the same today as it is typically one of the first songs to be sung in the Advent season.
In contrast to the simple, almost monotone melody, the words paint a rich illustration of the many biblical prophesies fulfilled by Christ’s birth. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is really a condensed study of the Bible’s view of the Messiah — who he was, what he represented and why he came to Earth.
The song owes its worldwide acceptance to a man named John Mason Neale who was an Anglican priest, educated at Trinity College in Cambridge. A brilliant man, Neale could write and speak more than twenty languages. He should have been destined for greatness, yet many feared his intelligence and insight. Church leaders thought he was too evangelical, too progressive, and too much a free-thinker to be allowed to influence the masses. So Neale was sent by the church to the Madiera Islands off the northwest coast of Africa where he was pushed out of the spotlight and given the position of warden in an all but forgotten locale. But Neale refused to give up on God or his own calling. He established the Sisterhood of St. Margaret, and from this order he began an orphanage, a school for girls, and a house of refuge for prostitutes. But these ministries were just the beginning.
When he wasn’t ministering to those who could truly be called “the least of these,” Neale, who was often frail and sickly, studied the Scriptures and every Scripture- based writing he could find. During these studies, Neale came across the Latin chant, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” in a book called Psalteroium Cantionum Catholicarum. Neale translated the words into English. In his initial work, the lyrics began, “Draw nigh, draw nigh, Emmanuel.”
The tune that Neale used with his translation was “Veni Emmanuel,” a 15th-century processional that originated in a community of French Franciscan nuns living in Lisbon, Portugal. His translation of the lyrics, coupled with “Veni Emmanuel,” was first published in the 1850s in England. Within 25 years, Neale’s work, later cut to five verses and called “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” grew in popularity throughout Europe and America.
Because it brings the story of Christ the Savior to life, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” ranks as one of the most important songs in the history of the Christian faith.
(Excerpts from “Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas” by Ace Collins)
