New West Network

“Do You Hear What I Hear?” Said the Little Lamb

By Nick Gier, New West Unfiltered 12-26-09

This year our Unitarian choir is singing “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and we were all delighted to learn that the lyricist Noel Regney was a Unitarian convert from Catholicism.

After fighting for the French Resistance in World War II, Regney came to the U.S. in 1952 and married pianist/composer Gloria Shayne. In addition to their great Christmas piece, they also wrote “Rain, Rain, Go Away,” “Sweet Little Darlin’” and many other top tunes.

Regney and Shayne wrote their famous carol during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and they must have decided – perhaps due to the threat of nuclear annihilation – that the Mighty King in their song should have a different view of the world than King Herod.

The carol begins with the Night Wind telling the Little Lamb to look skyward and see “a star, dancing in the night, with a tail as big as a kite.” Did Regney think the Star of Bethlehem was a comet rather than a conjunction of planets, as some scientists believe?

If the Night Wind is a witness for the earth, then today she could ask the Little Lamb to look at what he sees in India. The Ganges River, worshipped as a goddess by the Hindus, has a coliform bacterial count 3,000 times higher than the UN standard for safe water.

The Night Wind could also tell the Little Lamb to look at the Himalayan glaciers, melting at such a rate that tens of millions of people will soon be threatened by huge floods. The Night Wind is right now witnessing the total disappearance of the Chacaltaya glacier in Bolivia, once the highest in the world.

The Night Wind and her daytime sisters are invigorated by the warmest years in recorded history. By their very nature they cannot help but cause more unpredictable and destructive storms.

The Little Lamb asks the Shepherd Boy: “Do you hear what I hear?” Today the Shepherd Boy could hear some of same sounds he heard 2,000 years ago – the sounds of children, now hundreds of millions more, crying because they are sick and hungry.

The Shepherd Boy would be dismayed at the same huge gap between the rich and the poor. Today he would hear the pleas 1.3 billion people who are trying to feed, clothe and house their children on less than $2 per day.

The Shepherd Boy would be alarmed that today there are just as many discordant voices and armed battles as there were 2,000 years ago. Thousands of young children are carrying arms into battle, and a record number of girls and women are being raped.

The Shepherd Boy asks the Mighty King in his “palace warm”: “Do you know what I know? … A Child shivers in the cold, let us bring him silver and gold.”

What the children of the world need far more than jewels is clean water; as many as 4,400 die each day from diarrhea and other water borne illnesses. Today the Shepherd Boy would know, sadly, that last year 8.8 million children died from various illnesses before they reached the age of 5.

Even though the world’s farmers produce enough food for everyone, over one billion people are malnourished. Every day 16,000 children die of hunger in the world.

The Mighty King, not the Herod of Jesus’ time, says: “Listen to what I say: Pray for peace, people everywhere! The child, sleeping in the night, will bring us goodness and light.”

For Unitarians the birth of a divine child is a metaphor for the promise and great possibility of all infants born into this world. We see the miraculous births of Confucius, Buddha and Jesus as symbols of the hope that every newborn child brings to a broken world.

Nick Gier taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years. Read or listen to all his columns at www.NickGier.com