“Wild the Man and Wild the Place”

According to the General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar for the Roman Rite Advent “has a twofold character,…when the first coming of God’s Son to men is recalled.  It is also a season when minds are directed by this memorial to Christ’s second coming at the end of time.” (39) These Norms also note that “[t]he weekdays from December 17 to December 24 inclusive are more directly oriented to the preparation for the Lord’s birth.”

One of the ways that this shift of focus is marked is through the use of Advent Preface II from 17 – 24 December with its lyrical evocation of the figures who dominate the scriptural readings for these days: “His future coming was proclaimed by all the prophets. / The virgin mother bore him in her womb with love beyond all telling. / John the Baptist was his herald / and made him know when at last he came.”

Thus I find myself especially drawn to the figures of Proto-, Deutero-, and Trito-Isaiah, John the Baptist, and Mary in these final days of Advent.  The hymn that I’ve chosen for the third week of Advent (though it might certainly be used on other occasions when the Forerunner comes into focus liturgically) is a tour-de-force from the hymn-writing team of Thomas H. Troeger and Carol Doran, found in their collection, New Hymns for the Lectionary: To Glorify the Maker’s Name (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986):

Wild the man and wild the place,
Wild his dress and wild his face,
Wilder still his words that trace
Paths that lead from sin to grace.

“Knock down every proud backed hill!
Every canyon, valley fill!
Plane the soul and pray until
All its raucous ramblings still.”

“Throw yourself in Jordan’s streams,
Plunge beneath the wave the gleams,
Wash away what only seems.
Rise and float on heaven’s dreams.”

“Leave on shore unneeded weight,
Fear and doubt, the skeptic’s freight.
Toss them off and do not wait.
Time is short.  The hour is late.”

“One now comes whose very name
Makes my words seem mild and tame.
I use water to reclaim
Lives that he will cleanse with flame.”

“You will see him soon appear:
One whose steps through prayer you hear.
Christ is drawing, drawing near,
Christ is coming, coming here!”

© 1986 Oxford University Press, Inc.

It takes an extraordinary wordsmith to constrain his or her inspiration to a 77. 77 metrical scheme with an aaaa end-rhyme scheme and not have the finished product become doggerel.   (I’m not sure that stanza three escapes that fate.)  Consider how much easier these stanzas would strike the ear if these were their final lines:

• …Paths from sin to grace.
• …All its ramblings still.”
• …Float on heaven’s dreams.”
• …Now the hour is late.”
• …Lives he sears with flame.”
• …Christ is coming here!”

Yet the very audacity of  Troeger’s stanzaic framework catches something of the audacity of the Baptist’s life and preaching.  At times the author’s word choices are stunningly fresh: who else could yoke the preaching that called for mountains to be leveled and valleys filled in for the Sovereign’s Advent with the idea of “planing” the soul as a carpenter planes wood?  (It is unfortunate that a very popular short story and movie hitting the English-speaking culture after this text was written have inevitably influenced the way worshipers will understand a “proud backed hill” being “knocked down.”)  Stanza four is a miracle of concision where the effect of the monosyllables of the last two lines powerfully underscore the double command and dual statement about the endtimes.  The only misstep that I detect is in the final stanza, where “Christ is coming, coming near!” beautifully highlights the process of the Lord’s advent, where the previous line deflects focus: “Christ is drawing” leads one to think of Jesus with a sketchpad (or, God forbid, a sixshooter) which is then corrected by “drawing near.”  While I completely appreciate the force of ending the hymn in the voice of the Baptist telling us that “Christ is coming near,” I would have liked a concluding stanza that returned to the descriptive voice of the opening stanza, perhaps directly addressing God in prayer (To have us heed John’s message today? To prepare for Christ’s coming in word and sacrament?  To prepare for Christ’s coming at the end of time?).

These lyrics set quite the challenge for Doran as composer since hymnic convention demands a single melody be provided for all the stanzas, no matter how varied, as long as they share the same metrical and accentual pattern.  The problem primarily arises from Troeger’s use of enjambment between the third and fourth lines of stanzas 1, 2, and 5, where in stanzas 3, 4, and 6, the third line clearly concludes a thought.  Doran’s muscular B minor modal 4/4 hymntune (named JOHN BAPTIST) more than meets the challenge by offering three different rhythmic patterns for the 7-syllable lines, one for the first line, one for the third, and one shared by the second and final line.  The final note of each line of the melody outlines the tonal structure with as much craft as the metrical and rhyme scheme structures the poetry: the first and third lines cadencing on the tonic B, the second on G (evoking an Eminor subdominant chord for Bminor) and the final line cadencing totally surprisingly on the lowest tone of the melody, a “Picardy third” Dsharp.  The chord clusters and pedal pointing accompanying the first line’s melody perfectly evokes the “wildness” of this desert figure but the subsequent march-like rhythms underlying the melody never leave the congregation unprepared or unsure about the next step.

All in all, I hope “Wild the Man and Wild the Place” will enrich prayer the third week of Advent as the liturgy calls us to ponder the Forerunner.