I think I love “O Come O Come Emmanuel” because it’s precisely the right amount of yearning and hope. I tend to view it in one of two ways:
-Someone crying out to God for deliverance in the verses, and God reassuring them that their Deliverer is coming in the chorus
-Someone alternating between yearning to see salvation and God’s glory, and rejoicing that they even have this hope that these things will come.
if I may infodump,
so the hymn was written in Latin sometime before the 8th century and probably before the 6th. It was meant to be sung one verse at a time as antiphons in an evening service for the seven days leading up to Christmas, so that you would sing the last verse, Veni veni Emmanuel, on Christmas Eve.
each verse has a few parts to it. First, there’s an invocation, “come,” and then a name of Jesus from peophesy.
come, wisdom, Adonai, root of Jesse, key of David, rising star, king of the nations, and Emmanuel.
after the invocation, it lists some prophesies associated with that name and then asks Jesus to come and do that.
so here’s the fun part.
Veni O Sapientia
Veni Veni Adonai
Veni O Radix Iesse
Veni Clavis Davidica
Veni veni O Oriens
Veni Veni Rex Genitum
Veni Veni Emmanuel
All the names of Jesus, just the names, spell, backwards,
Ero Cras
I will be, tomorrow.
You sing for seven days “come, come Emmanuel,” and only on the last day, when you look back on your prayers, you see the promise that was always there, and not in the prophesies, and not in the requests, but in the names of Jesus himself. “I will be with you tomorrow.”
not to sound old fashioned or whatever but getting rid of payphones is a mistake, and the only reason we should do it is if we’re replacing them with free, public use phones. Having the ability to reach out to others in every place of public congress and transit is an important safety feature and the advent and adoption of smartphones does not negate their utility.
I know i’ve already lost this battle, so it’s somewhat pointless to say, but smartphones die. chargers aren’t always there. smartphones break. some people don’t have them. Being able to call someone and ask for help, to get in touch with friends and family, without relying on something you yourself own, is a societal good.
Furthermore, expecting everybody to have a single piece of fragile technology on them at all times to the point that critical services are not available without them is truly mind-boggling to me. This goes for things like restaurant menus and transit maps as well. you should be able to navigate the world without a brick made by Apple or Samsung, and if you can’t, then something is fundamentally broken. It’s one thing for new technology to augment an existing real-world experience, it’s another thing to usurp it entirely.
