Article
Christmas culture
Creed
Music
5 min read

That mother mild

A cartoon and a shampoo might shed some light on a lazy rhyme.
A Christmas tree bauble depicts the Virgin and Child.
Robert Thiemann on Unsplash.

Some years I’ve already reached ‘peak Christmas Carol’ by now. I haven’t - yet - but I have sung enough - in a nursing home, some sheltered accommodation, schools and our own Carol Services this week - to be irked by some seemingly lazy rhymes. And to notice that a surprisingly high number of our most popular carols contain the word ‘mild’ - an adjective that doesn’t pop up in many songs or hymns as at other times of the year. 

This year it started for me with Cecil Frances Alexander’s ‘Once in Royal David’s city.’ It’s a very fine carol, reminding us of Bethlehem’s royal connections and launching a thousand carol services with candlelit children soloing timorously. One of the most infamous uses of ‘mild’ comes in the original, written in 1848: 

‘Christian children all must be 

mild, obedient, good as he.’ 

Cecil Alexander was predominantly a writer of children’s hymns (including ‘All things bright and beautiful’) but the hectoring tone seems out of place in a Festival of Carols. Where’s the lifestyle advice for Christian grown-ups? And as a parent and a pastor, I can think of a hundred better adjectives that I would cherish for Christian children. What’s the use of being mild? What about courageous? Or compassionate? Or contrary? Children of the 70’s like me have only one good use for the word ‘mild’ - it’s as a cover for an alter ego. Our hero was Hong Kong Fuey, who masqueraded as a ‘mild-mannered janitor’ under the glare of Sergeant Flint but was actually a ‘number one super guy’! 

Also revealed in ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ is the apparently lazy rhyme that may well explain the ubiquity of ‘milds’ in our best-loved carols: 

‘Mary was that mother mild, 

Jesus Christ, her little child.’ 

The list of English words that rhyme well with child is limited - eg. filed - piled - riled - smiled - styled - tiled - wild - whiled. You’d have to crack out the shoe horn to get some of those convincingly into a carol. 

Edward Caswall published ‘See amid the winter’s snow’ 10 years after ‘Once in Royal...’, in 1858. He couldn’t resist either: 

‘Teach, O teach us, Holy Child, 

by thy face so meek and mild.’ 

And Freeman Young, who translated the German of Joseph Mohr’s ‘Stille nacht’ also followed suit: 

‘Round yon virgin mother and child, 

Holy Infant so tender and … (you guessed it!) - mild’ 

So is this just a rhyme of convenience, a verbal stocking filler? The intent, admittedly sentimental, seems to be to describe the gentleness, the ordinariness of Jesus or Mary. The problem, for twenty-first century ears, is that we don’t really want a ‘mild’ anything - we want the proper winters of our youth, with snow days. We want a sedative that will knock us out and not keep us awake. And who wants a mild cheddar when you can have Extra Mature for your cheese on toast? ‘Mild’ is unadventurous, dull, pedestrian - we don’t want it for ourselves, and we can’t see why we’d celebrate it as a characteristic of God - even at the moment of Incarnation. 

I think there is some more light to be shed on this seasonal celebration of mildness. Three shafts of light from the past that might help us change our tune on the value of being mild. 

First, the originals of our English word ‘mild.’ The Old English ‘milde’ carried the meaning of someone who is gracious, someone who isn’t severe. Someone who forebears harsh judgement and responds graciously, compassionately. That’s more promising if we’re sketching out the love of God. 

The second comes from the eighteenth century. The prolific Charles Wesley wrote 6,500 hymns, including the majestic and characteristically full-blooded ‘Hark! The herald angels sing’ (written in 1739). Wesley includes two ‘milds’, the first of which, about mercy, rhymes with reconciled, rather than child (that’s another one to add to the list!) It’s the second one that’s really interesting - and my nomination for the best us of ‘mild’ in a Christmas carol: 

‘Mild, he lays his glory by’ 

This carries the older, less familiar sense of being gracious, of not being severe. The essence of God’s mildness is described as the putting aside of his majesty, the majesty of King and Creator. Laying it aside - in love - so that He can become visible, and tangible - to fallen, fragile human beings. This is a brilliant description of the Christmas story - we just wouldn’t now choose the word ‘mild’ to encapsulate this. 

The most unlikely but illustrative modern echo of the Old English original and Wesleyan mild is Unilever’s Timotei shampoo. It exploded on to the UK market in the 80’s with its promise to be ‘so mild you can wash your hair as often as you like’. For starters, marketing genius - I can safely wash my hair every day (and use lots more shampoo)! But also a restatement of the value of gentleness or not being stringent or severe. This shampoo (actually removed from UK markets in 2017 but still popular in Europe) isn’t going to damage your scalp and hair - it’s going to nourish it instead. 

I can see why the nagging ‘Christian children must be mild’ is often left out of twenty-first century Carol Services. I can tolerate the number of child-mild rhymes, given the lack of other options (though I do feel ‘styled’ could be great in the hands of a Gen Z composer). But it’s Wesley’s ‘mild, he lays his glory by’ that will keep me celebrating the forebearance, the humility of Jesus this Christmas. Who knows, I may not reach ‘peak carol’ till 12.30 pm on Christmas Day (when we close up the church and jump in the car for festive lunch with the family.) The forecast for Winchester is, after all …. MILD! 

