Churchill and Smuts

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Flying eastward today, I watched and enjoyed the film Black Nativity, which I had never seen before.  It’s based on a 1961 play by the famous Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes (1901-1967).  Originally released in late November of 2013, it really is a Christmas film.  And, although not entirely unpredictable, it’s far more thought-provoking (and actually far more Christian) than the typical Lifetime or Hallmark Channel movie.  I enjoyed it.

I also read part of a German translation of the memoirs of Lord Moran, who was the personal physician to Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the Second World War.  (Why in German?  Because it’s in a German volume of Reader’s Digest condensed books that I found a couple of years ago among things that had been discarded by a faculty colleague of mine who was retiring.  Anyway, it was free.  And it was a book.  How could I possibly have said No?)

For whatever little it’s worth, I got a kick out of a passage in the book where Sir Winston is engaged in conversation, during meetings in Cairo, with the famous South African prime minister Jan Christian Smuts.  (Curiously, I’ve learned elsewhere, they had first met in 1899, when the much younger Winston had been captured by the Afrikaners during the Boer War.  Smuts interrogated Churchill.)  They’re discussing how to handle the problem of Mahatma Gandhi.  Smuts points out to Churchill that, while they’re both men of the world and secular leaders, Gandhi is a “man of God.”  Accordingly, Smuts tells Churchill, Gandhi must be approached in a different manner than other, secular, leaders.  Churchill responds that he too is a spiritual leader.  “Why,” he tells Smuts, “I’ve probably named more bishops than St. Augustine did.”  (He was referring, of course, to St. Augustine of Canterbury, not to the earlier and, outside England, the better-known St. Augustine of Hippo.)

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Here’s a remarkable a cappella version of a very popular Christmas carol:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ_MGWio-vc

The carol was written by Katherine Kennicott Davis, an American classical music composer and teacher, in 1941.  (She originally called it “The Carol of the Drum.”)  The Trapp Family Singers — think The Sound of Music — recorded it in 1955 and it became even more popular when the Harry Simeone Chorale recorded it in 1958.

I’m guessing that the latter may have been the version that I first encountered; I vaguely remember hearing the carol as “new” when I was a very little boy — on the radio, while riding in our family car down the main drag in Alhambra, California, underneath the street’s Christmas lights, which were a highly anticipated and wonder-inducing sign of the season every year of my childhood — and loving it.  That was a magical moment, which is why it remains, among my earliest memories.

Posted from Washington D.C.