Let’s turn the lights down, be in candlelight
Like it’s always been through the centuries[1]
Let the wax drop, I like to see it melt[2]
Taste the holy wine near the ringing bell[3]
We like to give as much as receive[4]
And we built four walls and it served as our creed[5]
There’s a star in the sky, will you follow?[6]
I heard a rumor that a child is gonna save us[7]
He came from foreign lands to the valleys that made us[8]
We built our church in flint and with wood
And we christen our babies and we try to be good[9]
Far from desert sands, only imagine
On the coldest night,[10] burn the candles bright
I moved down dirt track and a stone archway
Will you follow me through the century?[11]
We like to give as much as receive
And we built four walls and it served as our creed
There’s a star in the sky, will you follow?
I heard a rumor that a child was gonna save us
He came from foreign lands to the valleys that made us
We built our church with flint and with wood
And we christen our babies and we try to be good
I heard a rumor that a child was gonna save us
He came from foreign lands to the valleys that made us
We built our church in flint and with wood
And we christen our babies and we try to be good
For one night a year, you will find us here[12]
For one night a year, you will find us here
For one night a year, you will find us here
For one night a year, you will find us here
For one night a year, you will find us here
For one night a year, you will find us here[13]
I heard a rumor that a child was gonna save us
He came from foreign lands to the valleys that made us
We built our church in flint and with wood
And we christen our babies and we try to be good
Over the seas came word sent to tame us[14]
Live as is told and the land will sustain us
We pass this down through the generations
Written on the page and spoken in the ages[15]
[1] Smoke Fairies are a British band; Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies grew up together in Sussex and have spent their adulthood together learning their craft in the US, Canada, and Britain, arriving at a distinctly dark and elegant English sound. This song is just one excellent track from their “winter” (say it: Christmas) album Wild Winter. While the lyrics are not absolutely clear on the subject, lighting a candle in the darkness “Like it’s always been through the centuries” seems very much like a northern nation accustomed to hours of darkness come Christmastime. The speaker seems to be opening the song by connecting herself to her ancient forebears.
[2] Melting candlewax was once used as a method of measuring time, but is that what this song’s speaker likes about seeing it melt? Or is there something compellingly, attractively destructive about this time of year when the sun is almost consumed by the darkness?
[3] On relisten, it’s obvious from the first line that we are in a church; but on one’s first listen it’s not until the end of this opening stanza with its introduction of holy wine and a ringing bell that the setting is firmly established.
[4] A thousand Christmas stories teach us that it is more blessed to give than to receive, but this narrator might suggest that loving them equally is the best we can hope for? Or even that as without receiving there can be no giving, we must engage in both? Additionally, this may be a further reference to the topic of generations that will soon be explored more thoroughly.
[5] In the recent non-Christmas movie Wake Up Dead Man, firm atheist Benoit Blanc recognizes the power stone walls soaring into gothic arches can have on a person, even a nonbeliever. Latter-day Saints come out of a low-church tradition but we are currently spending untold funds to restore our own gothic cathedral in Salt Lake with the apparent purpose of allowing all pilgrims bound for Utah the chance to enter its four walls that serve as a permanent, Millennium-bound testimony of “our creed.”
[6] The previous track on Wild Winter, “3 Kings,” includes these lines: “I’ve got predictions from constellations / A light in the cosmos will bring revelations / And I think I have seen the future.” Genesis makes clear that when God created the stars, he “let them be for signs.” This is a spiritual gift we no longer embrace. But if a modern person can enter an ancient church and light a candle to watch its dripping wax, can we return to other lost forms of knowledge as well?
[7] Now we come to the Christ child. Here, over 2000 years later, is it unfair to refer to his birth as anything other than a rumor? But what a rumor!
[8] How literally should we take these lines? A longstanding tradition brings Christ to the British Isles. (There’s a lengthy book someone stashed at my ward building that davincicodes [in a very Mormon way] these legends with Third Nephi’s revelation of other sheep in other lands.) But even if Jesus never stepped sandalled foot, before or after his death, in England, can he not come to the valleys that made us via our hearts?
[9] As a Latter-day Saint, I reject infant baptism yet, somehow, this is, for me, the most moving line of the song. Why? She is reaching out to her ancestors, but each of those generation had found its greatest expression of faith by reaching forward, to the next generation: their very own children. What could be more holy than binding the generations together, one by one, in our holy houses of stone?
[10] On a dark, wet, cold, English, winter night, what could require more imagination—more Spirit—than picturing the desert land where Jesus was born? Perhaps all religion is an act of holy imagination. As Father Jud asked Benoit Blanc in that non-Christmas movie, “You’re right. It’s storytelling. The rites and the rituals. Costumes, all of it. It’s storytelling. I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside us that’s profoundly true, that we can’t express any other way except storytelling?”
[11] Is the speaker still herself? Is she speaking as her ancestors? Is she channeling the Savior himself? When we achieve a true act of holy imagination, will we need to restrain ourselves to only one option?
[12] Is this an admission of coming to church only on Christmas? Or is it something deeper? Is there something about this night that allows us to truly bring our full selves to the altar?
[13] Of all the lines to repeat six times in a row, why this one? “For one night a year, you will find us here”? Is she trying to convince us? herself? or her God? At the very least, it is a recognition that time is a circle and this day will return year after year after year.
[14] One crime often placed at the feet of Christendom is that colonization tamed peoples once gloriously wild. Britain was among the first of such lands to be so tamed. On the coldest nights, the darkness still consumes the sun. But the Son always rises again. And nothing is more wild—nor less tamable—than He. The sins of Christendom are not the sins of Christ.
[15] Words hold us together over time. In this way, we are all people of some book. Whether the pages she references are the story of Christmas, her listed family over time, or the testimony of this song—perhaps it is only in the darkest nights, reading by ancient candles, that we can see most clearly.