Today, 28th December, is known in the Christian liturgical calendar as Childermas, or ‘The Feast of the Holy Innocents.’ Believed to be an unlucky day, the fourth day of Christmas is a day to commemorate the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’, during which King Herod of Judea ordered the execution of all male infants in Bethlehem, as described in the Gospel of Matthew (2:16 - 18).
The murder of babes doesn’t seem a particularly festive topic to be observing during a period meant to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. In the medieval period, the day was a time for children to run somewhat wild, pulling the kind of pranks we now associate with April Fool’s Day.
Later on, it became tradition for children to be beaten in their beds on December 28th, supposedly with the intention to drive out evil spirits before the new year. But much of the music and literature associated with Childermas doesn’t really focus on children at all. Instead, they are frequently meditations on motherhood - or, more specifically, maternal grief.
The Coventry Carol is one of the most famous Christian songs associated with Childermas. First recorded in 1534, it was performed as part of the medieval ‘mystery play’ - travelling theatre tableaus depicting Bible stories - during a pageant put on by one of Coventry’s city guilds. ‘The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors,’ depicted the nativity story from the Gospel of Matthew; while the lyrics of ‘The Coventry Carol’ reference the Massacre of the Innocents. Sung by a chorus of grieving mothers, it’s referred to as a carol, but really, it’s a lullaby-lament:
Lully, lullah, thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
Thou little tiny child,
Bye bye, lully, lullay.
O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
"Bye bye, lully, lullay"?
Herod the king, in his raging,
Chargèd he hath this day
His men of might in his own sight
All young children to slay.
That woe is me, poor child, for thee
And ever mourn and may
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
"Bye bye, lully, lullay."
What makes The Coventry Carol notable isn’t just that, particularly in its setting by Philip Stopford, it’s a hauntingly beautiful piece of choral music, or that it has survived and been passed down for over 500 years. To me, The Coventry Carol - and Childermas - are noteworthy because they not only give space to, but credence of, grief – in a time otherwise reserved for festivities and celebration.
And to do so via a chorus of women, who otherwise are granted rare acknowledgement during the liturgical calendar, makes that contrast the more poignant. After all, what grief is more acute than that of a mother mourning the death of a child? When is grief more pronounced than in the darkest nights of winter?
We are, at best, culturally uncomfortable around death. To mourn for ‘too long’ is considered socially gauche; yet deviation from normative funeral customs is often frowned upon. To be bereaved can feel like an illness, especially when emotionally uncomfortable or unattuned people around you treat you as if your grief may be contagious.
We mark anniversaries, birthdays and seasonal holidays for a reason: annual celebrations give us opportunity to reflect, reset, and recognize our good fortune. But remembrance gets a far more meager plate at the table. A national day of mourning, linked to a monarchy which many do not support, and a country that has brutalized many more others, is more insult than equivocation for these regular celebrations.
Birth and death are the two diametric certainties of our lives. And yet, in their very opposition, death and birth are closer to synonyms - yet we spend much of our waking moments trying to exclude the existence of one from the other.
I can think of few more heartbreaking scenes than that of a mother singing a lullaby to her permanently-asleep child. And yet, this mourning dirge has been part of the Nine Lessons and Carols line-up for centuries, used to celebrate the birth of a child. Through its poetry, The Coventry Carol places mourning and new life side by side in a manger.
Joy does not erase loss, any more than grief extinguishes the experience of happiness. Salt makes the honey sweeter. Acknowledging loss - which exists like a crater in the living room floor of our daily lives - won’t cause the ground of your own house to cave in. It simply offers a hand, so you can, gingerly at first, and eventually without even thinking, step around it.
On Christmas Day 1940, The Coventry Carol was performed in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, six weeks after the brutal bombing which set much of the city ablaze. Broadcast live as part of the BBC’s Christmas programming, the ancient carol was heard around the world, during a time in which much of the world was mourning.
The first Coventry Cathedral was built in 1095, with the second iteration built in its place during the 14th century. On November 14th 1940, this building was destroyed by the Luftwaffe during the Coventry Blitz - and the Christmas service was held there weeks after, while the cinders were almost still smoking.
But rather than rebuilding on top of these ruins, it was decided to keep the destroyed Cathedral as a monument, and for the land to remain hallowed ground. Rather than erasing this brutal illustration of the city’s tragedy, the new Coventry Cathedral was built alongside the ruins of the old. Consecrated in 1962, it is one of the only cathedrals in Europe in which the alter faces north, not east.
With contributions from architects and artists from across the world, Coventry Cathedral is now regarded as a locus for working towards global peace. Home to The International Centre for Reconciliation, which works to promote reconciliation, rather than revenge for devastation, in areas of conflict, the building itself serves as a metaphor for this mission.
Rather than removing evidence of the brutality of war, new beauty was built alongside it. In Coventry, destruction and defiance, grief and celebration, stand in stark co-existence. With one of the world’s largest tapestries and a stained-glass, full-height window, through which light appears to oscillate like the dance of sunlight on a butterfly’s wings, the Cathedral is not only a testament to craft and artistry – but how giving due room to grief better enables true recovery.
Loss cleaves our worlds into a before and after, its chasm occupying the liminal space inbetween. To prematurely usher ourselves into that tertiary space, or pretend it didn’t even happen, not only gives disservice to our before, but ignores the enormous physic marathon that is mourning.
I visited Coventry Cathedral for the first time three years ago today, on Childermas, while bearing my own fresh, deep grief. I went with a dear friend of mine, Barney Norris, who in his novel The Vanishing Hours, offers a definition of a word which is too often seen as a binding state, but is in fact an ever evolving mode of being (just like mourning).
RECOVER. To save or rescue something. To grow back a skin that can shelter nerve endings. To be able to feel again without the feeling burning. To bloom again, to sprout new life, put roots down. To have gone through hell.
The experience of loss, like the experience of severe illness, fundamentally changes us. And when that loss is bound up with love - how could it not? Like Coventry, the structure of our lives are rendered cinders, and those same walls of our ‘before’ selves can never be rebuilt. But new buildings can be constructed, and sometimes, they might just be breathtaking monuments of grace and glory.
But the true beauty of any ‘after’ comes when we pay credence to the griefs of our lives, and allow them to gently exist alongside us. By giving space for grief, we give ourselves room to recover. We allow light to filter through stained-glass windows, so that colours might dance amongst the shadows of ruins.