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Article
Creed
Easter
5 min read

The compassion of Easter's tears

There’s complexity and beauty behind crying.
A stone statue's face depicts a falling tear.
Ohlsdorf Cemetery, Hamburg.
Marek Studzinski on Unsplash.

The great English metaphysical playboy poet, John Donne, became Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1621. During Lent a year later he preached a majestic sermon entitled ‘To speake of Tears’. I first read it 30 years ago and it has prodded and challenged me ever since. This hyper-bright poet and reformed Lothario brought to the pulpit all his astonishing rhetorical skill, and a deep learning, combined with an overriding sense of God’s mercy and the wonder of new beginnings. His sermons were as thick as treacle and as rich as chocolate mousse, but built on a profound religious sympathy and a pastor’s ear for the yearnings of his listeners. 

In his 1622 sermon, Donne highlights the different kinds of tears shed by Jesus in the last weeks of his life.  

He speaks of Jesus’ ‘humane tears’ - tears he shed alongside Mary and Martha at the grave of his dear friend Lazarus - so surprising, Donne suggests, that the scholars charged with the chapter and verse divisions of the New Testament stopped in wonder at the two words ‘Jesus wept’ and made it a complete (and the shortest) verse in the Bible. 

He speaks of Jesus’ ‘prophetic tears’ on Palm Sunday, as Jesus looks down over the city of Jerusalem, foreseeing the people’s rejection of God and the judgement that would come upon this city he loved. These tears are again surprising - Jesus had been borne into the city on the excited adulation of the crowds - so why does he weep? 

Donne speaks of Jesus’ ‘pontifical’ or ‘sacrificial tears’ on the Cross - forsaken, despairing tears, encapsulated in Jesus’ agonisingly seizing a line of dereliction from the Psalms and hurling it at the dark sky - ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’  

Donne was hardly the first theologian to wonder at these tears. But he is compelling in separating them out, wondering how different they are, and plotting the complexity of Jesus becoming a Man of Sorrows, for people who know so much sorrow. And he has the pastor’s touch as well as the preacher’s flourish to help us understand that we see ourselves most clearly through the tears of Jesus, or as C.S. Lewis would put it in the Problem of Pain, ‘the tears of God are the meaning of history.’ 

Tears, like snowflakes, are unique. Donne started to tease them apart 400 years ago, and we can see this even more clearly today, though it is always a challenge to do so because of the emotional intensity and maelstrom they spring from. 

We now know there are physically three kinds of tears; basal tears, which lubricate the eye, irritant tears, which flush out bugs or specks of dirt and emotional tears, agreed by most to be unique to humans (though newborn babies don’t normally cry tears for the first month or more). Rose-Lynn Fisher poignantly deepened this understanding of different kinds of tears in her ground-breaking work on The Topography of Tears. As an artist, she captured some of her own tears and placed them on a microscope slide. She then took close-up pictures of the tears with a digital microscopy camera mounted on a 1960’s Zeiss standard light microscope; 

‘The microscope provided the means to examine my tears and visually evoke the unseen realm of my emotions.’ 

She discovered that no two tears look the same, much as another hero of mine, Snowflake Bentley, had discovered, using a similar method in a frostier setting, the same is true for snowflakes. Tears of grief, even if shed at the same time, are all uniquely different; each one subtly changed by air temperature, and the proteins, minerals, hormones, antibodies and enzymes in an individual tear. 

This knowledge brings a new weight to Jesus’ searching question to Mary on Easter morning - ‘Woman, why are you crying?’ These tears that I’m shedding, today, what kind of tears are these? Angry, grieving, frustrated, fearful? Fisher gives astonishing names to her close-ups of tears - ‘Compassion’, ‘Tears of Change’, ‘Overwhelm’, ‘Redemption.’ And it opens up the question of what tears am I not shedding? If there are so many different kinds of tears, are there some I am avoiding, or closing my heart to? 

Richard Rohr has just published a long-awaited book on the Minor Prophets called The Tears of Things. I cannot possibly summarise it here, but Rohr includes an argument for the necessity of tears to soften our anger and outrage, the defining emotions of our age. He charts the prophet’s journey from outrage at the lawlessness of the world, through tears for the greed and cruelty of the world, to a settled but fiercer love and mercy. The prophetic tears of Jesus - tears of love, not for ourselves, but an expression of compassion for others - are the ultimate expression of this. This is a compelling vision - I would prefer the people who mould our world to be less shouty and angry, and more tearful and compassionate, people who live near enough to the pain of others to have cried with them and for them before making a plan. 

The Psalms offer us a second discipline for our tears. As well as knowing them, that is understanding them, naming them, placing them, we can sow them: 

‘Those who sow in tears 

Will reap with songs of joy.’ 

This is an ancient invitation to give weight to our tears. To take them to God, to share them with others, and not just to see them as a way to get things of our chest.  

Our human tears can deepen our sense of frailty and dependence on others and God. 

Our prophetic tears can invigorate our fight for justice and peace, without destroying our spirit or making us worse than the people we criticise. 

Our forsaken tears, the ones shed quietly, without hope, without even the hope that God sees them, can prepare the way for God’s new beginnings. 

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.


If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?


Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.


Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief