by Benedicta Cipolla
Since 1918, every Christmas Eve in England hundreds of people wait for hours in cold temperatures outside King's College Chapel at the University of Cambridge for a coveted seat at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.
The millions of listeners around the world who tune in via short wave, FM and the Internet, unable to reach Cambridge's 16th-century vaulted church or unwilling to risk frostbite, can now follow the annual radio broadcast with a new, illustrated book detailing the service.
THE FESTIVAL OF NINE LESSONS AND CAROLS (published in November by Universe, a division of Rizzoli, and designed by David Larkin) includes background on the tradition's beginnings; texts of the prayers, nine Scripture readings, and carols most often sung from year to year; splendid photographs, paintings and engravings; and a CD recording of the service.For the book's author and editor, William Edwards, the volume represents a very personal labor of love.
"What people want for Christmas is something they can take out every year and read along while playing the music," says Edwards, a former retail entrepreneur and bookstore executive. "I also wanted to capture the emotional impact the service has on me and I think it has on other people."
Calling himself a "lapsed Congregationalist," Edwards is moved each year by the overarching message of the service that he describes in the book as "the romantic and religious antithesis of the modern world."
"This is a service about the birth of a child and about the birth of hope," he says, pointing to the initial choice 86 years ago to lead the entrance procession with a solo chorister singing the first stanza of the nineteenth-century Victorian hymn, "Once in Royal David's City." "It stands for an innocence we all want to get back to."
When the service of readings, prayers, and carols debuted in Cambridge not even two months after the end of World War I, Britain and Europe as a whole were reeling from the conflict's devastation. Eric Milner-White, the dean of King's College and architect of the program, which was modeled on an earlier service in Cornwall, had served as an Army chaplain for four years. In 1919, he added to the service the Bidding Prayer, which spoke poignantly to the millions of Britons who had lost loved ones in the war with its evocation of "all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which none can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh."
"It's true to say that the 1918 service was so developed in the aftermath of terrific suffering and huge casualties referred to in the Bidding Prayer," says Stephen Cleobury, the music director at King's College, who recently led the choir on a U.S. tour. "The sad fact is that the two great world wars of the 20th century prove not to have been the end of strife in the world, and the story of the birth of a young and innocent child in a troubled world, as it was then and is now, gives some new and fresh hope."
