Article

Christmas culture

Creed

Music

22 December 2024

5 min read

That mother mild

A cartoon and a shampoo might shed some light on a lazy rhyme.

Simon Cansdale

Simon is a vicar in Winchester, Hampshire.

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!

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Article

Creed

Sport

5 June 2023

4 min read

Riding from darkness to light

Long-distance cycle rides give Graeme Holdsworth time to contemplate traveling from light to darkness and back again. And, to grapple with the wordless way our bodies do what they were created to do.

Graeme Holdsworth

Graeme is a vicar of Marsden and Slaithwaite in West Yorkshire. He also cycles and juggles.

A cyclist ascends a village street between stone-built houses as twilight turns to night

An audax cyclist passes through a village as night falls.

I’m standing next to my bicycle at a petrol station in Blackpool, it is 1am. I’m eating a cheap cheese sandwich and drinking cold coffee from a can. What I want is hot coffee, but the machine only takes cash, and the cash machine charges for withdrawals. I’m making do with cheap and cold, because the need for calories outweighs the need for taste. On this night, I’m cycling from Slaithwaite to Blackpool and back, checking the route for a cycling event I’m organising. It’s an audax: a type of sporting experience typically documented by forecourt-chic social media posts. Its name is derived from the French for audacious.

A glance though long-distance cycling blogs, vlogs and curated media, hints at an experience of transcendence; the emptying of self, in the search of meaning from the zip of tyres over tarmac as the kilometres click past.

The reality, however, can be more mundane: long distance cycling often involves sitting on a weed strewn curb, while a friend fixes a puncture and though the clouds are not quite heavy enough to rain, there’s a mizziness to the air that seeps through your sportwool baselayer. There is no film crew to capture this epic moment, and you’re alone with your thoughts, which are mainly thankfulness that it isn’t your puncture.

I’m a vicar in West Yorkshire, but haven’t always been a vicar, or even a Christian and I’ve been riding bikes for much longer than I’ve been a person of faith. As a child cycling was about belonging, I was part of a BMX community whose hierarchy was measured by how high you could bunny-hop. Later, that belonging was replaced with a different sort of identity, found through music. It was only when I was older and fatter that I rediscovered cycling thanks to my wife, who thought we both needed some exercise.

We loved to explore, and perhaps this physical exploration was why we also began a journey of spiritual exploration.

Together we remembered how to cycle, and as we gathered experiences, we grew in the wisdom of the cyclo-tourist. We learned that mudguards and rain capes are things of comfort and therefore beauty. We loved to explore, and perhaps this physical exploration was why we also began a journey of spiritual exploration. I’ve no intention to suggest that cycling is a gateway drug to Christianity, more that perhaps our curiosity was being fed physically, mentally, and spiritually, in ways that were not of our making.

The first time I noticed a spiritual element to my cycling was coming back from a meeting, crossing the North Yorkshire Moors at night. It was autumn and the evening turned to dark quite early, leaving only a puddle of weak bike light to ride with. A phrase from morning prayer returned to me: ‘even the darkness is not dark to you’. A single line from a psalm in the Bible. This one line, on this one night, redefined my relationship with God. Even though all around me had turned to darkness, there was nowhere I could be lost from God.

These remote fans and supporters are constructing narratives to explain rider’s movement, or lack of it. Yet the rules of self-sufficiency mean you are alone, no one can set you back on the right path.

Not being lost is an important element to cycling a long distance, especially in a race. In events like the TransContinental – a multi-day self-sufficient cycle race across Europe, spending hours cycling in the wrong direction could be a racing disaster. Race winner Emily Chappell, in Where there’s a Will, eloquently documents the racer’s experience of being ‘watched over’. She tells of ‘dot-watchers’ following a rider’s GPS tracks across a map of Europe. These are remote fans and supporters constructing narratives to explain rider’s movement, or lack of it. Yet the rules of self-sufficiency mean you are alone, no one can set you back on the right path.

Being alone with your thoughts is a common theme to long distance cycling. While our bodies silently convert glucose into energy through glycolysis, and our muscle memory converts this into kilometres covered, our minds are set free to process our past and present experiences.

During my time at theological college, I wanted to explore the idea of physical exercise being an expression of prayer. I tried to grapple with the wordless way our bodies do what bodies were created to do. Can our bodies worship without words? Is there a physical language of lactic acid, originally written by a creator who celebrates when creation is true to itself? There’s a poetic language in the Bible that hints at this, that

‘the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands’.

Pro-cyclist Jens Voigt famously told his legs to shut up… maybe he should have let them sing.

Audaxing, long distance cycling, racing across continents; these are extraordinary journeys in which we might travel from light to darkness and back again. Simultaneously, there is a physical descent from adventurous confidence to uncertain determination, where the will to go on is no longer found in the legs, but in a dogmatic determination to see this through. Then, with the dawning of the day, there is a fresh hope: a hope of warmth and a return to strength. With the dawning of the day, the opening of the first coffee shop and this long-distance cyclist’s prayer is answered.